Spring/Fall 2002
Articles:
by John Lowery
Perspectives:
by Stuart Brown
Book Reviews:
by Christopher Harris
Dr. Charles Witten: A Conversation about a Remarkable Life and Career
John Lowery
University of South Carolina - Columbia
John Lowery and Charles Witten
This interview was conducted during 1997 University of South Carolina Homecoming. The subject of the interview, Dr. Witten, came to USC to the student affairs staff in July of 1963 as Dean of Students. Then on July 1st, 1966 he became the first Vice President of Student Affairs. This conversation will focus on his experiences in student affairs and as faculty member at the University of South Carolina and his views on the student affairs profession of higher education as a whole. The interview was conducted by John Wesley Lowery, one of Dr. Witten’s former students who subsequently returned to the University of South Carolina as a member of the faculty. This interview focused on Dr. Witten’s experiences in student affairs and as faculty member at the University of South Carolina and his views on the student affairs profession of higher education as a whole. As the Higher Education and Student Affairs program which Dr. Witten helped to found approaches the 40th anniversary of its founding, an retrospective interview with Dr. Witten seems a very appropriate way to celebrate this important piece of our history.
Lowery: Dr. Witten, can we begin by you talking about your own undergraduate college experience?
Witten: Mine was not a typical college experience because I was very young when I went to college. I had not reached my 15th birthday. The thing I remember about college that is so different is that when I was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill there were 2500 students at the University and 2500 people in the town. It was the ideal college town of the early 20th century that you read about in literature. We went to class and it was small enough so we knew our professors when we wanted to. We knew each other pretty well. I never knew who the Dean of Students was until I saw his picture in the yearbook. I don’t know what he did.
It was the depths of the depression. We had a program known as the NYA, a federal program which gave people $15 a month and a lot a people that were in school could not have gotten there without that $15. My dorm room was $6 a month and meals were $.50 a day in the college dining hall. Five of us chipped in and bought a car for $25. Of course we couldn’t afford anti-freeze so we lost it one cold night. I made good friends; I came away with a lot. I was a Chemistry major. I sometimes I feel like I majored in playing poker and drinking and playing tennis. I learned a lot of things. I learned how to be a chemist. I learned the scientific method. I had a whole a lot of courses and graduated with a ton of semester hours. I think I took courses in everything that appeared interesting to me. I think two of the most interesting courses I had outside of Chemistry were Greek Civilization and Archeology and Marriage and the Family. We did not have a program of student support with staff like today. Students were out there on their own. It was different and some of us who survived the rigors of the system are actually pretty good friends today some of us. We have a group, getting smaller every year, of about 25 of us that meet once a year in Chapel Hill. We’ve endowed a fellowship program and pick the recipients of it and we still have the friendships that we started in college. I couldn’t afford a fraternity. My folks were scraping the barrel. My parents had two kids at Chapel Hill at the same time.
Lowery: What did you do after college?
Witten: Jobs were hard to come by. I got a job in New York with a pencil company as a chemist. My aim was to get enough money to go back to graduate school. My parents said, “Well if you save your money we will provide the rest of what you need.” A graduate assistantship was not that easy to come by in those days. I worked for a year, and I was going to go to Duke. I got off the train in Durham which used to be a big tobacco town and smelled the tobacco. So I got on a bus and went to Chapel Hill. I’ll tell you how things were in those days. I went to see the Dean of the Graduate School. It was during registration. I told him I wanted to go to graduate school in Chemistry. He said, “Where did you go to undergraduate school?” I said, “I went here.” He said, “Wait a minute” and he looked at my transcript and said, “OK, you’re in. Fill out the application.”
After I received my degree and had a job I saw something one day that they were looking for people with degrees in Chemistry to be commissioned as officers in the Navy. I’d always actually wanted to go to West Point. By the time I was old enough to go to West Point, I had graduated from college and didn’t want to go through four more years of that stuff. So I went down to Navy headquarters and the recruiter happened to be a friend of my uncle’s. I filled out the application and in several months I was sworn in as an officer in the Navy, and I entered the Navy. After the war, I was transferred to regular Navy. During my career in the Navy, I had command of a destroyer, a destroyer escort, two different high-speed transports and command of a division of high-speed transports. I had a lot of good experiences.
Lowery: What brought you to the University of South Carolina?
Witten: In 1960, I was selected for captain and they ordered me here. Well not exactly, I was working for the Commander of Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. Washington said well you’ve been wanting an ROTC job. I said I don’t want to go to shore duty. They said you have never had shore duty. That was pretty good . I was a captain, and I had never had shore duty. Washington said you have got to go to shore duty. They said there is a problem, you’ve got to leave without being relieved. I said you mean my admiral has got to approve it, and they said yes. I said well what if I can’t make it, and they said well then we will find something for you at the Pentagon. That was enough for me. So I ended up at the University of South Carolina heading up the Naval ROTC unit. In the NROTC, we integrated ourselves this university more than ever before. Then we got a new President at the University, Tom Jones, and he liked the way I was running the NROTC and he offered me a job as the Dean of Students.
Lowery: You helped to found the Student Personnel Services program in the College of Education at USC in 1963 and 1964, yet as you said you didn’t have an academic background in this field. Why did you believe it was so important to the University of South Carolina to have such a program?
Witten: It wasn’t quite correct that I didn’t have a background in the field, while I was a professor of Naval Science, I was a full professor. I also worked toward a degree in the College of Education. We started many new programs in the Naval ROTC. I was copying from an ideal student personnel program with career guidance, counseling, and a few other things. When I took the job of Dean of Students I wasn’t exactly coming in as a newborn baby without clothing. I had two pairs of diapers.
It didn’t take me long to find out that the system for running the dorms wasn’t what I wanted. Let me tell you about the horrible situation we had in a lot of things. My predecessor left and didn’t turn over anything. We never had a real Dean of Students, so the first thing I did was to hire a Dean of Men. It wasn’t the best choice, but I hired a Dean of Men who wanted to come for what we were willing to pay. So I had a Dean of Men and a Dean of Women. My predecessor took the files, of which there weren’t many. I think they all fit into one file drawer. I went and asked the secretary. I said, “Tell me there is some stuff floating around about federal aid for students. How did we handle that here?” And she said, “Well I handled it.” I said, “You did what.” She said, “Yes the student comes in and tells me how much money he wants and I authorize it.” Oh, I said, “Well we are going to change that tomorrow.” That was one thing that I had to change.
As to the dorms, the women’s dorms were run by she-dragons, really nice retired old ladies who didn’t want to move to a retirement home, didn’t have much family, well connected, really a nice bunch. Oh, the rules they had for women were just something. A woman couldn’t wear jeans on campus. The she-dragons would stand at the door and if a woman had liquor on her breath then they would restrict her to campus and things like that. The men’s dorms were a little better, not much. They had a few law students who were picking up some spare change and they had a great number of athletes who the university saw fit to support after their four year scholarships were over. They weren’t playing ball anymore, but they hadn’t finished their degrees and wanted to finish. I wanted to have graduate students running the dorms. How you attract graduate students if you don’t have a program to attract them? So I went over to see Velma Hayden, Assistant Dean of the College of Education, a wonderful woman. She had been a Dean of Students at some place and she was in graduate counseling. I went up with a proposed program to William Savage Dean of College of Education with her help. We added two courses to the Counseling and Guidance program. I just wanted to get in. The courses were Higher Education in America and Introduction to College Student Personnel. It was primarily a counseling and guidance program geared towards college but that wasn’t what I really wanted so later we changed it a little. That’s how I got into it. I just wanted to run a better student affairs program.
Lowery: In the fall of 1963, the University of South Carolina prepared to desegregate by the order of the court. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?
Witten: Let me tell you, there were two problem areas during my time. One of them is what you referred to as desegregation and the other was I don’t know what you call it. I call it the cultural revolution (drug scene, student protest movement, etc.…). During desegregation we had a lot of problems. We planned that our two Black students would have a trouble free entrance to the university. We had the model of the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia on one hand, and I hate to say this but we had the model of Clemson too which was wonderful. Clemson did a beautiful job. I went up to visit them as a member of a committee appointed by the President to plan for desegregation at USC. We had an Air Force ROTC commander and myself on the committee. The President knew that if the federal government said do it, that the Navy skipper and the Air Force ROTC commander would do it. The chairman of the committee was the Dean of the College of Engineering, and he had been contaminated by having gone to Yale. But, they couldn’t call him an outsider because his great grandfather had been President of the University before the civil war. There were a few others there. We did a lot of planning. We went up and interviewed Walter Cox, who was later President of Clemson for a while. He was Dean of Students up there. He gave us a few tips. When we came back we wrote an elaborate plan.
We gave the Black students their money back on the athletic activities fee. We told them we can’t guarantee your safety if you go to a football game down there at night. They agreed to it. Actually we had three black students that year. One guy showed up, he was an Assistant Commissioner of Higher Education for South Carolina some years later. He showed up and no one expected him. He wasn’t living on campus so he was no problem. The other two were living on campus.
When we celebrated the 25th anniversary of desegregation, Bob Anderson, one of the first Black students, told me, if it hadn’t been for the support I gave him, he would have never made it. I didn’t realize I had ever done anything for him. One thing I learned in the Navy, there was a guy by the name of Arleigh Burke, who was one of the greatest people in the modern Navy. He said, the art of leadership is treating people like they are people. And all I was doing was treating these Black students the way all other students were treated.
I got all of the student leaders together for a presentation I did, about a 150 of them, and I said, “Look this is your university. The respect that is given to the degree that you get from here depends on how we treat these people [the new Black students].” They accepted that. There were a lot of people that didn’t. There was one white student whose name I forget right now, who was quite bitter. They packaged grits in Confederate flags and set up a table to sell them and of course that infuriated the Black students. It was a real confrontation. The white students were a recognized student organization and they could do it. I was at a meeting on the other side of campus and in came Pete Strom, who was the head of the state constabulary at that time. He said, “Come with me Dean. We need you.” I went down to the student union and there were two groups facing each other. There were many there did not belong on this campus. The Orangeburg Massacre had happened about two weeks before at South Carolina State. The black students were just about to leave the scene. They said “Okay Dean we don’t want to create trouble, we will go ahead and leave if you want us to.” Just then Pete Strom’s constabulary and state troopers in their tin hats and sawed off shot guns marched onto the field there. Pete said to me, “I’m taking over now.” I said, “You’re damned welcome to it.” I just left. He didn’t do right by me.
The black students trusted us. One time they were going to have a parade down Main Street. They had gotten a permit to have parade and then the city manager called me up and said, “Hey will you get that permit from them?” I said, “Why, you gave it to them. You get it back.” He said, “Well they’re your students.” I said, “Yeah but they are your citizens.” He said, “Well if they have the parade it is going to be real trouble.” Anyhow, Dr. Fidler, my assistant vice president, and I sat down with five or six of the black students. We sat there and we argued and negotiated with them for seven hours and they finally said, “okay we guess you are right.” I called the city manager and said, “We’ve got your damned permit back for you.”
As far as the radical white students were concerned, I don’t think they trusted us. I don’t know why. The leader of the pack, I forget his name, had a cousin, who happens to be godmother to my son. I know his mother. He was going to have some sort of Confederate parade down the main drag. I couldn’t talk him out of it. So, I knew how to handle him. I bumped into him up at the administration building. I grabbed him by the collar and said, “Look you SOB, I don’t know how to stop the parade but I know one thing, if that parade goes you’re going too.” Hence, we didn’t have the parade. I used to could do things like that but you can’t now. But you know it took all different kinds of approaches.
I hired the first black professional on the campus. He and I walked around campus and we would know every black student on the campus. There weren’t that many of them. Dr. Fidler was instrumental in helping with the start of what was called the Afro-American Student Association. They needed a faculty advisor and we didn’t have any so I contacted Matthew Perry, the NAACP attorney from the University’s desegregation case, who is now a retired federal judge. He put me on to a law student, Franchot Brown who didn’t want to do it. He was wary. He talked to Perry and Perry said, “Look you can trust those people.” This is the important thing. You know if you have got to say no to them don’t say yes maybe. Just tell them no and they would respect that.
Brett Bursey, the head of our local SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] who I still bump into once in a while, and who I banned him from the campus, knew he could trust us. You’ve got to develop this trust. You don’t come in and say I am Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs trust me. No, you have to develop it. It is a hard fight. I guess that’s the key to a lot of it, is trust, isn’t it? I think people should learn that. I guess that’s all I want to say about that.
We ran something called Upward Bound which is still running. Let me tell you about that. One day I went into the President’s office. The President introduced me to a Vice President of the Ford Foundation as his vice president in charge of all education outside the formal classroom. I went to the President’s office one day and he said, “Look at this beautiful program [Upward Bound]. No other southern university will touch it. We could run it but I can’t get anybody to do it.” I looked at the federal request for proposals for Upward Bound, looked through a few pages, and said, “Do you really want to do this, Mr. President?” He said, “Yes.” I said “When do we have to be in Washington with our proposal?” He said Friday. I said “This is Tuesday.” I said okay, I’ll give a take shot at it and I took it back to my office and gave it to Dr. Paul Stanton, who ran our counseling bureau, and his assistant, Dr. Swanson who was a graduate student then. I said, “Hey, let’s get something going.” We got it into Washington on time. We were the first major state institution in the southeast to run an Upward Bound program. Now we were supposed to run it half black and half white and we did. We ran it that way and we couldn’t tell people we were doing it. Representative Sol Blatt was Speaker of the State House of Representatives and he called up and wailed about us doing that. I got told well just keep it under tight wraps. You couldn’t tell people what a good job we were doing. Now I don’t want anybody to get the idea that I am a bloody liberal—you know I’m not. The students used to fuss at me because I was a Navy captain. But when something is right, it has to be done to be right and we were real proud of that Upward Bound program. We went on to send these kids to college. Some of the best colleges in the country, including Harvard. These were kids that would have never gone to college. I thought so much of it that I took my daughter on as a special student. When she was in high school, she participated in it as a learning experience. She didn’t live on the campus or have any of the financial benefits, but she went to the classes and activities. I had another daughter who worked for Upward Bound later. It was an excellent program, to bring out the learning potential of people who thought they were not learning. That’s one of the jobs of student affairs, to encourage people to learn.
Let me switch to the cultural revolution. One of the things we found there were that there were an awful lot of students dropping out of school, totally unsuccessful. They were good students, bright kids, some of the brightest kids we had. We had to go about taking care of them. The university was small enough in those days that the President could hold a meeting around a table of all of his deans and vice presidents. I don’t think they could get all of the vice presidents into one room now, there are so many of them. But the Dean of College of Business Administration had said if students didn’t have whatever it was 2.5, 2.0 average after they finished two years they couldn’t get in, they couldn’t continue the College of Business Administration. What do you do with these students? No one else wanted them either. So I stuck up my hand and said, “Mr. President let me tell you about the part that bothers me. We’ve got a lot of students who really are good and they don’t know where they want to go. They don’t want to go into the College of Business Administration and they don’t want to pick one of our majors.” His eyes popped open, and appointed a three-person committee, I was chairing it with the Dean of Arts of Science and with the Dean of Business Administration. We were to see what we could do about this problem of students who weren’t going on to the third and fourth year. They were dropping out of school or being forced to drop out of school. We turned the job over to our assistants. What came out of this was an interdisciplinary studies program which is great. We had a lot of people that would come in with experiences from the outside world and they’d think “Why in the hell do they have to sit through class again?” From that idea, came the degree program in Interdisciplinary Studies.
There was another thing that came about during that cultural revolution. These kids wanted to do something. We set up the volunteer services program and it was the second one in the country. I think Michigan State had the first one. We had 1,500 kids out working in the community. It was great.
Let me tell you about the big riots. We had lots of little ones. We used to have riots when we were just playing games, panty raids. We had the Dean of Women and the Dean of Men all involved. As far as the kids were concerned it was just clean fun, but even in the riots we had a lot of kids involved who really just thought it was just clean fun.
The President and I met with the Governor, Robert McNair and he had said the students are not going to take over. Unfortunately we are two blocks from the state house and the governor’s office. We even had legislators patrolling our halls to see if they could find somebody who wanted to sell them drugs. One day a small group of students took over the Russell House, the student union building. Before I knew it, the National Guard was here dragging them all off in handcuffs, loaded them up in busses, and took them down to jail where their heads were shaved.
Then the Board of Trustees got into the act. They were not going to leave it to the old disciplinary system of the university. We had a discipline committee comprised of faculty, and I was the secretary. The committee directed me to write a letter to the trustees saying how angry they were. The trustees were going to set themselves up as a court to try these people. Needless to say, it was a fiasco. They didn’t really know how to go about it, but they were doing it anyhow. The trustees were meeting up on the second floor of the administration building and the head of the state constabulary was up there also. He was a hostage too. Then the city cops got into the act. They were on national TV, marching on the campus, bricks in hand. Tear gas was everywhere. People don’t know it but the National Guard was on this campus for thirty days.
I recently heard an interesting story from one of the superintendents of schools around here who was a residence hall advisor at the time. The kids were heckling the National Guard and they said, “You can’t fool us. Those guns aren’t loaded.” The guardsman pulled back the bolt on his rifle and showed them the bullets. The kid turned white. Their guns were loaded. Now I didn’t approve of that.
After the Russell House takeover and before the trashing, we had our annual university awards day ceremony. Most of the awards are academic along with a few student leadership awards. We had the ceremony on the Horseshoe, right outside of the administration building and it was right after the Jackson State and Kent State killings. By that time a lot of faculty were upset too. I’ve got pictures of faculty and students marching around with those black banners. They came in and formed a big semi-circle, several rows deep, behind the speaker stand. I guess the President was out of his office that day and he couldn’t come. Dr. Patterson, the Provost, was supposed to handle things. Dr. Patterson saw what was going on and he sent word that he couldn’t come either. Dr. Willard Davis was there. He was Vice President of Academic Affairs and looked at me and said, “You’re used to handling this stuff more than I am, so you run it.” So I ran it, and it was all very nice. The protestors sat there in silence until the Air Force ROTC Colonel got up to give the ROTC award and then a whole bunch of them stood up, hissed, and marched off. They marched to the Sheraton Hotel, a few blocks away, where the Board of Trustees was meeting on something important: Should we leave the Atlantic Coast Conference? That’s where the President, the Provost, and the Board of Trustees were. The kid realized that’s where the power was so they went down there.
I remember one day I was sitting with some city committee and the chief of police or head of detectives got up and said, “Well, you’ve got to realize, that alcohol is our drug of choice. Theirs is marijuana.” I looked at him and said, “Oh you’ve finally wised up.” And that’s what it was. We didn’t tolerate that stuff. If we found somebody peddling it, they were gone. We didn’t say they were kicked out of school, we just threw them off campus. And then when we gave them a hearing in front of the faculty discipline committee. I remember one time a son of a friend of ours from Virginia, whose grandfather had been Dean of the College of William & Mary, was caught with something like 60 pounds of marijuana. The guy was suspended in spite of his mother’s pleas. Anyhow, I said well we’ve got to do something about this. I got the President to appoint a drug committee to investigate drug use. It was a faculty committee and we found out what drugs were being used and to what extent and by what classes. It was very interesting. For example, by the time people got to be seniors, they had wised up and weren’t using amphetamines. People in the state worried their kids were coming up here from Podunkville and Pumpkintown and getting introduced to drugs. The University had to do something about that. Dr. Fidler and I had a meeting with the legislative committee investigating collegiate drug use. There were representatives from the Citadel and Clemson in attendance, and they were lily white as far as the legislature was concerned. We came in with this study and one of the things it showed was that: freshmen were using drugs to same degree as they had used them in high school. We came up with a drug policy that the students could buy and the faculty could buy and the trustees could live with. It is still in effect as far as I know.
Lowery: Can you talk about how the Division of Student Affairs developed over your association with USC?
Witten: When I came here, there were a total of 13 professionals in the student affairs division counting the nurses in the health center. We didn’t have much. The discipline process was a matter of when somebody did something horrible, they would go to the Dean and he would say something like, “There is a train coming through here in about three hours going to your hometown. I suggest you get on it.” That was the way they handled things. There were bodies that were supposed to handle it but they didn’t do it. I came across that when I was working in the NROTC and the Dean was literally trying to railroad one of our midshipmen out of school. I said, “This ain’t going to work.”
We didn’t have such things as a counseling service. I went to the President one day and I said, “You know there are 6 major universities in this country that don’t have a counseling program.” I wasn’t sure of the statistic, I made it up, but the President never questioned it. He went to the legislature and he got a special appropriation to start a counseling service. I think it was $20,000. That paid for two counselors, a graduate assistant, a secretary, etc. Dr. Fidler was intimately connected with the career and development center. We didn’t have that, but we had some sort of career service. Instead of just posting notices that jobs were available, we got a full time counselor who had worked at the counseling bureau. We ran a career center (vocational counseling) and worked with placement.
We didn’t have a foreign student program. You know what it is today. We had a so called foreign student advisor whose primary job was Dean of the Graduate School. Most all of our foreign students were graduate students. Whenever he got their I-20 filled out he was through with them. I said, “Hey there must be a better way of doing things than this.” I took Ted Ledeen, the new foreign student advisor, and we went to a meeting of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors, and we came back with some ideas. We joined the association. Ted and I got a bunch of good ladies from the First Baptist Church interested in being on the Committee for Internationals which is a model program today for community groups all over the country.
Student financial aid, I think I mentioned it. I hired a graduate assistant to run financial aid. He was the only 50-hour a week, 20-hour graduate assistant I ever had. I remember going into his place and it was five feet high with applications. He had a couple of good students that worked for him. Then we joined the College Scholarship Service. I went over the President who had never heard of the College Scholarship Service and I said, “We ought to be members of the College Scholarship Service.” He said, “I don’t know if we can afford that.” I said, “Mr. President the dues are $50 a year. If you can’t pay it, I will pay it out of my pocket.” We joined that, and became part of the national scene. The governor appointed the committee to recommend allocation from the state’s share of federal student financial aid. I was chair of the committee for several years. From that, we formed the South Carolina Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, which is a big thing today. We also started the South Carolina College Personnel Association which is still running today. We had three members to start and dues were $2 a year. We were professionalizing not only people here at USC but people throughout the state.
Lowery: Twenty-five years ago this year the University of South Carolina established its University 101 program which as become a national model for first-year courses of its type. What are your recollections of the early years of this program?
Witten: During the years of the student revolt and the cultural revolution, we had several big retreats attended by student leaders and some key faculty members and administrators. We went down to Hilton Head one weekend. The big one finally came off at Camp Gravatt near Aiken. We knew where we were going by then. We came out of that one with a 4 or 8 page tabloid printed document on recommendations and one of the things that came out of that conference lead to appointment of a faculty committee headed by a philosophy professor named Bob Mulvaney. Bob doesn’t get credit now for it but that was the framework for University 101.
Students were coming here and enduring what was academically largely a repetition of their high school senior year. For example, when my son entered the US Naval Academy, he already had 30 hours of college credit at the University of South Carolina that he had earned during high school. The idea of this new course was to introduce students to the world of learning. Learning is a terrific thing. If college can do nothing else for students, it must teach them how to learn. It is our duty. When people go out for jobs, the outfit they work for is going to train them for 6 months to a year. So to teach them how to learn is the key. At first, the new course was taught just by the faculty members and most of them were told by the President to teach the course. I remember the head of the philosophy department taught the course and his faculty members said how wonderful the change in his attitude was after learning what students were about. You know we did have an academic administrator, Dr. Patterson who was quoted on this so I’m not giving away any secrets who said, “The University would be a great place to work if it weren’t for the students.” He meant it. The job of student affairs is to really act as a change agent and a catalyst for student learning. So out of that came out Camp Gravatt.
Lowery: You have been quoted as saying “How the hell can you know where you are going, if you don’t know where you have been?” What are the dangers facing the student affairs profession if it fails to pay enough attention to its own history and history of higher education?
Witten: You know we’ve gotten away from religion in higher education. Is religion an important part of education? We’ve got a pretty good religious studies program. We have chaplains on our campus that the denominations pay for. I know of no place where they have been better integrated into campus life. Our campus chaplains were given ID cards as auxiliary members of the student affairs division. We had a formal agreement with the chaplains, which the University signed, stating their role. They still operate under that. It is slightly revised but it contains same principles. The thing is you’ve got to work with them. They are an important part of education.
During the riots, when Jane Fonda came here to help tear the place down, the chaplains and the faculty got out and went around to the dorms and calmed the students. We had a command post up at the top of Capstone Building. I used my binoculars to see that she was at rally with the students in a nearby park. I remember Bobby Cremins who coached basketball down at Georgia Tech, came in one day and he said, “Dean, you’re having a lot of troubles?” I said, “Well it does look that way.” He said, “The boys and I think a lot of you and what can we do to help?” I said, “You want to help us get out of this mess?” We had a championship basketball game and the students really respected them. I took Bobby to Dr. Fidler and that was the day before Jane Fonda came. I think it ended up that the basketball team who were head and shoulders above the crowd going around at the Jane Fonda assembly, calming the students down. No riots came out of that, but the thing is the students realized that it’s their university. Take advantage of that and work with them.
Lowery: The National Association for Campus Activities was also founded during your tenure as Vice President for Student Affairs at the University of South Carolina and had its original offices in Five Points near the campus. Could you talk about the founding of that organization?
Witten: NACA started right here in the Russell House University Union. We didn’t have a student union. I took some of the student leaders up to Raleigh and looked at NC State. They had something going there called “Block Booking.” That was a predecessor to NACA. The guy who was the spark plug behind that was the assistant director of the student union at NC State named Dave Phillips. We came back and the students did a lot of politicking. The students voted to form a student union and set up a governing system for that. With that I went ahead and hired a director of student union. We didn’t have to go through the search committee in those days. Life was so much simpler. I told Dave Phillips I’d love to have him and asked if he would bring the “Block Booking” conference with him. He agreed. So he brought that and then we operated a “Block Booking” conference here. Then we had NACA. That got into politics around here because someone told the local district attorney that it was a commercial organization we were running it on government property. He got after the President and me. We moved that office off campus to a building the university owned. Dave was the first director of NACA. Dennis Pruitt, the current Vice President of Student Affairs, is former chair of NACA as have been several former students of ours. One thing that came out of our work with NACA, and I’m sorry to see that it disappeared was something called a competency based program in Student Personnel Services. NAC and later NACA gave scholarships to people who came here to graduate school who enrolled in the competency-based program. We drew up something like 130 different competencies which student affairs administered. A student did academic work here and their assistantships, internships, and like where the student addressed these competencies. Once the student graduated, he or she received a diploma from the university and a certificate of competency from NACA. That really got us into the national picture and we’ve got former students all over the country now who were in that program.
Lowery: Back in 1990 at the University of South Carolina, the division of student affairs recognized your many years of service with the dedication of the Witten Room here at the Russell House where we are having our interview today. There’s also a graduate student award in the student personnel service program named in your honor and you’re a professor emeritus here at the university. When you look back at your career, which spans four decades at the University of South Carolina, what means the most to you?
Witten: You left out one thing, the Charles and Margaret Witten Lectureship Without my wife’s support and doing half the job, none of it would amount to anything. So there’s the Charles and Margaret Witten Lectureship and also there is the Witten book award.
There was a guy, a very very bright student named Redfern, who had an SAT score which could have gotten him into the Ivy League schools. When he was in our Upward Bound program, I met with his principal at Booker T. Washington High School, which was right on campus at the time. The principal said the boy was very bright, he was raised on the streets, and he ate out of garbage cans. You just really wouldn’t believe it. His freshman year, he got into the hands of the SDS and some of those other people. He wasn’t going to be manipulated by them, but he was going to learn from them. He went up to the Pentagon with them and was going to help levitate the Pentagon or whatever. They got turned off by seeing the fully armed 82nd Airborne guarding the Pentagon. They decided they better go home. Redfern was a leading revolter and he called himself Redfern II because he wasn’t going to have any white name. He was a real rebel. He hardly ever spoke to us but what prompted him to do so was at a dedication to something for me. Various attendees got up and spoke, and my daughter, Jane, to whom I hardly talked, got up and said how proud she was of her father and everything he had done. She was followed by Redfern II. I looked at him and said good gravy what is he doing here? He said, “Jane, you know you and I have the same father.” He is a minister now. Last time I saw him at a banquet, he had a tuxedo on. It’s things like that. Like when we were at a reunion for the class of ’67 and a Vice President of Sonoco Corporation came up to me and said, “Dean Witten, you get tired of hearing this I know, but you had more of an impact on my life than anybody on campus.” Just the other night I was at a reception and a former Dean said, “The things you did for generations were probably one of the biggest parts of our college experience.”
There is also the fact as an educator, I’ve got former students who are all over the country who are doing well. So I guess I am proudest of that and proudest of the fact that the Vice President of Student Affairs was a student of mine. He’s taken a lot of things further than I did.
Lowery: You’ve talked on a couple of different occasions both with the student unrest and the enlightening of the early 1970’s but at other times about your involvement in student discipline both as Dean of Students and Vice President of Student Affairs.
Witten: One is we’ve got to have different rules. We are a community of learners. We’ve got to have different rules. Stealing a book from the library isn’t much of a offense but we had a discipline hearing one time on a student who stole a Greek/English Lexicon out of the library. It was easy to do this at the old library. You just tossed out the window. You couldn’t walk out with a book like that under your belt. He tossed it out of the window and he went and got it. Well he was found and he didn’t think there was anything wrong with stealing a book. The chairman of the discipline committee, a professor of international studies, was Jim Holland and I will never forget what he said. He said, “Son, let me tell you something. You remember what horses were in the Old West? Well a horse was to a cowboy what books are to a university and you know what they did to horse thieves? They hung them.” We suspended the student from the university.
So you’ve got different rules and when they started to legalize discipline at the university. I think they are moving away from that but I could be wrong. I’ve been off of the campus for 10 years. It’s too bad if they have gotten away from it completely. You went by your set of rules and when people broke a rule, they had to be taught a lesson. The community had to know that if you did it, the wrath the faculty was upon you and if we lived by these rules, everything will be better off in our little specialized learning community. So I guess my main idea on discipline is its got to be a learning experience. I had a boy come to me one time who we had thrown out of school. I saw him at a funeral and he came up to me and said, “If you hadn’t done what you did to me, I would have gone straight down the hill. I will never forget my gratitude for you people. You taught me that you do what’s right.” I guess with disciplining, the major part of it is the learning experience. What the punishment has to do is teach a lesson..
Lowery: Dr. Witten I appreciate your willingness to come here and talk to us today about your career at the University of South Carolina. Are there any final comments you want to share?
Witten: I was in college during the student revolt of the thirties which makes this last student revolt almost look like child’s play. There were students killed, although they weren’t on the campus. They were on the coal field strikes of Kentucky and West Virginia and a lot of people died. People took an oath and I guess I took it too, never to fight for God or country. That was in 1936. A few years later most of us went to war in the armed forces. That has been completely forgotten and it’s a shame.
I think the one thing that bothers me most these days, is academic dishonesty. I wish there was something that I could do about the grading system because there is nothing that impedes learning more than a fight for a decent grade. These are some of the things. The University could be such a beautiful thing. I look back on my college years, those were the best days of my life. I think we should try to make college that for every student, the best years of his or her life. That’s the job of a university.
Building Virtual Communities
Stuart Brown
StudentAffairs.com
Stuart Brown is the President of StudentAffairs.com (http://www.StudentAffairs.com) which includes hundreds of resources for student affairs administrators, including online professional development courses and the most accessed job site on the Internet.
Virtual communities have been seen as the Holy Grail of the Internet ever since the Webs popularity exploded among the denizens of cyberspace in the early 1990s. Have we located this Holy Grail or does it exist somewhere beyond our grasp? Magrid Igbaria, a Professor of Information Science at Claremont Graduate University, defines virtual community "as a term commonly used to describe various forms of computer-mediated communication, particularly long-term, textually mediated conversations among large groups (p. 68)." The most common methods of information transference are through computer bulletin boards, chat rooms and discussion lists.
These online watering holes have been written and spoken about in hushed, reverent tones as predictions of a mass migration of Internet users flocking to these virtual villages was projected. Along with these forecasts came warnings of gloom and doom. Gary Pavela wrote in 1994: "Much attention is being paid to the novelty of creating cyberspace communities on the Internet. There's a danger, however, that these efforts will divert energy from the equally important task of building the kind of friendships that make local communities work (p. 412)." William Simpson, speaking in 1993 about the challenges for the future of higher education, emphasized that "interrelationships with fellow students and staff and identification with a campus and its heritage (p. 88)" are necessary attributes that a decentralized interactive relationship with a computer cannot be an adequate substitute for. Indeed, as Larry Moneta wrote in 1997, "twenty-first century campus centers will face an even more challenging task to offer social gathering opportunities that compete with the abundance of solitary electronic entertainment options (p. 9)."
Fast forward a few years (a quantum leap when measured in Internet time) and the landscape has changed somewhat, or at least slightly altered as the murky, unchartered waters surrounding virtual communities has become less cloudy. No longer are they seen as an unholy force threatening our very existence. In fact, some of the online neighborhoods have thrived. One of the more notable success stories has been craigslist.org, a Web site featuring countless numbers of classified ads that encompass such topics as community bulletin boards, all types of housing information (rentals, roommates, shares), a jobs area, local events listings, and much more. Founded in 1997, the site registers millions of page views a month by tens of thousands of browsers.
More recently, the 2001 UCLA Internet Report, "Surveying the Digital Future," (http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/pages/NewsTopics.asp?Id=27) on the impact of the Internet on users and non-users shows that time spent on virtual community-type activities has little or no effect on face-to-face relationships or socialization in the real world. Going online either has no influence on the amount of time spent with household members, or positively influences household time together, the results disclose. Internet users spend more time than non-users socializing with family members, and almost as much time socializing with friends. Is it safe, then, to venture into the online world without fear and retribution from loved ones? Can we once and for all put aside the cautionary warnings of the past? Not quite yet.
In a forthcoming book, "The Internet in Everyday Life," Stanford Professor Norman Nie reiterates his findings from his February 2000 report, "The Study of the Social Consequences of the Internet" (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/february16/internetsurvey-216.html). These findings paint a slightly different picture of the online world. Some quotes from Dr. Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society and principal investigator of the study.
"The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than television did before it.
The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings."
And my favorite: "E-mail is a way to stay in touch, but you can't share a coffee or a beer with somebody on e-mail or give them a hug."
Clearly, the jury is still out on the effects cyberspace communities play in our society. So where do we go from here? As I preach to my children, and myself, moderation is always the best medicine whether it's chocolate or online activities. Delving into the virtual world should not be viewed as going over to the Dark side, nor a panacea to the pain, heartache, or frustrations caused by interactions with our fellow human beings. Spending time chatting with friends or Internet acquaintances is healthy and natural in today's world. Logging hours online, while not a substitute for face-to-face interactions, can produce some of the same benefits as other humanistic activities. Overindulging, becoming lost in space and time, has consequences. But as long as we are aware of the potential pitfalls of involving ourselves with virtual communities then our participation should be celebrated, not disdained.
References
Igbaria, M. (1999). The driving forces in the virtual society. Communications of the ACM,
42 (12), 64-70.
Moneta, L. (1997). The integration of technology with the management of student services. In
C.M. Engstrom & K.W. Kruger (Eds.), Using technology to promote student learning:
Opportunities for today and tomorrow (pp. 5-16). New Directions for Student
Services, No. 78. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pavela, G. (1994). What Internet Means. Synthesis: Law and policy in higher education, 5
(4), 397-413).
Simpson, W. (1993). Challenges for the future. In W.B. Simpson (Ed.), Managing with
scare resources (85-93). New Directions for Institutional Research, No. 79. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Listen Very Loud
Christopher Harris
University of South Carolina-Columbia
Mitchell, R. L. (2001). Listen Very Loud. Atwood Publishing.
Christopher J. Harris is a second year Master’s degree student in the Education Administration program at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. He also a graduate assistant in the Department of Student Life and can be reached at harriscj@gwm.sc.edu
This book puts into writing what we all struggle with: meaning (in life and in our professions), balance, and time for reflection. The author, Randy L. Mitchell, through the use of personal reflection and life stories, prompts the reader to be aware of the importance of these three. This book, though specifically designed for student affairs professionals, is a book that any other professional could benefit from. And wisely enough, the author provides reflection questions to ponder at the end of each chapter. The author shows that the typical “what is the meaning of life?” question is not as poignant and principle as the question “what gives your life meaning?” This book proves much more than your typical path to success or character-building book. The author has extensively (almost too extensively) covered all of those questions that we have internally probed. Questions such as, how do you attempt to balance making a living and making a life, do you have any work habits your would prefer your students didn’t learn, is there something you’d like to do before you die, what are you doing to make that happen, does your campus have any ‘Bermuda triangles’? This reviewer saw himself in the author’s stories and would imagine that many others would as well. Having a typical interaction with his little daughter who perceived that her father was not paying attention, in her words told her father he needed to listen very loud. Requiring him to pay attention to what she was doing was of utmost importance to her. And as it is, the author has come to realize that we encounter issues and people that require us to pay attention. Yet many student affairs professionals routinely journey through each day without listening very loud- that is, paying attention. The needs, ideas, and developments of our students and campuses are the things that we should listen very loud to. But of higher significance is what the author forces the reader to realize: this listening very loud concept needs to become a lifestyle and not just a part of the professional aspect of our lives.
The author begins with a typical day for the student affairs professional and immediately draws the readers’ attention to the idea that this book is simple and easy to read, but more importantly, is relevant and realistic in its suggestions and views. Taking lessons and insight from his father, the author is engaged in a personal discovery that music is good for the character of a person, play is good for the soul, and perspective is good for the future of a person. The other topics covered throughout the book include; being touched and changed by the random energy of students and staff, discovering joy in and around our work lives, fine-tuning the ‘instruments’ we use, helping students exercise their newfound freedom with responsibility, making sense by being sensible and sensitive, helping students define success, creating the conditions that foster student motivation, responding appropriately to stress, adjusting to the seasonal needs of our students, maintaining balance, and paying attention to the souls of our campuses. But what makes this publication stand out from the others that this reader has read is the closeness of the stories to the common stories heard everyday. It is not far-reaching to connect with the life of the author or his insight. Yet, to know that others have considered and struggled with these similar issues is comforting and further, the authors’ affectionate questions equip the reader to grow in perspective, relationships, and profession.
This reviewer has been somewhat riled by the length of the publication. This book could have been almost fifty to sixty pages shorter and still as effective and thorough in the information presented. The authors’ target audience is not one, even as the author mentioned, that has extensive time and in order to develop that balance and learn the lessons within the book; the author ought to consider those reading are not yet balanced in their approach to life. As reading the first thirteen chapters, the author’s redundancy was only a hindrance to getting the substance of what was being said. A deliberate focus was needed for the last seventeen chapters.
Without considering the length of the book, this reviewer recommends that any student affairs professional, higher education professional, and particularly, any para-professional or new professionals in the field take hold of all that is within the book, and grow from it. This is a must read, and should be on the bookshelves of all those that have an expectation to get anything from life. This reviewer has grown from its approach, and encourages others to make their lives go under the same construction.
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