College professors spend a lot of time preparing others for careers but may have little time to pursue their own development or look back on their own journeys. This selection of books is intended to offer a chance to reflect on the long haul and to consider new options. Sometimes academics take jobs as a short-term option, only to find that it turns into a career. That first step becomes a lifelong commitment to a field or a single school. That is what happened to the author of this first book.
Race and the University: A Memoir, by George Henderson, $24.95, University of Oklahoma Press, September 2010, ISBN-10: 0806141298, ISBN-13: 978-0806141299, pp. 272.
Shortly after completing a Ph.D. at Wayne State University, Dr. George Henderson, assistant superintendent for Detroit Public Schools and an adjunct professor at three colleges, told his mentor he had accepted a job as a full-time professor at the University of Oklahoma. He was taken off guard by the reaction:
“You won’t like it there. It’s a small redneck school in a backward state,” said Dr. Leonard Moss, chairman of Wayne State’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology. “If you want to go to a suburban school and live a nice, quiet life, let me find you a better place. You shouldn’t begin your career in a second-rate university in the boondocks of Oklahoma. Besides, it’s not a place where your social values and professional abilities will be appreciated.”
Moss was wrong about the last part, and in any case, Henderson was undeterred.
The year was 1967, and Henderson, born in Alabama and reared in East Chicago, Ind., was soon to get his first taste of what going to Norman, Okla., to be an associate professor of sociology and education would mean for his family. The Hendersons were rebuffed with lame excuses when they pursued their first, second and third choice of housing. The family secured a barely suitable place with potential after a White department chair accompanied Henderson’s wife, Barbara, to inspect a fourth property. The colleague, as he disclosed decades later, led the sellers to assume that he was the buyer who just brought his maid along to see how much work her boss’s home might require.
It was a mere foretaste of the kind of racial isolation and animus that was common in the community and the university. On the one hand, it was an era of hope as the university sought — and some within the academic body welcomed — a new African-American colleague who would be one of three Black faculty. The situation in the wider community, on the other hand, was more dire than Moss predicted.
