The few days ago, as I walked across the campus of the University of Oklahoma, appreciating the cool morning air and the austerity of the empty campus, with its red-brick gothic and whitewashed neoclassical buildings, I was struck by how different I feel coming to this campus now than I did when I first came to OU as a freshman.
These days, as I walk across the campus, I feel at home here. The recognizable architecture, the landscaping, and the rhythm of a university feels warmly familiar to me. I have, after all, spent much of my adult life at universities. They are where I have done my best and favorite work. So, when I step onto just about any university campus, especially after spending time in the bleak, cheaply built hallways of municipal government, I feel at home, as a child might feel in the warmth of a grandmother's house--if grandma were brilliant and wealthy.
As a freshman, however, I did not feel this way. The university was an intimidating place for me in 1997, as it no doubt is for many freshman today. Though I was living at home, and had several friends from high school there, I was surrounded by people I did not know. I had attended a large high school, with a graduating class of 529. But OU, a relatively large research institution, had more than ten times the number students as my high school (with about 20,000 undergraduates). I had been a successful student in high school with relatively little effort. I had played hockey, been first chair in the band, been in the top chorus, and was the president of the drama club. Yet now I was at a place where nobody cared about all that. Everybody here had been those things. And now I wondered whether or not I belonged. The people were smart, and the campus was huge and beautiful. I, on the other hand, suddenly felt very average. I was the oldest son of parents who had only been to junior college, and who had been working full time jobs and paying their own bills when they were my age. But here I was, spending their money and trying to blend in with really smart kids from wealthy homes (it seemed to me). I felt like an impostor, waiting to be found out.
I did okay at first, but I felt very small. I went from being in first chair in high school to second chair in the second band at OU. I went from being a relatively popular student to being part of a mass of freshman who no one knew. I saw upper class-men wearing high school letter jackets and proclaiming it to be "Make Fun of Freshmen Day." I didn't know the words, or even the tunes, to the songs we sung to make fun of the Longhorns on OU/Texas weekend. I wasn't invited to away games.The professors didn't know my name and the TAs seemed to see me as a burden. I didn't drink or join a fraternity, and when I went to parties where everyone else was, I was scared to death and I just wanted to go home.
I didn't make it as a freshman. In my second semester, I decided to change my major and I quit taking my music education classes very seriously. I didn't go to the Group Piano final. But I did better in that class than I did in Math for Critical Thinking, a math class that didn't seem to have much math in it. I went to the lecture a few times and sat in the back of a lecture room with about 130 other students where I couldn't see the notes being written on the overhead because I thought I looked stupid in my glasses. I quit going entirely, thinking I could keep up with the material in the lab. When I realized I couldn't, I quit going to that too. I also stopped going to a Geology class where the professor seemed to enjoy making jokes about "creationists" which at the time I was totally unable to put in perspective. I wasn't offended that he made fun of Christians; I was afraid he would find out I was one and he would think I was stupid. I was starting to become convinced that I was.
After that semester, I was placed on academic probation. I knew that I could retake one of my failing grades and that it would be replaced on my transcript, so I signed up for the summer semester to retake the Geology class, since it would fulfill a general education requirement. The only thing I remember about the class is that it was in Sarkeys (a sky scraper on campus that is rumored to be closing soon due to structural problems) and that the professor talked a lot about Calcium Feldspar. I still don't know what that is. I started going to my girlfriend's house instead of class, and I was suspended after the summer semester.
I served out my suspension at a community college, but I never returned to OU as an undergraduate (in fact, when I got accepted into the PhD program at OU, I had to clear the academic hold from my suspension 15 years before). Instead, I transferred to Harding University, a much smaller and much more expensive Liberal Arts university.
I flourished at Harding. For one thing, I had followed my girlfriend (who I've now been married to for twelve years). This was not trivial. Not only did I have someone to complain to, cry to, and so on, but she was an excellent student. She hung out with people who got together in the student center for study groups, people for whom knowledge was a social event, central to their daily lives. I've since come to learn (and this is an epistemological grounding in my field) that knowledge making is itself a community act. Not only did we learn from one another, but we made learning a privileged social activity. Harding, it seemed to me, was a place where the the smart kids were the cool kids. Also, these people had been here for a couple years already by the time I transferred in as a third year student. This meant that I had people to show me around, people of whom I felt comfortable asking questions. I was privy to insider knowledge that helped me navigate the terrain.
As importantly, I encountered faculty who, unlike those who stood in front of the 130 person lecture rooms of my freshman year, seemed to have a personal investment in my life. One in particular became, and remains, a mentor to me. Steve and Dottie Frye were both professors in my theatre department. Steve taught theory and history, and Dottie was the director of a theatre troupe I was in. I became very close to them both and, along with scores of other students, considered them surrogate parents. I think I gravitated a bit more toward Steve because I was a young man in need of role models.
In my senior year, I worked for Steve and Dottie as an assistant. It was in Steve's office that I decided that I wanted to teach in the university. Steve kept in his office a jar of bite sized candy bars and a refrigerator full of Coke. Students would put 50 cents into a coffee cup on top of the fridge and take a Coke. We would generally then sit and talk for a while. His office became a lounge for his students. We would drink Coke, and talk to him and each other about the subject matter of his classes or about life outside of it. This made him both a very involved teacher and also a confidant. Those of us who were in Dottie's troupe were also frequent visitors to their home. We ate together and played with her kids. I even did laundry there from time to time.
The importance of this kind of relationship cannot be overstated. Not only were there important social and emotional benefits to these relationships, but there were important pedagogical implications as well. Many students experience what is often called "impostor syndrome." This is the jarring and disillusioning feeling that I don't actually belong here. That I am, in fact, not good enough, not smart enough for this new place. I was a mistake by the admissions office and any day now, everyone is going to find out. I'm doomed to failure.
One of the most important aspects of my relationships with the Fryes is that it initiated me into the academic community. A couple years ago, I found a paper that I wrote for one of Steve's classes. It was called "The Rise of the Greek Theatre and the Vast Confusion Surrounding that Rise" or something like that. As I think about the essay now, even the title seems trite. It was full of very commonplace information and arguments that, at the time, I thought were rather daring and new. It was a startling bit of juvenilia. Yet I remember vividly that Steve took it very seriously. I remember working on it with him in his office, and being treated like a serious scholar when I turned it in. I considered becoming a theatre historian. Likewise, when I brought a play into his office, a terrible tragic romance in one act, he insisted that plays are meant to be heard, and so we staged a reading in his office. Again, he took it completely seriously, praising me for my flair for dialogue and giving feedback on the lacking plot (I'm wording this more strongly here than he did ). Years later, when I asked him for a reference for a PhD application (one of many I'd asked him for) after I had been working as a police officer for several years, he told me, "I've always thought you'd be happier in the life of the mind."
It made all the difference for me to be taken seriously. It was an emphatic signal that I did in fact belong. When I got to Harding, I had to work. My classes were being paid for by loans that I am now paying off. It would be tempting to repeat the often made argument that having to pay for my education made me care about it more. Such an argument, at least for me, would be a fallacy. I didn't take my studies seriously because of my own financial investment (I really had no concept of what it would be like to pay those loans off). I took my studies seriously because I was treated seriously. I was made to feel like this was what I was good at--that this is where I belonged. It wasn't my investment that made me want to do well; it was others' investment in me. Even now, I feel the pressure to do well so that I don't let Steve down. Others who have invested in me have been added to that concern: Matt Hollrah who trained me as a teacher and who is partnering with me in a serious literacy work, Ron Brooks who tried to talk me out of leaving OSU, and Lynn Lewis who got pissed and started making phone calls when I didn't get admitted to OU last year.
I still feel the sinking pull of Impostor Syndrome. I felt it when I returned to graduate school four years after I earned my B.A. I felt it when I began a PhD at Oklahoma State and I feel it now that I continue it at Oklahoma a school that denied my application four times before admitting me this year, and where I have now returned full circle. I have no doubt that I will feel it again when I defend a dissertation and when I enter a flooded and embattled academic job market.
But now I feel comfortable, and that makes all the difference. I imagine what the university must look like to students who have come from less privileged backgrounds and I fear for them. What must the beautiful austerity of campus look like to a student who has come from a crumbling, neglected inner city school? How intimidating must the large and impersonal classrooms of lower-division classes seem to those who feel the pressure of starting from behind? How disorienting must this place be to those who have so often been made to feel unwelcome, who were never "good enough" to go to schools attended by the young men and women who now surround them? What must the thirteen story freshman dorms feel like to a student from a town less populous than any one of those buildings (3% of our incoming freshman class comes from towns smaller than their dorm). What does a student think when he hears his suite mates complain about a dorm room that looks much like the project apartment he lived in before he got here?
David Bartholomae, Mike Rose, and others have written about the importance of being initiated into discourse communities--of the careful apprenticeship between faculty and new scholars. As our universities continue to become more diverse, this process becomes all the more vital. Relationships between students and other students, faculty, and even the physical space of the university must be carefully and purposefully cultivated. Our pedagogy must be infused by and must begin with relationship. We must learn to be Fryes.
