Young Scholar: Eastern Michiga University 01

EMU had two good things going for it. First, many of the faculty were hard-working and knew their stuff. Second, most of the grad students in the Geography-Geology Department were intellectually engaged and excited about learning. Both elements were right up my alley and gave me considerable satisfaction.

The part about teaching there that was most frustrating was the course load. We had to teach four courses each semester. Which often translated into having four separate preparations. It was maddening. And in truth many of the undergrads were less than interested in learning anything. They wanted a degree so they could get a job. Therefore, their commitment to learning was barely skin deep. Students like that filled my classes and made me want to pull my hair out.

Shortly before finishing the dissertation I got involved with grad and undergrad students on a summer semester field geography project in Detroit. You have to remember it was 1972, a time of turmoil in the U.S. over Vietnam and many other related and not so related social causes. A time of civil rights protests and riots. A time when the sweet smell of marijuana seemed to be everywhere outdoors and LSD and cocaine were sweeping the campuses. Kids in southeastern Michigan were discovering some wild guy named Bob Seeger and his Silver Bullet Band. Well, not me because I wasn’t into rock music. But you get the picture.

I decided one painless way to get students involved in gritty urban social issues was by offering an eight-week Field Course in Urban Geography in central Detroit. The field course focused on the Cass Corridor or in what was termed by the City of Detroit’s Planning Department the Cass-Trumbull Neighborhood, to be specific. About twenty students enrolled in the course. Among the grad students were Larry Hugg, Dick Crocker, Dick Berg, Jim Anderson Jr. (Big Jim’s son who had come to EMU for a master’s degree probably because his father knew I’d look out for him, though he never needed it) and Bob Ayotte, a bright undergrad.

Working with the Detroit Geographical Expedition, a leftist community-based organization founded by the famous radical geographer Bill Bunge, I hooked up with a fairly well known community organization, the Trumbull Community Center, and we worked out a deal where we would gather information under their direction and for their use against the City, which was trying its damnedest to bulldoze and “urban renewal” much of the area. (Author’s Note: Bill Bunge was one of the principal heirs to the Bunge grain fortune. Either slightly before or right around that time he repudiated his father’s family and their large fortune, became estranged from them, and eventually wound up a card-carrying Communist living in Toronto who, for a time, supported himself and his family by driving a cab. He was also one of the most creative and intellectually stimulating geographers of the 1960s and early 1970s. The idea of “geographical expeditions" to the uncharted territory of U.S. inner cities was his and his alone. In 1962, Bunge wrote one of the most advanced texts on theoretical geography and was the darling of geographers who used statistical techniques in their research. There’s a LOT more to that story but this blog probably isn’t the place to tell it other than to say that Bunge told me personally that he thought I had stolen the job at EMU from him and he resented the shit out of me and called me an imperialist, back-stabbing mother fucker. In those precise words. No exaggeration.)

After a week of classroom prep we packed up in early June and headed to Detroit, where we lived 24/7 in the community with volunteers or at a commune run by Sam Stark and Kae Halonen, leaders of the Trumbull Community Center. San endured that summer by taking Dave and Karen to St. Louis. Larry, Bob, and I lived at the commune with about six resident members. So, when I returned to Ann Arbor for our Sunday off it was to an empty apartment and a toilet still stopped up by a gift deposited by Dick Berg. Ha ha. I bet he thought I would have forgotten that huge log by this time. No chance.

We were interested in competition and conflict over land use among vastly unequal adversaries. On one side of that struggle were the poor residents of the Cass Corridor, largely but not entirely populated by blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Appalachian whites defined by the “establishment” as marginal at best and the NGOs and institutions that supported them. How can I fail to mention that the area was characterized by low incomes, low educational achievement, deteriorated and dilapidated housing, and few city services.

On the other side were arrayed the forces of money and power: the City of Detroit in the guise of the Planning and Housing Commissions, Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, and the corporations operating the New Center (you better be thinking General Motors). In a nutshell, all of those powerful adversaries were working hard to encroach on and convert to their control land in the Cass Corridor and the adjacent Woodward Corridor and give the then existing residents the boot. It was classic urban renewal, otherwise known in the urban planning business as Nigger Removal.

In practical terms, each student was assigned to a team headed by a member of the Cass-Trumbull Community and gathered information for a specific research topic. Which meant that each research unit consisted of four or five students, with a minimum of one grad student per team, a local expert, and with me as an ex-officio, “floating,” member. As an aside, I was fiercely determined not get caught in another argument over academic imperialism (not since my experience in Kinloch or with a very threatening and intimidating Bill Bunge) and worked with the community-based NGOs to avoid any such appearance.

We did the ordinary things academics do but residents were not trained to do, mostly identify, collect, and analyze publically available data, turn the results over to the community organizations, and work with them to apply the information systematically to their struggle to retain control of the land. What we were fighting was the wholesale clearance and redevelopment of functioning inner-city neighborhoods. Naturally, the “progress” that the City was interested in and the neighborhood was fighting was intended to benefit someone else. Meaning the power elite. The poor residents were supposed to fold their tents, pack their meager belongings, and slink away with their tails tucked between their legs, preferably under cover of darkness. But go away nonetheless.

What we did that summer was advocacy urban geography and planning as we advocated for the residents of Cass-Trumbull against the City. I believe that summer taught all the students a great deal about how cities really work. It taught me as well. Afterwards, I worked with Larry Hugg, Dick Crocker, and Bob Ayotte to write a paper that was published in 1974 in Antopode: a Radical Journal of Geography titled: “Competition and Conflict over Land Use Change in the Inner-City: Institution versus Community.” Larry wound up doing his Master’s thesis on a geographical analysis of life and health in Detroit and Dick’s was on how Wayne State had been abusing the residents of the Cass-Trumbull Community for decades. So, I think the intellectual investment in that one summer field course was well worth it.

Later, Larry and I edited a book on the urban geography of black America that was published by Doubleday Press. We wanted the cover to be a photo of Moms Mabley pointing to a globe with that goofy expression on her face but it didn’t fly with Doubleday. They were too tight-assed. Well, maybe Moms, a well-known standup black comedian and vaudevillian from the Chitlin Circuit, would have been a stretch for our audience of middle-class geographers. Ha ha.

As an aside, several years later when I was attending a conference of geographers in nearby Windsor, Ontario, my old friend Gerry Romsa from grad school days at the University of Florida and then a geography professor at the University of Windsor warned me to stay as far away as possible from his colleague, Professor Jack R., because if I didn’t he would kick my ass. When, in astonishment, I asked him why he told me that Jack’s daughter had been living at the Cass commune with Kae Halonen and Sam Stark and because she had spoken of me to her father in glowing terms he had assumed I had been fucking her brains out on a regular basis, it being a hippy commune and all and us living and cavorting there together, so to speak.

Jesus, I had hardly spoken to the girl that summer. Seriously. Much less did the deed with her. The longest contact I had had with her was chatting in the commune kitchen one Saturday afternoon when I was making marijuana-laced brownies for the residents. (Author’s Note: They supplied the goodies; I supplied the brownie mix and chocolate chips I had “liberated” from a local supermarket.) Nevertheless, I stayed away from the angry father and his righteous middle-class values. It was the early 1970s and young people were fucking anyone who looked the slightest bit interested. I missed out, no doubt.

On States’ Rights and Practical Reality

          As an urban planner, I've always held the position that if a planning report sits on a shelf it’s a failure. For me, a plan is a working document that earns its way through practical action. Implementation is the only game in town as far as planning is concerned. Plans that result in real world improvements are what make a city work, not pretty maps or colorful graphic images. All my professional life I've had an implementation-orientation rather than being influenced by soaring academic daydreams that look great on a paper but don’t work in real life, like the miserable failures that are Chandigarh, Ciudad Guayana, and Brasília, all of which were designed by world famous planners and architects.

          That background has led me to look at states’ rights from the view point of practical reality, which for me is actual, on the ground consequences. That means I’m interested in finding a topic that is a real world, multi-decade example of state stewardship of public health, education, and welfare. The topic I’ve identified is of concern to all fifty states and their citizens: public education.

          Although the enforcement of federal educational statutes may impose financial burdens on states, such as the Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), No Child Left Behind Act, the Equal Education Opportunities Act and others, all states (with the exception of wacko California) fund and manage education locally through property taxes and school districts. Despite the vociferous criticisms of conservatives that have been leveled at the U.S. Department of Education, we do not have a nationally controlled education system. As of 2011, a little over seven percent of all funds generated for public education in the U.S. come from the U.S. Department of Education and not quite three percent more from other federal agencies. So, approximately 90 percent of all educational funding comes from state and local sources.

          Many conservatives claim that empowering state and local government leaders to solve their own problems often leads to better policies and operations. States’ rights. They believe locally elected leaders are closer to the people affected by their decisions and are much more likely to understand the nuances of their community's particular challenges and to respond appropriately in addressing their needs. As South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint’s web site puts it, “Local solutions are needed for local shortcomings, and when Washington recognizes that local communities, parents, and schools know what’s best for their children we will finally be on the trajectory for national success in education.” I’m scratching my head here because, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t every school district in the country locally controlled and has been that way forever?

          So, exactly how well have states done with their public education responsibilities? Although many conservatives would rather deal with truthy factoids that mirror their ideological mindset, let’s take a look at some recent, objective metrics gathered by people outside the U.S. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the OECD is a forum of developed countries committed to democracy and the market economy) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science, and a way below-average 25th for mathematics. Now there’s a wonderful performance we should all be proud of, especially the people advocating states’ rights.

          But, to demonstrate the latest results weren’t a fluke, let’s look at the 2003 PISA Report. I won’t bore you with all the pithy details but below I’ve provided four tables from that Report comparing the U.S. to Germany, France, Sweden, Australia, and Canada in mathematics, science, problem solving, and reading. The column of numbers indicates each nation’s mean score; the country at the top of the column has the lowest score. Australia is highlighted because it too is a nation of relatively recent immigrants, as is Canada. Note that with the exception of reading, the U.S. places last and below average. And in reading we occupied second last place and were only a point above average, so we didn’t cover ourselves in glory in that category either. Another stellar educational performance.

           

Mathematics 2003

United States	482.89
OECD Average	500.00
Germany	502.99
Sweden	509.05
France	510.80
Australia	524.27
Canada	532.49

Science 2003

United States	491.26
OECD Average	499.61
Germany	502.34
Sweden	506.12
France	511.23
Canada	518.75
Australia	525.05

Problem Solving

United States	477.34
OECD Average	499.99
Sweden	508.57
Germany	513.43
France	519.16
Canada	529.32
Australia	529.85

Reading 2003

Germany	491.36
OECD Average	494.20
United States	495.18
France	496.19
Sweden	514.27
Australia	525.43
Canada	527.91

          Alert readers may have noted the scores of Australia and Canada in the tables with respect to those of the U.S. As an aside, in both of those countries, Germany, and Sweden the public educational system is controlled by provinces/states and local school districts, much like ours; only the French system is nationally-controlled.

          What real world conclusions can be drawn from the above information? First, the collective fifty states have an execrable record of guiding public education. Political ideology is not part of that criticism since state governments have been and will continue to be controlled by either party, a situation that switches regularly almost every four years. In practical terms, the states have abjectly failed their citizens in ways that adversely affect the present and the future. What we see is a horrific and willful state government failure to protect their citizens from harm, in this case economic harm since a piss poor education can affect your entire life as well as your earnings potential and your ability to be prepared to compete on every stage imaginable: local, regional, national, and international.

          Second, the states’ intentional failures to improve public education prove it ranks far down the totem pole of importance, not in terms of funding but in oversight and leadership. The only rational conclusion is that states as a whole care little about advancing public education. Just look at the glaring inequities over the way states fund public education: property taxes. If you live in an affluent area the public schools are typically well funded and the teachers well paid. If you live in a poor, inner-city neighborhood or a rural area, chances are your school is not well funded or equipped and your teachers make a lot less than their counterparts in the affluent school districts. That’s the result of intentional state policies and regulations.

          The exercise of states’ rights in public education in practical reality for those on the receiving end means it is state policy for them to be uneducated and stupid. If you do not believe that statement, please refer to the above PISA scores, where the U.S. places below average in the far greater majority of the measures. And why should we be surprised at that real world result? States have every right to neglect public education and ignore the welfare of their citizens and have done exactly that for many decades, until our students are testing dumb and dumber with respect to their peers in other countries. Just like it was every states’ right to treat black Americans like shit and all too many Southern and border states did so for decades until federal civil and voting rights and inter-state commerce acts were passed and things finally started to change.

          If we elect people who support Tea Party solutions we are headed back in time to those wonderful days when states got to enforce or not enforce laws as they wished, including anti-pollution, food and drug quality, civil rights, voting rights, as well as set public education standards. We’ll be back to the glory days of the 1880s and 1890s when separate but unequal was federal and state law. That’s the practical reality of states’ rights. If that is what you want, vote for Tea Party candidates, because once they are in power, that’s exactly what we’ll get. If you do not believe that statement, how do you explain what is happening in Congress with the earlier and continuing fiscal crisis?

Dissertation Struggles: University of Florida 04

It took over a year of hard work to establish rapport with several of the elected officials in Kinloch, the all-black St. Louis suburb where I would do the dissertation research. It was a long year before they reached the point of maybe begining to trust that I wasn’t out to screw them and walk away. Part of that trust was gained when I turned over to the Mayor a check for $2,000 I had received for participating in a conference on all-black cities and towns in the U.S. To my delight, that money was put to good use in a Head Start program that had not been able to purchase much needed supplies for the kids. My wife thought I was stark raving mad but it worked perfectly in terms of the Kinloch officials changing their minds about me being just another whitebread, imperialist muthafuck. In mid-May 1971 I was able to hire a local community-based group to administer a questionnaire to a random sample of Kinloch households. By the end of that summer I finally had sufficient data to run various computer analyses.

But that’s about the time I had second and third thoughts about the topic I had selected. The research hadn’t been going well in many ways. I came to realize I had made a major mistake in terms of selecting the right topic and also in doing research that may not advance knowledge in a significant way. I spoke with Big Jim about my concerns on numerous occasions. He was always upbeat and pointed out that no one had taken the approach I was investigating so my point about not advancing knowledge was off the mark. The proof of the pudding is in the taste, he would say. His advice was to start filling out the detailed outline the committee had approved by writing the first three or four chapters and see what the committee thought of the direction the research was taking.

Recognizing good advice when I heard it, I buckled down, encouraged by an increasingly desperate wife who had been agonizing over me wasting all those years of grad school by not finishing the dissertation. After six months analysis and hard work I had, by my initial estimate, nearly half the outline fleshed out and submitted the completed chapters to Anderson and the committee.

That’s when the shit hit the fan. Professor Niddrie took a meat cleaver to the chapters. His criticism was absolutely brutal. The way I attempted to operationalize the problem was woefully deficient. My organization stunk to high heaven. The writing was sophomoric. I ignored the journey-to-work problem. The topic wasn’t even good enough for a college-level term paper. In fact, I ignored everything that was right about urban social geography. The only possible thing I could do was abandon the project and start over by selecting an appropriate topic. My stomach dropped to my toes. His brutal criticism was much, much worse than I had anticipated.

When I called Anderson in a near panic he tried to reassure me that Niddrie was taking his anger at him out on me. Apparently, more than a year previously Anderson and Niddrie had several near shouting matches in departmental meetings over when and how to apply the new grad school regulations the Dean had approved and for which Niddrie had been one of the driving forces. Niddrie wanted to apply the new regs to all existing as well as incoming grad students. Anderson staunchly opposed that action because existing students were locked into the previous regs and couldn’t be forced to change their educational programs. The discussion was hot and heavy but Anderson prevailed, partly because the University Attorney issued an opinion that supported Anderson one hundred percent. But Niddrie was royally pissed off at Anderson. And now he had me in his sights.

Anderson advised me to complete the dissertation as soon as possible and submit it to the committee. He thought he had the necessary votes to override Niddrie’s objections. But, he warned me, the work had to be of very high quality. With every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. Or he wouldn’t even be able to present it to the committee as being ready for defense.

Man, that was a terrible time because it came only a few months after Karin’s surgery and brush with death. My mental state was fragile and my powers of concentration were far less than adequate. But push ahead I did.

It took another four months to finish the outstanding chapters and another month and a half to polish and re-polish the whole thing. I held my breath and put the package in the mail.

Two weeks later I received another hyper-critical letter from my nemesis. Although the dissertation was improved, Niddrie wrote, it still failed to meet his standards or those of the University. As things stood, he could not vote in favor of advancing the dissertation to defense. I felt utterly nauseated.

That same day I also received a letter from Joe Vandiver, the sociology professor who had agreed to serve as my minor representative on the committee. I had taken two or three courses from him and we had developed a very good professional relationship that verged on friendship. Vandiver apologized but was forced to withdraw from the committee because he was taking a sabbatical and would be out of the country for the next two semesters. One of his colleagues who I had taken coursework from in demography had volunteered to take his place on the committee. When I read the name my heart nearly stopped. It was one of Niddrie’s good friends; I knew they would vote together against Anderson and me. I felt like yesterday’s garbage.

When I talked to Anderson later that evening even he was pessimistic. He wasn’t sure how I could get around Niddrie’s criticism. Worse, he was getting closer to moving to the USGS and that process was taking so much time that he might be forced to withdraw as my committee chair. My stomach turned over and over until I thought I’d vomit all over our kitchen floor. It looked and felt like the absolute end of the road.

That night was a taste of hell. I tossed and turned for hours and hours, agonizing over what could be done in a ver short time. What approach could I take that I hadn’t thought of? What techniques could I use that were appropriate to the topic? What would change Niddrie’s mind? What could I do to make the dissertation acceptable? What, what, what.

But the next morning I got up with a fierce determination and renewed spirit. Suddenly, during what I thought was a sleepless night I had discovered what must be done and, far more importantly, exactly how to do it. No more uncertainty, no more indecision, no more looking over my shoulder for the boogeyman. I knew what was needed to tie the dissertation together and get Niddrie off my back for once and all.

For the next fourteen days and nights I worked like a man possessed. I outlined, wrote drafts, tore those pages up, and re-wrote more polished material. San typed as I wrote. I would proof-read her pages, correct them, and she would re-type as I wrote new text. I searched for and found several old notebooks from previous grad courses, mining them for ways to use analytical techniques that fit what I wanted to do, and studied the early results with a vengeance, pulling one all-nighter after another, changing, improving, refining until it was what I wanted, what I desperately needed. I was consumed with the job of crafting the right approach, one Niddrie couldn’t possibly reject. I was fiercely determined not to fail. An indication of my mental and physical state can be summed up in one simple statement: I was living on Tums to calm my constantly upset stomach.

On the morning of the sixteenth day I drove to the post office and mailed the new chapter to Anderson. Twenty-eight pages of fresh material. Twenty-eight pages of an approach he had never seen and had never anticipated. Twenty-eight pages I had never discussed with him. And waited and waited. Holding my breath. Biting my fingernails to the quick. Sleeping fitfully at best. Able to think of nothing else.

Four days after I had mailed the new chapter Anderson called. I had thought I would instantly know from his tone of voice his reaction to the new chapter but was wrong. He simply sounded like the same old calm and steady Big Jim.

“When did you write this chapter,” he asked casually.

"In the last two weeks," I told him.

He couldn’t believe I had written that much complex material in such a short time. Finally, he said the words I had been desperate to hear.

“Well, the new chapter is very good.” He thought it was close to perfect. He couldn’t see how Niddrie could object because the new material connected all the dots.

“It’s a great solution,” he said with relief and something approaching admiration. “There’s no way Niddrie can object to the dissertation being ready for defense. And no way could he vote the dissertation down. Now that I’ve read the material,” he said, “it seems so logical that I wonder why you didn’t think of that approach before.”

I almost howled from the shear hysteria that gripped me. Why had I not thought of that approach indeed?

When we disconnected I nearly wept hot tears of relief.

What I had done was to switch gears and use multivariate analysis to relate Kinloch to the universe of all-black cities in the U. S. and then to the other black communities in the St. Louis Metropolitan area, determining how it fit or didn’t fit in terms of defining socioeconomic characteristics. Statistical analysis was the coming thing in the social sciences and Anderson thought I hit that nail on the head. He was very upbeat and I was as well. I knew from experience the sociology guy wasn’t likely to object to my approach since we had had that conversation about the use of statistics in social science in one of the courses I took from him about three years previously. I also knew the Niddrie wouldn’t want to pose objections in the defense that could be shown as spurious or ad hominem attacks and would most likely back down from his trenchant opposition. I also knew Niddrie was not a statistics guy and may not have understood the techniques I had used and would be unwilling to expose his ignorance to his colleagues.

As soon as I inserted the new chapters into the body of the dissertation and sent the revised copy to Big Jim, Anderson asked Dr. Shannon McCune, the new Geography Department Chairman, to play an active role on my committee. [Author’s Note: McCune was a VERY BIG GUN nationally. Previously, he had served as the Director of the famous American Geographical Society, president of the University of Vermont, provost of the University of Massachusetts--Amherst, the first civil administrator of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, serving from 1962 to 1964, was an expert on the geography of the Far East, and widely published in all the right journals.] Then, before McCune could demure, Anderson promptly sent him a copy of the newly revised dissertation. McCune reviewed it, sent me a short letter requesting a number of fairly minor and easy to make changes, and complimented me on the excellent job I had done using statistical measures as an integral part of the research. Anderson certainly knew how to play big league politics. He had outfoxed Niddrie by getting McCune on my side and everyone on the committee knew it. Niddrie, a political animal if ever there was one, would be extraordinarily reluctant to oppose the new Chairman publicly, even if it was only for a dissertation defense.

Anderson certainly knew how to play politics in the big league. He had outfoxed Niddrie by getting McCune on my side and everyone on the committee knew it. Niddrie, a political animal if ever there was one, would be extraordinarily reluctant to oppose the new Chairman publicly, especially if it was for something as trivial as a dissertation defense.

After reviewing the revised copy Anderson gave him, Niddrie sent me a letter with his grudging admission that the new material had changed the dissertation for the better. He would no longer oppose the dissertation or the defense, even though he thought I had wasted an opportunity to do better work on another topic. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief and finally stopped shaking inside.

The dissertation defense was on April 20, 1973. Good Friday, no less. To my surprise and immense relief, Niddrie never showed up for the defense, though later that afternoon he signed the approval form as a member of my committee. The Sociology Department guy was there and said very little of substance but voted to approve the defense. Clark Cross, from whom I had taken two courses in photogrammetry and satellite imagery and was not among my favorite profs, was also at the defense, even though he wasn’t officially on my committee. He threw a few softball questions designed for me to hit out of the ballpark, which I did. And for that I was extraordinarily grateful because I knew from Anderson that Cross was furious with Niddrie for trying to screw me because of his disagreement with Big Jim. Anderson, who never had to resign from the committee as he said he might, carefully led me through the defense, making sure I nailed all the highlights.

I was then asked to leave the room while the committee discussed the defense. Although I knew I had done well, tension still had me by the throat. Things could still turn to shit. After all, my life, as I then imagined it, was on the line. After an interminably long fifteen minutes, Prof. McCune called me back into the examining room. He announced to me and the committee I had passed, shook my hand, and informed me I had done a fine job, which is what he almost certainly told everyone who not performed abysmally and had failed. And so I earned the PhD the year I turned 30, though I didn’t formally graduate until later in the summer of 1973.

Several months later, Big Jim told me that he knew McCune had previously been Provost of the University of Massachusetts and also served as Governor-General of the Ryukyu Islands, a high level U.S. Department of State diplomatic post. He thought all that experience dealing with controversial and sensitive intellectual and political issues would ensure McCune would be fair and objective about my dissertation and would be an effective counter-weight to Niddrie’s one-sided negativism. He also told me he mentioned to McCune in passing the previous difficulties he had had with Niddrie and immediately realized from McCune’s reaction that he was well aware of what had transpired and was not happy about the way Niddrie had conducted himself.

After considerable reflection over many months, I came to realize I disagreed with McCune about doing a fine job. Both Niddrie and Anderson had been closer to the truth. Anderson was right because I did shed new light on an existing problem, though it was more from a flashlight than a spotlight. Niddrie was right because I should never have selected that topic in the first place, mostly for reasons he never tumbled to: I was white and my research had every appearance of using the problem (an all-black city isolated from surrounding white suburbs) for my own benefit. Academic imperialism at its finest. Which, of course, is exactly what I had done since I got a PhD out of the deal and Kinloch got jack shit (not counting the $2,000 the Head Start program received or the funds for conducting the survey). As Niddrie had perceptively noted, I had wasted my time in certain significant ways.

But it wasn’t the fatal blow to my career as he had grimly prophesied. Actually, I had learned a great deal more from working on that topic than I realized at the time. It taught me about land use competition and conflict, especially between groups of different status in terms of socioeconomic characteristics and power, a topic I soon would explore with grad students at EMU in several papers published in professional journals.

So, after all was said and done, the dissertation was a mixed bag that leaned more to the positive side than Niddrie would ever give me credit for. In the final analysis, I believe he was very disappointed I didn’t fail, which was a terrible thing to say about someone whose vocation in life was to educate. But the experience taught me that even your most trenchant critics have truth to tell you if you are open to listening and learning. No matter how painful that experience may be.