I'll Fight

There are many unfair aspects to Anne Balay’s having been denied promotion and tenure, but a major one is Bloomington administrators’ failure to allow the decision to be made by Chancellor William Lowe, the top administrator on her home campus, IU Northwest.  After she received unanimous support from her English Department Promotion and Tenure committee and unanimous support from her Arts and Sciences divisional committee, Vice Chancellor David Malik recommended her for promotion and tenure.  In spite of this, President Michael McRobbie turned her down, giving more credence evidently to very dubious arguments put forward by her chair and dean about her alleged teaching inadequacies.  In a stinging rebuke to those arguments, the IU Northwest Faculty Board of Review found that Anne was a transformational teacher and winner of several teaching awards who had been given virtually no warning that her tenure case was in jeopardy.  In its report the Faculty Board of Review members expressed deep regret that the university will lose one of its most promising scholars and a transformational teacher who sets and enforces high standards.  The committee concluded that the failures of the University in the process were many.  She was provided with inadequate warnings on both the complaints and the DWF (withdrawal) rates.  She was not informed in writing or even at all of the problems in the classroom.  There was virtually no follow-up to the warnings that were provided.  Finally, the university made too little effort to apply the resources of IU Northwest to improving her teaching.

In cases much less egregious than this one, where administrators did not follow proper procedures, it has been common to allow faculty members a year or two to show significant improvement, something Anne requested.  The Faculty Board of Review report states that members seriously considered granting this request but that her Chair and Dean opposed the idea and Anne admitted that she couldn't teach effectively if her Chair and Dean stood on the sidelines, hoping she’ll make an error which they can use against her.  The report then sadly concurred that this was a good description of the attitude of the leadership of the English Department toward her.  So the committee suggested that she be compensated rather that given an opportunity to be mentored by those willing to help her.

There are other scenarios that I wish President McRobbie consider.  First, if her chair refuses to mentor her, replace him with someone who will or ask him to delegate the responsibility to someone else, perhaps former Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Mary Russell, who was on the English Department P and T committee and whose field, Children’s Literature, is the same as Anne’s.  Second, since Vice Chancellor Malik offered to mentor her, transfer Anne to the Gender Studies program, where her present research interests lie.   Malik could perhaps ask his associate vice chancellor Cynthia O’Dell, formerly a member of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, to assist him in the mentoring.  Thirdly, I believe fairness demands that the final decision whether or not to retain Anne be made be IU Northwest Chancellor Lowe, who has had the opportunity at close hand to evaluate and appreciate Anne’s contributions to the university in the areas of research, teaching, and service – as well as familiarity with the personalities involved in the case -  rather than the final decision be made by distant administrators.

 F.C. Richardson

above, Nicolas Kanellos; below, Robin Hass Birky

If Anne’s chief failing was that she was too outspoken as an open lesbian feminist, isn’t there, in the name of diversity, room for at least one such scholar on a campus?  A half-century ago, critics thought F.C. Richardson too pushy for supporting student demands for a Black Studies program.  Richardson went on to become a chancellor in the IU system.  A decade later, critics wanted Nicolas Kanellos denied tenure because he supported student demands for a Latino Studies program.  Kanellos is at present Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston.  Robin Hass Birky received much criticism for supporting a Women’s and Gender Studies program.  Now, after her tragic death, there is a room on campus named after her.  As a historian I have little doubt that in the future Anne Balay’s activities on behalf of LGBTs at IU Northwest will be similarly recognized.  I believe Chancellor Lowe already recognizes her worth.  If she is abrasive at times and maybe has room for improvement in the classroom, these are minor flaws compared to the many, many students she’s mentored and helped develop intellectually.  How great it could be if the university that I love so much celebrated the impending publication of her path breaking book “Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers” rather than show her the door and betray the principles of academic freedom and diversity that IU claims as its heritage.

Chichen Itza

I have returned from a fifteen-day trip to California and the so-called Mayan Riviera near Cancun, Mexico. Those all-inclusive stays at ocean-front five-star hotels such as the Grand Bahia Tulum are everything that they are made up to be – great food, free drinks, no tipping, and shows every evening, not to mention perfect weather for January and daily walks along the Gulf of Mexico beach. Most impressive was a visit to the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, featuring the incredible thousand year-old pyramid honoring the Mayan sun god Kukulkan (feathered serpent). Our knowledgeable guide, who joked that some tourists call the site “chicken ‘n’ pizza”) pointed out the amazing mathematical and astronomical calculations that went into designing it. For example, during the spring and autumn equinoxes the afternoon sunlight causes seven isosceles triangles to form near the pyramid's main stairway imitating the body of a serpent that creeps downwards until it joins the huge serpent's head carved in stone at the bottom. Other notable sites include a ball field (the game ended after one goal after which there was a ritual beheading as sacrifice to the gods) and columns where market was held. While in Los Angeles with friends Kate and Jim Migoski, we stayed with their daughter Suzanne, her husband Kris Kallin, and their delightful kids William and Julia. William has a really winning grin, and Julia has remarkably penetrating eyes that appear to take in everything that is happening.

Did some reading during the vacation, thanks to finding “The Great Gatsby” in Kris and Suzi’s bookcase (was even more impressed with Fitzgerald than the first time I read it) and “The House of God,” a book about interns set in the 1970s that was satirical and pretty raunchy. My favorite novelist John Updike compared it to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” Author Samuel Shem (real name Stephen Begman) is someone Kris knows personally.

Unlike a year ago, when we arrived back from California to discover that the furnace had stopped, all was well on our Maple Place hill even though a fire had destroyed the house across the ravine from us. A dozen or so phone messages awaited, including updates from the Arredondos and Sheriff Dominguez on our book projects. While we were gone, son Dave had been named Lake County teacher of the year, and we will be able to go to a reception in his honor to be held at the Horseshoe Casino (it will be my first visit to one out the Region boats).

At the university more than 350 emails were waiting to be read and/or deleted, including New York Times updates on the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti and the shocking loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown (once named America’s sexiest man by Cosmopolitan magazine). I got invitations to join several Facebooks, with the message that so-and-so wants to add me to their list of friends. The most touching email came from the parents of Robin Hass Birky, who died last year when a truck plowed through a red light and crashed into her car. They must have heard that I mentioned her in my retirement journal and requested a copy. Her mom wrote, “ I spend time looking up things about her as it gives me peace knowing her efforts in life.” In my letter I directed her to the Index. In a section entitled “Grieving,” I wrote that on September 2, 2008, Vice Chancellor Kwesi Aggrey set aside two hours where people could share thoughts over her death and how many people could barely control their emotions. Kim Hunt emailed me that day that “Robin was one of my academic inspirations. She motivated us to enjoy and want to learn more about our language, just as you motivated us to enjoy and learn more of our history.” On September 3 I wrote how I passed where Robin had died on my way to the packed service. In church Mary Russell called her “our Rockin’ Robin.” Kwesi sang a Ghanian song in her honor that was unbelievably moving. DeeDee Ige mentioned that when she went back to teaching, Robin gave her a book. Inside was a photo of the three of us dancing at my retirement party (it’s one of three photos in volume 40 that Robin is in) and a note telling her to keep joy in her life. Before going to the cemetery the funeral procession wove past the Valparaiso firehouse, where Robin’s husband worked, the firemen were out front at attention. Back at school was this email from a stunned Paul Kern: “Robin’s son Cole played basketball for Morgan Township. I’d check the bos scores to see how he did and mention it to Robin. The heartfelt tributes were deserved. What a lot of enthusiasm snuffed out.”

High school classmate Gaard Murphy Logan reported that the Tacoma Art Museum where she is a docent has an exhibit featuring animals in artwork and that she and hubby Chuck “did our first motorcycle ride of the year last week. It was sweet to be back on the road.” She had been ill but claims to be 97 percent well and back to jogging and visits to the gym. I replied in part: “I checked out the information about the animal exhibit on the Tacoma Art Museum’s website. Sounds like April 25 will be fun with folks dressed in the favorite animal outfits. There’s a guy on our campus who often dresses as a cat with whiskers, a long tail, and mittens. He is a ‘furry,’ part of a cult group partial to the novel ‘Watership Down.’ Let me know if you see any furries while you are a docent.” A telecommunications professor from Bloomington, Ronald Osgood, who used some material from my “Brothers in Arms” Shavings magazine, wants to send me a DVD he did called “My Vietnam Your Iraq: Eight Families, Two Wars,” Sounds intriguing. Got this email, which I passed on to Dave: “This is Aaron, the bass player from Drena's jam night. Thanks for the kind words on your blog. The kind words should be coming from me. David did a great job. I wish to jam with him again real soon. It was very invigorating.”

At bowling rolled three games in the 170s, well above my average. Relaxing at home with a quart of Miller High Life, started planning my February 16 appearance before the Portage Historical Society. I’ve decided to have some 17 people read excerpts from my oral history of Portage (Shavings, volume 20, 1991) covering the years from World War I through the 1920s. In an article entitled “Portage in Three Stages of Its Growth,” former student (and good friend) Bruce Sawochka called the time between the 1880s and the 1945s “The Quiet Years” to distinguish it from the previous half-century (the pioneer period) and the past half-century (in his words, “the Big Bang”).

FACET's Eileen T. Bender

Yesterday I interviewed FACET founder Eileen Bender at her office in the English Department at IU South Bend. Several weeks ago in the cafeteria lunchroom FACET (Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching) director David Malik, who is also interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at IU Northwest, said to me, “Since you are an oral historian, how would you like to interview the woman who started FACET?” She is retiring from teaching this year, and he wanted her remembrances recorded for posterity. He offered to pay me but the terms of my retirement plan prevent me from earning any extra money from IU. I was in desperate need of a new computer, however, so I heard him out, and agreed that the interview might become part of a larger project. To learn more about FACET I interviewed Don Coffin, who had been an active member since 1989, as well as current campus liaison Charlotte Reed, and Malik himself. Tome Trajkovski and Aaron Pigars provided camera work and then produced excellent DVDs of the interviews that could possibly be part of a documentary or put on FACET’s electronic Website and/or Newsletter. I contacted Eileen and we set up a time and date.

The weather yesterday was threatening, but we plunged on. Aaron was a recent graduate of IU South Bend and navigated while Tome drove us in his new BMW. We made it to campus in under an hour. I packed ham sandwiches and Fritos for each of us. Eileen proved to be a charming woman with much to say. At one time she was special adviser to IU President Tom Ehrlich, who supported her vision to honor excellent teachers and bring them together as an unofficial leadership cadre to encourage teaching innovations on their respective campuses. The interview went on for nearly two hours. Each year in May new inductees and those already members of the organization go to a weekend retreat. For the past several years this has taken place in French Lick, a former spa in southern Indiana that now boasts a casino. Various sessions and workshops take place that involve teachers having to learn new skills outside their discipline. One such collaborative effort involved making pieces of a quilt. Another involved participants making silkscreen segments. As Eileen recalled, in 1998 her assistant “smuggled out” a snapshot of her, which was enlarged and cut into squares. People worked on and made abstractions from nine little screens not knowing what the larger picture was. The collage was unveiled at the closing session and now hangs in a lounge near Eileen’s office. Eileen said, “It has taken me years to be able to view my abstracted multicolored image with good humor. I’m amused when holding a class in the lounge when a student asks warily, ‘Dr. Bender – is that YOU????’”

Thanks to Vice Chancellor Malik I now have a state-of-the-art MAC (version 10.6.2) 27-inch screen computer with 4 GBs of memory. In the past couple days I’ve worked out most of the bugs and gotten used to it thanks in large part to technician Velate Sullivan. I love it. The old one had been freezing up every half hour or so. So far I have showed it off to Steve, Anne Balay, and other visitors to the Archives. Malik is also going to pay for Aaron, Tome, and me to attend next year’s retreat so we can do interviews and capture some of the highlights on tape. Malik was at today’s Holiday Party (you don’t say Christmas!) and I introduced him to 89 year-old Bill Neil, a surprise guest who mentioned that he, too, had been Dean (as it was called in 1971) of Academic Affairs until an idiot, Robert McNeil, became Chancellor (and Bill was not exaggerating). Chris Young sat at our table. His field, early American History, was the same as Bill’s, so they got along famously. Also at our table were Ken Schoon, who (as I pointed out to Bill) wrote the excellent book “Calumet Beginnings,” which combines his expertise in geology and history. Zoran and Vesna Kilibarda, who moved to the United States from Yugoslavia in the 1980s, were our other companions. Bill recalled some of his former Serbian students (what a memory), and Zoran expressed regret that after Tito’s death his country disintegrated into a half dozen little states with little power or influence. He knew Bill from chairing the 2009 Arts and Sciences Research Conference Committee that approved my Plenary Session on the history of the university featuring Bill, Paul Kern and me. Vesna thanked me for giving them my Retirement Journal and said she found it interesting. I mentioned in volume 40 that Vesna was a Voodoo Chili fan who danced to my son’s band at the Roadhouse, that as Chair of the Math Department she gave Lary Schiefelbusch the Gary Pictorial History and Ron Cohen and I co-edited, and that at grieving session in the wake of Robin Hass Birky being killed in an auto accident, she was so moved she could barely control her emotions (she wasn’t alone).

Next week will be the A & S Holiday Party, and last week was a Retirement Reception for Business Prof Bert Scott (didn’t know him very well) and an Information Technology secretary. Three other retirees failed to attend, including good old Mary Bertoluzzi, who was hired in 1978 to work in a unit that was later abolished and never promoted into a position that would have used her considerable talents. Usually try to provide witty anecdotes at such events, but kept my mouth shut. Have been reading with pleasure Gore Vidal’s “Burr,” told from the point of view of a young would-be biographer who works in the former vice president's law office. As in "Lincoln," the main character frequents a fashionable D.C. brothel. Picked up and skimmed through “Everything’s Changed” by Gail Collins about women’s history since 1960. In that year a judge kicked a woman out of his courtroom for wearing slacks. There’s a photo of a sexy stewardess lighting men’s cigars. How times have changed.

Wednesday ended with a wintry blizzard. It took my son Dave 90 minutes to get home to Portage from East Chicago Central H.S. and he begged out of bowling in place of me. I have been nursing a pinched sciatic nerve but drove through the snow and wind to Cressmoor Lanes and bowled a 509 series (194, 182, and 133 with four splits in the third game). The Engineers won one game and series for three points, and Dick Maloney beat me out for high series above average by a total of four pins to win the five dollar pot. Had two Leinie drafts and then a couple Goose Island 12-ouncers while listening to an Owl City CD and proofreading my forward to the an autobiography I am helping someone put together.

Autograph Party & Pep Rally

I have been sending out email notices for the Pep Rally and Autograph Party next Tuesday November 3 at IU Northwest’s Savannah Center between 5 and 6:45 and prior to the Lady Redhawks’ first basketball game of the season against Grace College. Heard back from Carson Cunningham, who has a PhD in sports history and coaches at Andrean High School. Former student and Gary police officer Todd Cliborne said he’d try to be there. I mention in volume 40 that he inquired about teaching possibilities in SPEA and for volume 33 (on the year 2000 in the Calumet Region) wrote movingly about children drowning in Lake Etta in Black Oak. A Californian got confused during a sudden thundershower and drove her car into the water. After good friend Bill May was murdered senselessly in his condo in Miller, Todd spotted the stolen car and apprehended the killer.

Steve helped me put up display cases in the Conference Center lobby and in Savannah next to the bookstore. We put up flyers and Jeff Manes’s SALT article plus displayed both the front of the magazine and the back, which has photos of my final class in Summer I, 2007, and members of the History and Philosophy Department at one of my retirement parties. I also opened a third book, in one case to an account of the September 2007 flood that closed the campus for two weeks and for the second display the two-page spread includes photos of my son Dave and other members of the band Voodoo Chili on one page and a photo of Robin Hass Birky and a section called “Grieving.” On August 29 I wrote: “Campus news flash: Assistant Vice Chancellor Robin Hass Birky just died, her car hit by a truck that ran a red light as she turned onto Route 49 on her way to a meeting in Indy. She was a friend of the History department, Jerry especially, her academic specialty being Medieval Literature. Went over to the cafeteria to be with colleagues and ran into her boss, Kwesi Aggrey, who was too shook up to talk. Robin danced with me to Voodoo Chili at Leroy’s Hot Stuff and on campus after my retirement ceremony. Everyone loved her. I’m numb.”

Three days later came this entry: “Vice Chancellor Aggrey set aside two hours where people could grieve over Robin’s death as well as the recent passing of George Adair and Doc Lukas. Like a Quaker meeting there were periods of silence and short testimonies. I started things off with brief personal anecdotes about each. Vesna Kilibarda could barely control her emotions, and some others were too shaken up to speak. Charlotte Reed mentioned what a comfort Robin was when people close to her passed away. Roberta Wollons came into my office, having traveled from Boston to attend the wake and burial service. She remembered when the three of us danced to a Rolling Stones song at Leroy’s. Kim Hunt wrote: ‘Robin was one of my academic inspirations. She motivated us to enjoy and want to learn more about our language, just as you motivated us to enjoy and want to learn more of our history.’”

On September 3 I wrote: “Passed where Robin died on the way to the packed church service and got choked up. Had been at the intersection many times delivering Shavings to Home Mountain Press. Trucks roar by at 60 mph and commonly run the light. In church Mary Russell called her “our Rockin’ Robin.” Kwesi sang a Ghanaian song in her honor that was unbelievably moving. DeeDee Ige mentioned that when she went back to teaching, Robin gave her a book. Inside was a picture of the three of us dancing at my retirement party and a note telling her to keep joy in her life. That broke me up. Two former students spoke of how tough but caring she was. Son Cole just finished basic training and wore a military uniform. Before going to the cemetery the funeral precession wove past the Valpo firehouse, where Robin’s husband worked, and firemen were out front at attention. Stunned, Paul Kern wrote: “Robin’s son played basketball for Morgan Township. I’d check the box scores to see how he did and mention it to Robin. The heartfelt tributes were deserved. What a lot of enthusiasm snuffed out.”

The flood started on September 14 as a remnant of Hurricane Ike and caused areas near the Little Calumet River to be inundated, including the Tri-State (Interstate 80-94). I had some of Trish and Ray Arredondo’s photos in my office for the book project on Maria Arredondo plus the latest version of the manuscript on my computer and on a CD. Couldn’t even get near campus until four days later. On September 18 I wrote: “IUN is still flooded but parked at 35th and Jefferson and got in my office, jumping over numerous puddles before a campus policeman let me in a side door. If anything, things have worsened because nearby communities are pumping floodwater into the Little Cal. It is obvious that the campus won’t open for quite a while. A family in Griffith lost a home to the recent tornado and now their hotel quarters are under water.” Five days later, told I could go into my office for ten minutes, I stayed two hours. Actually the History offices weren’t flooded at all, but the Theatre got it bad. A photo that I used taken by Chris Sheid shows IU president Michael McRobbie investigating the damage, escorted by Physical Plant director Otto Jefimenko.