Mahon: Alright, that one is on, so is that one. Okay.
Today is Thursday, June 20, 2019. My name is Leeah Mahon,
Graduate Intern on this oral history project and Master’s student in the Public History Program at Indiana University/Purdue University
Indianapolis, IUPUI.
Today I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Richard Turner in a conference room in the IUPUI Ruth Lilly Special Archives.
This interview is sponsored and funded by the Administration of IUPUI.
Note: While the audio states that the interview was co-sponsored by the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, that is not the case.
This is the second recording session with Dr. Turner.
There is a biographical sketch of Dr. Turner at the start of the first recording session. And, just like last time, before we begin the interview, I’m going to ask you for your permission to do the same things that you agreed to do in writing, in case the paperwork gets lost.
So, I’m asking for your permission to do the following: record the interview; prepare a verbatim transcript of the interview; deposit the interview and the verbatim transcript with the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and with the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, as well as the Directors of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and the Tobias Center may make the interview and transcript available to their patrons, which may include posting all or part of the audio recording and the transcription to their respective websites.
Do I have your permission to do these things?
Turner: Yes, you do.
Mahon: Alrighty. So, let’s get started. Last time we left off, we were talking about your teaching career, and I’m just going to wrap that up now. I mean, we’re going to talk about it throughout the interview, but just specific questions about it. So, from 1970, when you started at IUPUI, you taught a wide array of English classes spanning from introductory to graduate classes. You also taught a few classes within the School of Philanthropy. In 2009, you became Professor Emeritus of English and Philanthropic Studies and, I just want to know, did you have a favorite course that you taught throughout all of the years?
Turner: Oh, probably my favorite course was Introduction to Poetry. It allowed me to do a lot of the things that I’d like to do in class. Poetry is a genre that on the one hand is, in some ways, inaccessible to students. On the
other hand, it’s much more manageable because the texts are, from beginning to end, usually right in front of you. So, it enables students, at least, to keep the whole work in front of them, which is, it seems in novels in some place, it’s not as easy.
Mahon: Did you have a favorite poem or set of poems that you taught?
Turner: Oh, yeah. Actually, there’s lots of different poems and lots of different things, but one of my favorite poems that I did use a number of times is – but usually as an exemplar because it’s kind of, it does have a lot of barriers for people to get into – is Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead.
In some ways, it was always interesting to me because I had worked on it in a poetry class I took in college and enjoyed that. I’d done – in graduate school, I’d done an extended study of Robert Lowell for a 20th Century American Literature seminar. And, one of the central images of the poem is the steam shovels – this was a long time ago – steam shovels digging up the Boston Common to put in a parking garage, and Lowell uses that in a number of different ways. And, as a kid, I
remember that. I remember that being done, the construction, and both the actual physical construction, but also all the controversy
surrounding it. People didn’t want it to happen because they thought it would break up the integrity of the Boston Common, but also, there was, as usual in Massachusetts public ventures, there was a lot of corruption surrounding it. So, it was something I remember, and there it is as an important central image in the poem, and so I used it a number of times. I used to have a thing I did with students, where I’d have them map their own background along a grid, and then map what they knew of the background of the writer. And, get them to look at the interaction of their background and the text, their background and the author, and their background with general principles of meaning. So, it’s a kind of nine-square grid that they would fill out. And the example I used to use was the Robert Lowell thing probably because, for me, it did have close personal connections, as well as broad historical and cultural things.
Mahon: Okay. So, in 1986, you were asked to be the Chair of the English Department. You remained the Chair until 1998. Prior to this, you mentioned there was a lot of hostility within the department when you became Chair. So, what kind of hostility are you talking about?
Turner: Well, let me back off the hostility. When I first arrived in the ‘70s, there was a lot of hostility…
Mahon: Okay, so before you became Chair.
Turner: ...Yeah, and there was. The hostility came from two separate
departments being jammed together, also hostility from some distinctly older faculty members and newer, younger people coming in. And,
then the tension between new ways of doing things and the old ways of doing things that isn’t exactly the same as the old versus young.
Anyway, that was hostility. By the time we got to the ‘80s, much of that had worked itself out as hostility; but what we had was a department that people had pretty much decided to leave well enough alone and go their own way. And, what I was dissatisfied with wasn’t so much
hostility, but the lack of community. So, in the early ‘80s, some people in the department were doing good work, but they were all doing it by themselves, off by themselves, and there wasn’t much conversation, there wasn’t much. So, when I got the chance to be Chair, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to build a department that had a sense of community. Not necessarily social stuff, but we had to get along, but that we were all in conversation about this discipline that we had all been trained in and were purporting to teach to other people. So, that was my, that was my interest in becoming Chair.
Mahon: So, what did you do to help foster that community or help build that community?
Turner: I had a couple of things I did. One was, as I think I mentioned last time, I restructured how we would do our business so that the person who was in the Director of Composition, who was moving things away from community, would not have a role. The other thing I did was to – the new way we did business was through committees, and so I would, people who would be in charge of, have oversight or responsibility for the distinct courses – not official titles – but they were responsible, you know, for getting them on the books; seeing that the curriculum was up- to-date; making sure that the people who were teaching it were in conversation with each other about. But, those people then would be a committee that would decide things about what we need next semester and the semester after. So, instead of one person doing it in the office, it was, as much as possible, things were done by committee. I did as much of that as possible so that people would come together to talk about things. In the department at that time, we had five people who were non-tenure track teacher positions, which are fairly common now, but it was pretty much brand new then. And so, I wanted the people in the department who had different appointments and who had different subject matters – creative writing, literature, writing linguistics – to, at some point, be in conversation, not just sit at a department meeting, but to have some business that they had to get done together. We also looked, we had committees that were meant to try to rethink major requirements, rethink what our hiring priorities would be, so that they would have an ongoing conversation about how that would work. And, again, those conversations were among people who, just in terms of their teaching assignments and their research, might not be talking to each other. So, I was doing that. The other thing I did was when I, as I had mentioned a couple of times, there were a number of people in the
department who were pretty old or pretty far along in their careers when I got there. Well, some of these people, by the mid-‘80s, were starting to retire, and so it was a good opportunity to build the department in a way I wanted it to go because I was going to get a lot of hires. So, what I did was to make a decision that everybody we hired would have a foot in at least two camps in the department, so that somebody who taught writing also had been trained in or had a research interest in linguistics or literature or in creative writing, so that just about everybody, even if most of the work they did in the department was in literature, say, they also had an interest in and an ongoing work in writing or linguistics, whatever their other one was. That kept the department together in terms of everybody had some connection with something else. So, it became the pattern for people to be in, not only know the work of, but have investment in other people in the department. And, that was part of building the community in the department.
Mahon: Okay. So, what would you say is the thing that you are most proud of that you accomplished as Chair?
Turner: I think it was that sense of community. I had some other things I did, but some of them nobody else, in the long run, wanted to do it. As soon as I was out of there, those things were out of there. So, but in terms of the community thing, I think that did work and it still is a characteristic of the department.
Mahon: Okay. So, I’m going to switch gears now and talk a little bit about philanthropy and faculty development in your career, and as well as how those two relate to one another. So, my first question is: What got you interested in faculty governance?
Turner: Oh, I was interested in that – in graduate school, one of the, you know, as I mentioned before, it’s a small department and we all kind of knew each other. One of the faculty members was – and I’ve come to see that there’s usually one or two of these kind of faculty members on any faculty, very suspicious of how the administration was working, of top down direction, but also really smart and clever about how to work inside faculty governance and work with or against university
administrations. He was kind of, he was a very smart guy and he was very interesting, and so I got interested in faculty governance and faculty work, faculty life while I was in graduate school. Then, when I came here, as I’ve mentioned, it was all brand new. So, people were working on this stuff night and day trying to figure out how we’re going to do this, and I was involved in that from the beginning because I was already interested. And, I was in a department that was kind of – there was not much that was traditional or standard about it, so that was always interesting about how we’re going to get this done. So, faculty governance, it seemed to me, while in some ways it’s really very
tiresome. I mean, I think for faculty whose reason we come here, the reason, the thing that gets us excited is new ideas and getting things done and moving ahead with a project, and faculty governance just always seems to be slow and ponderous and, in some cases, pointless.
But, that, I always thought – I wouldn’t disagree with anybody who said that – it’s just that, it’s just because the University does its business differently, so we have to, we just have to put up with that.
Mahon: So, then, what first got you interested in faculty work as philanthropy?
Turner: Oh, that. Well, that was, I think, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift because I published that article that said “Faculty Work as Philanthropy” in 2015.
But, the little piece I wrote about Hyde’s The Gift, was basically saying that this would be a good thing for English professors to read because they’re not, they don’t get paid much; they don’t get any respect, you know, but they do all this work and that, so that would make them feel better. So, I wasn’t quite, at that point, saying that it was philanthropy, but that it’s close. And so, from the time I wrote that until I published the “Faculty Work as Philanthropy,” I’d been part of the conversations of philanthropy and philanthropic studies as an emerging discipline. First with Bob Payton, and then as part of the faculty governance and philanthropic studies, as it sort of figured out how it was going to work when, before it was the School of Philanthropy and it was just the Center of Philanthropy because that’s kind anomalous. Anyway, it’s not an organization that’s academic in its structure in the ways that most schools and departments and colleges are. So, again, these were interesting problems to try to think about: how we’re going to have a discipline where we don’t even know yet what the field is, so we’re talking about the field and so doing the two things at once. So, we talked about being an emerging discipline for the first 10, 15 years, and I think it’s now, it’s probably safe to say that – actually, I am not sure; I don’t know if they’re using that term now for what they do. So, it was an interesting problem and I’d been interested in interdisciplinary things for most of my career, and so this was always an interesting question.
Mahon: Right. So, as you mentioned, and you told me in the pre-interview as well, the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde that I have in front of us, had a big impact on your thinking about faculty work. I ended up reading a little bit of the book. In the introduction of the book, Hyde states that, and I quote, “A gift cannot be given away – A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation. If this is the case, gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.” So, then, my question now is: Do you consider faculty work a gift?
Turner: Yeah, and not just faculty work. I also, when I talked about, I would say this applies to other professions as well, all those people who do a job
and go above and beyond. I mean, it’s something that very often gets mentioned when somebody gets an award or some recognition, but so it happens, but not everybody who does that job goes above and beyond. So, yeah, I think that it’s a, the notion of giving is an important one, and I think it’s increasingly important in a world where people are more and more thinking of their relationship with the world as kind of one way; what can the world do for me? And, it’s harder to get people to think about civic duty or common good. There are very immediate reasons for that in the public sphere or in the political sphere, but it’s not just a person who’s creating that, it’s an increasing – and I’m the last person to offer insights into media theory, but, you know, the more somebody sits and looks at a device instead of looking at somebody else, you know, that’s kind of a cheesy thing, but it’s true, some of it’s true.
Mahon: Yeah, it is.
Turner: So, that kind of focus on self, instead of self in relationship to others, is something that The Gift is helpful in articulating why we, what it means when we do something for somebody else. And, especially when we do it in a, what Hyde focuses on, in works of art. When somebody spends night after night working very, very hard on a short story or a poem or a novel or even a piece of craft for somebody else, that they’re going to give to somebody else, this is all – that’s a lot of work. And, in many cases, if you didn’t do it, you know, there’s no consequences for not doing it. So, doing it is something that’s coming from within, there’s a drive there, there’s a conviction that this is a good thing to do and it’s going to make a difference. Now, sometimes that’s also accompanied by: if this works out, I’ll be famous, or if this works out, I’ll be able to charge more for my next piece, but that kind of attended self-interest doesn’t officiate the gift part of it. You know, as Hyde talked about, there’s a turning point where if your sole interest is profit, your sole interest is recognition, then well, okay, that’s not a gift. But, in many, for many people, what they do is over and beyond, and it is a gift. So, that kind of disposition to the world that Hyde helps us to understand, and I think is applicable to lots – he applies it mainly to art – but I think it’s applicable to a much broader context, many other situations. So, I find it to be a really helpful framework for looking at the world.
Mahon: I also noticed that in his explanation of gift giving, he talks about the chain: how one gives the gift and how it is then passed on and how other people receive it and what happens if you stop passing it on. So, how would you say then that chain would work within faculty work when they’re given that gift – how would you explain that?
Turner: Yeah, I think that the – if you listen to faculty when they’re asked, and especially when they’re challenged, you know, so you teach political
science or you teach literature, why is that important? What good does that do? I mean, why should I do that instead of mechanical
engineering? Although it seems to me that mechanical engineering could stand up under the same kind of questioning. So, the faculty generally will say, “Well, the students have learned something,” but that’s kind of a tautology because if you set up a course and have requirements and quizzes, well, you can say that they learned something. But, the something they learned, whether or not it does them good in the longer term, is something that’s very hard to document, but it is the thing that faculty will say, “Yeah, no, it’s true, they just got an A and they left, but you really tell whether or not they learned something because over time…” And, they’ll give you an anecdote about, “I had a professor when I was in college and I hated the course, hated the guy, but then, you know, 10 years later when I was doing this job, boy, what got me through, it was that, it wasn’t either the – what I learned from that person or I learned how to do something and that was the discipline.” So, they have an anecdote like that. So, a lot of people have pretty strong convictions that that’s the way things happen. It’s very hard to document that and it’s very risky to trust somebody’s faith that that’s going to happen; it’s faith. But, that is the dynamic that people expect, and so if they have that conviction that something is going to make a difference, maybe not right away, but in the long run and make a big difference, then when they get the chance to teach or to do something, part of their impulse to do it well or to care about what they’re doing or to think that it’s important, comes from that sense that if I do this well, if I do this important thing, then it will make a difference, that there’s going to be something that will come of that.
And, I may not be able to pick the student exactly, or the students, for whom this is going to be a life-changing moment or when it will, but I’m sure that happens. You can see how that’s a really dicey thing, but it is part of human, a human part of teaching and faculty work that there is that confidence that it does. I’d be happy, I’d be happier if faculty had done a better job of measuring that and put more effort into tracking it down instead of just leaving it to faith. But, that seems to be the context within which people approach their work and I think, as I’ve mentioned, it’s why very often faculty don’t have hobbies and don’t have
boundaries on how much work they do for their students, for their research, for their university. They just don’t usually put boundaries on that.
Mahon: Right. So, as you alluded to a lit bit, you do have multiple publications on faculty work as philanthropy or the two separately. One of them that I ended up reading, “Doing Good and Doing it Well: Faculty Work as Public Good” in the edited volume Faculty Work as Public Good, you argue why and how faculty members make philanthropic contributions to the world through their work. And, now I’m going to quote: “Faculty contribute to the academic life of the institutions in which they work
through service on governance committees, task forces, administrative positions, and other duties necessary to the health and success of the institution. Some of this work is expected, but the flexibility of faculty responsibilities makes it possible for some faculty to contribute more than others.” So, you go further on in depth in the article, but can you explain more on why you’re so passionate about this topic specifically and why you’ve wrote so much on it, written so much on it?
Turner: Well, I think that most of the literature, the faculty development literature, talks about faculty work in sort of instrumental ways, about how, how do we get faculty to do X, Y and Z so that students will learn or the university will be better? And, they have to think about that because the faculty have a great deal of independence once you get tenure. But, even before you get tenure, nobody’s telling you, pretty much, nobody’s telling you what to do your research on and nobody’s telling you exactly how to do your course. So, there’s, even before you get tenure, or once you get tenure, you’ve got a lot of protection and a lot of independence. Even people who don’t have tenure are still protected by the policies that protect tenured faculty, so that they can’t be, usually they can’t be fired arbitrarily or without due notice. So, they’re not as protected as somebody with tenure, but they are
protected. So, with that kind of independence, it’s important that faculty have within themselves the sense of public duty of their roles and responsibilities. This is a hard thing to deal with because, and again, this is part of the independence, their roles and responsibilities aren’t spelled out very clearly. When you get your – there’s almost never a job description for a faculty position. When you’re offered a position, you’re told you’re to teach between two and five courses a year; you’re to pursue a productive research program; you’re to participate in the civic life of the university, but that’s it. Then it says you should be here by August 1st and your Chair will be in touch telling you what course you’re going to teach and when that starts. That’s it. So, they’re left to figure out what their roles and responsibilities are. But, if the university, that is very much a collaborative enterprise when it works well, if it’s going to succeed, then everybody has to have some degree of commitment to making that work. When the university – sort of up to World War II and for a while after that, universities were relatively small and they were very much homogeneous. The GIs coming back in the
‘50s made some difference in that. And, then the admission, the challenge to admissions policies, and the broadening of the university admissions in the ‘60s changed it a lot, but when it was small and homogeneous, you could tell who was doing what, informally, and everybody kind of knew who was making a difference and who didn’t, so if it got bad, you could nudge somebody formally or informally. But, once things got big and complex and diverse, then you don’t have that.
So, what you’ve got is a faculty made up of people who are living the cultural – in the cultural world of those early days when nobody had to
say anything because everybody knew, but now you’re in a much more complex thing where people are different and people don’t know what each other is doing. So, the answer to that is not, well, is not to make new rules for everybody, that’s an impossible task, but to begin the conversation, now you have to say why it is that people – this is what work should be, this is how you should approach your students. You need to get people into that conversation. I like the word conversation for talking about faculty work because it assumes that everybody engaged in this is equal, interested, valued, and that, in a conversation, you don’t have to resolve it one way or another. It’s not about a
gimmick; it’s not a debate; it’s not a discussion even. And so, it’s an ongoing thing that people stay in because they see some value in it.
So, I think that talking about faculty work, in numbers of different ways, but certainly as philanthropy, is something we need to do more of because there isn’t automatically a shared understanding of how things are supposed to work, what we’re supposed to do, and what measures we should use for own behavior, but also for other people. There’s a good book by William Sullivan – let me see, it’s called, I can’t remember the title now – but it’s work and, but he talks about what professionals are supposed to do. And, he says that one of the marks of
professionals is that they generate their own, within a profession, their own code, their own values, their own code of behavior and
performance, and measure that and keep each other in check. So, this is what it seems to me talking about faculty where there’s very little – very few faculty understand themselves as professional teachers. They understand themselves as, when they think of themselves as
professionals, as sociologists, poets, engineers, the discipline that they’ve learned. And so, getting them to be professional about, especially teaching – the amount of time people spend teaching is as much and sometimes more than what they do on research or anything else, and yet, for many people, they don’t think of themselves as professional in that work. So, it seems to me that’s what the writing about it, talking about it, presenting on it, having meetings about it is valuable because there isn’t a common understanding, and without – and I don’t mean that everybody has to do the same thing, but
everybody has to be in a conversation that is operating on some common values and some common vision about what’s supposed to happen. But, that’s why the talk about and writing about faculty work, I think, is important.
Mahon: Okay. I just, I have one more question then about philanthropy. So, when you started teaching here in 1970, correct, there was no, as you mentioned, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy or anything related to that. Can you tell me a little bit about your role in the development of that school?
Turner: Oh, well…
Mahon: I know that you weren’t teaching full-time, but you did have a role in it.
Turner: I had a role in the conversations about philanthropy when they first started in the late ‘80s.
Mahon: In the late ‘80s.
Turner: And, then I had a role in – once I started teaching philanthropy and literature in the – I guess we started that in the mid ‘90s – then I was more or less part of the faculty that was emerging. It was still in the Center in Philanthropy, so it wasn’t a School, but we were starting to have faculty meetings and faculty committees to plan – our first one was the Master’s degree, then plan the Doctoral degree, and then, later, the undergraduate degree. So, we started acting like it. Now, when we started offering courses, we had to have a home and that right away, partly because Bob Payton was really emphatic that philanthropic studies should be a humanities-oriented, liberal arts discipline. So, we were in the School of Liberal Arts. So, it was not the department of philanthropy, but the philanthropy faculty in the Center that would meet.
In fact, somebody from that group would meet with the Chairs of Liberal Arts when they met. So, it was sort of like a department, but not quite, but that was the arrangement that was made between the Center. So, its academic side was the School of Liberal Arts and then the other nonprofit studies, the research into the sector was done in the Center.
The Center raised its own money to fund those research activities. So, I was not much involved in the Center activities, and involved pretty regularly in the faculty meetings about how we’re going to have a curriculum; what do we do about these courses; how are we going to connect with other parts of the University that are offering courses that are somewhat like us, because SPEA offers a lot of courses that are nonprofit management-related things, and that’s an ongoing matter of negotiation. So, by the time we were in the 2000s, we had something like an organization that had a Chair, like a faculty organization that had a Chair, and I did that for four years. For a few years there, I was the Director of Graduate Studies. So, yeah, so that would have been my role. Now, the courses I taught, Philanthropy – actually, the course – Philanthropy and Literature was one that was always an elective. It was not something that ever was a core course. When we started to teach the – when we developed the other graduate curriculum, I taught some of the courses, especially the capstone course, for five or six years, and then some of the introductory or the – I developed another course along the way that was Philanthropy Calling and Community. It was a course meant to get students in philanthropy to think about what do I want to do with – you know, is it a location, is it a job training – but have them think about what do I want, my study and my life, want this stuff to do. So, but those are not, anyway, that became part of the
curriculum or part of the offerings, but that would have been about the kind of involvement I had with the development of that.
Mahon: Okay. Now we’re going to move on and talk about the various
administrative appointments that you held throughout your years here.
So, the first one that actually caught my eye, after looking at your CV that you provided me, was that you were Associate Director from 2000 to 2003, Acting Director from 2003 to 2004, and then Director from 2004 to 2005 of Women’s Studies. So, how did you come into that position?
Turner: Yeah, right, because I wasn’t on the faculty, it’s not in the specialty.
When in, I think it was around 2000, the Dean came to me and said,
“We’re having trouble with Women’s Studies.” Women’s Studies for the previous, I think, two or three years, had had three different Directors and hadn’t worked out ,and the faculty in Women’s Studies weren’t agreeing on a lot of different things, including what Women’s Studies should be – Women’s Studies or Women and Gender Studies or how should – there was a lot of questions and that had not gone well. So, they had one person who was Director one year, another person was Director the next year. The third year, they had three people as a sort of troika that was directing it, and that didn’t work out. So, he said, “I’ve had it with this. I’m going to either close down Women’s Studies or ship it off, see if I can ship it off to another School because we can’t – it’s not working.” He didn’t say this…
Mahon: Who was this Dean?
Turner: I can’t remember his name. Gee, I can’t remember his name.
Mahon: That’s okay. We can look it up later and put it in.
Turner: Well, I’m an old person; it’ll come to me. Whether it comes to me in 15 seconds or 15 minutes, I don’t know. So, he didn’t say anything about, I don’t remember him saying, “I’m not going to give it any more money,”
but that seemed to be understood. But, anyway, he said he’s going to ship it out. So, one of my good friends had been in the department who was no longer here – she had moved to another university – was part of that. And, Women’s Studies was, I thought, a very good thing to have, and I just didn’t want to see it fall apart. So, I said okay, but you can see how I’m not, I’m really not in a position to lead this and they need some leadership. He said, “Well, Obi Nnaemeka has agreed to – she would be part of it and she, because of her research, and she could be the leader, but she doesn’t have much patience with managerial details.
So, if you could be the person who sort of kept the wheels on the rails, got the paperwork in, just keep it running, then that would be a big help.” And so, that’s what we set up. So, for three years Obi was the
Chair and the Director, and I was the Associate Director and that’s the way it worked. And so, I didn’t, I was – they have some prizes that they offer and some scholarships they offer. So, there has to be a
committee. So, I got a lot of help from some of the people in the Women’s Studies faculty who said, “Yeah, yeah, okay, I’ll run the scholarships, I’ll run the prizes.” And, then Karen Kovacik kept doing with the Women’s program in the first week of March. So, there was, people were generally helpful. So, that’s pretty much what I did. It had only a half-time secretary or administrative assistant. There was a small library that had been started, but it was hard to know how to curate it or where to put it. Space is always a problem in Liberal Arts.
So, I wouldn’t say that my time in the Women’s Studies program was a matter of great leadership or even an appointment, but it was
something that I was just holding things together until they could get something. And, then after, then Obi, I think, went on leave. That’s when I was the full-time Director. But, again, I was just working with people. One of the things, one of the parts, one of the things I did do was Jean Bepko and Gail Plater were very determined, very helpful to revive Women’s Studies as a program because of the potential for community outreach. So, they worked on recreating the Board of Advisors for Women’s Studies, and mainly it was women that they knew in the community and agreed to help. So, that was actually, so I got to meet with those people and plan some fundraising and some of the things that, and so that was, that was interesting. It was good work and that was one where I didn’t have to be expert in the discipline to sort of be effective in terms of making something happen. But, that was, yeah, so that was my time with Women’s Studies. It was, I think, Herman is his first name.
Mahon: Okay. Wells?
Turner: No, no. Herman, the other part will come. My wife had died in the fall of ’99, so I think I have, I’m not sure, but Herman may have thought that this would be good for me, to keep me busy, and so it did and so it was good.
Mahon: So, then did you, because I mean, you are a man coming into the position of Women’s Studies directorship; did you face any backlash or issue, or did you have any issues while you were in the position, when you came into the position?
Turner: Oh, because of…
Mahon: Just at all. I mean, for any reason, because you are an outsider coming into this position in a pretty, I mean, it’s a pretty powerful role.
Turner: Well, just being a man wasn’t a problem because there were men who had held positions on the faculty of Women’s Studies, and partly, you know, I was a kind of a known quantity. I’d been around it a long time.
English is a department and a discipline that’s probably primarily women. Interestingly, not exactly, even yet, in the full professor ranks, but anyway, so it was a fairly feminized discipline. So it wasn’t, I think that I wouldn’t – just in terms of who I was, the fact that I was a man, wasn’t going to bother a lot of people. The problem with the Women’s Studies was that they weren’t coming together. So, I wasn’t going to be able to help that without some disciplinary leadership, but I think what finally got it was a few people, Catherine Dobris for one, and a few other people decided that it was time to get this back on track. And, I think that some – this is completely perceptual, I’m not sure about this at all – but a sense that there was, part of the reason it was falling apart was that there was a generational rift between people who had founded it and done a lot of the work to set it up were doing things that people, who would come later, thought maybe should be different. And so, until that, some of those personalities shifted their interests into other things, took other appointments, took a sabbatical that changed the landscape, then people were able to come back together and build the Women’s Studies again.
Mahon: Okay.
Turner: Yeah.
Mahon: So, then moving on past that position, from 2004 to 2005 and 2006 to 2009, you were a Faculty Fellow for Faculty Appointments and
Advancement in the IUPUI Office of Academic Affairs. So, what kinds of things did you do in this position?
Turner: So, in 2000, we had a new person in charge of the Office of Professional Development – actually, it was a new office. Faculty Development here had been going on since the late ‘80s, but it was a part-time thing. Irv Boschmann was doing it and he did some good things, but it was a full-blown Faculty Development Office. And, Plater brought in Nancy Chism from Ohio State in 2000 to set up the Office of Professional Development. It would be Faculty Development, Staff Development, things like the Office of Women; all of this would be in the Office of Professional Development. So, when that was announced, I, well, I approached Nancy Chism to ask, to suggest that I’d like to be in the Office of Professional Development as a Faculty Fellow. And, I proposed that I would look after, or take its projects, Chair
Development, because I’d done some of that earlier. Diversity, getting faculty engaged in Diversity, and, what was the other one, oh yeah, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a thing. So, from 2000 to 2004, I did that in the Office of Professional Development. And, then a
position opened up the next year in Academic Affairs. They had a new Vice Chancellor, a new Executive Chancellor in the Office of Faculty Affairs, and so they decided they wanted some faculty fellow to take care of some of the business over there, and so I applied for that. So, from 2005 to 2009, I was half-time in the Office of Faculty Affairs.
Mahon: Okay.
Turner: Yeah. And so, one thing I wanted to say is one reason I did that, and I think I mention this, was that over my career, I’d seen a lot of senior faculty end their careers on a kind of bitter note.
Mahon: Yeah, you mentioned that in the pre-interview.
Turner: Yeah, and so I looked to, I mean, I still like teaching literature, but I didn’t want to go back to doing just that, being in a department and going, because I didn’t think that, well, for one thing, I didn’t think the department was doing things collaboratively that I would have been interested in…
Mahon: Right.
Turner: … and so, so then this, going first to OPD and then to the Office of Academic Affairs was a way to keep me with new projects to work on, so I wouldn’t end up being bitter and unhappy with my life as the way it ended.
Mahon: So, then, I just want to clarify and make sure that I didn’t miss a position then. So, from 2001 to 2004, you were Director of Administrative and Organizational Development in the IUPUI Office of Professional Development.
Turner: Right.
Mahon: So, is that the one that you were just…
Turner: Yes.
Mahon: … so, that’s the one that you transitioned to from Fellow to…
Turner: No, I started as the Director of the Office of – what was it again…?
Mahon: Professional Development?
Turner: No, no, no.
Mahon: The Director of Administrative and Organizational Development.
Turner: Yes. That’s the subheading in OPD, from 2000 to 2004, and that comprised the Diversity, the (INAUDIBLE), and the Chair Development.
Mahon: I see. Okay, okay, okay. I see.
Turner: And, then from, then in 2005, I started as a Faculty Fellow in the Office of Academic Affairs.
Mahon: Okay, gotcha. So, during all of these administrative appointments, you also continued to teach.
Turner: Yes.
Mahon: So, did you ever have trouble balancing all these different responsibilities, or were you fairly comfortable with it all?
Turner: Well, I mean, everybody in academic communities, just like everybody everyplace else, because of technology, is overwhelmed. I mean, everybody has got not enough time and too much to do. But it was, I had some, I was not unhappy with the way things were going. Some of the stuff, I had, so the new Executive Vice Chancellor was Uday. He came from Buffalo, where he had overseen this very successful poetry contest for high school kids in the surrounding area. It was a recruiting tool, but it was something they got. He thought that was a great idea, and he thought I’d be just the person to make it happen here. It was just that, it’s absolutely, for me, all that managerial detail that makes me crazy, but he didn’t ask me if I was interested; he told me that’s what I was going to do. So, for four years I struggled with this thing trying to get this poetry contest off the ground. You know, it was interesting. We did it for the first couple of years where people, we did it locally and people sent in paper poems, but then that was, you know, there wasn’t quite enough traffic. There were a few schools that sent a lot of them and another bunch of schools that sent a little few of them in, but it really wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. So, then we put it online and, of course, we got thousands of entries and that was okay too. We managed that. But, it was, I think it’s actually still going on. I’ll have to check. So, some of the work was like that. That was not, I wasn’t really good at that and did – you know, sometimes it worked and there were nice moments and there were sometimes we got these really great poems and sometimes we got these really engaging kids coming to pick up their prizes. So, it had some nice moments, but it was not my favorite thing to do.
Mahon: Okay. So, then in 2008, you officially retired from the University, correct?
Turner: Nine, July.
Mahon: 2009 you officially retired. Then in 2014, you returned to IUPUI as a Faculty Fellow in the IUPUI Center for Teaching and Learning. You still hold this position today. So, what made you decide to come back?
Turner: Well, I have to say, in one sense, I never really left because I retired in 2009 and, at that point, I had started the work to develop the
undergraduate major.
Mahon: In what?
Turner: In Philanthropic Studies.
Mahon: Okay.
Turner: They had a Master’s, then they had a PhD, but I think in 2006 or 2007, I started getting the faculty to get serious about doing an undergraduate major. Now, while on the one hand, that would seem like, at first glance, it would seem that that’s the easier part. But, in point of fact, in graduate degrees, you don’t have to work very hard at designing the curriculum because it’s kind of either already set, everybody knows what goes into an MA and…
Mahon: Right.
Turner: … or it’s small enough that you can have a couple of committee
meetings. When you have an undergraduate thing, you’re talking long conversations about what constitutes introductory; what’s the
qualifications; what’s the difference between a 100 and a 200 level class, and it got, and many of the people on the Philanthropic Studies faculty were doing it because they were interested in the subject matter and that works well with graduate. So, they taught graduate courses, but they weren’t very much interested in teaching undergraduate
courses, many of them. And, it’s an interdisciplinary faculty, so it’s hard to keep them corralled anyway. So, this was a four – let’s see, we got it approved, I think, at the end of 2010, so it was about a three- or four- year project, but they asked me to stick around. They couldn’t pay me because of our retirement plan, but they gave me some travel money, and so that was fine, and I was glad to do it. This was right after the economy had collapsed. And so, when I retired, there weren’t many consultations – there aren’t that many consultations for poetry anyway – but they certainly weren’t heft and there weren’t many other positions, full-time or part-time at other universities. So, the thing that some people do is to retire and then go pick up a gig someplace else. There wasn’t much of that. So, I had nothing else to do. This was fine. It was interesting. And, then when it started – so we got it approved in 2010 and then, I think, by 2011 – I think this was right, yes – there was enough students with enough classes to – because we’d been offering
undergraduate classes; we just didn’t have the degree. We had
enough stuff, so we had a graduating class in 2011, and Julie Hatcher, who was the Director of Undergraduate Studies at that point, asked me to teach it with her because I knew more about capstone and about how to get students to do research projects than she did, so we co- taught it. Then the next year, she moved on to something else and they asked Tyrone Freeman to pick it up, and so Tyrone and I co-taught it. We co-taught it for about five years. So, I didn’t, in a sense, I didn’t really, and I wasn’t getting paid for that either.
Mahon: Okay. So that was in 2011 that you co-taught?
Turner: Yeah, 2011, 2012. I think the last time I taught it was 2016.
Mahon: So, you have not left. (laughing) You didn’t really have a five-year break, you were still here, just not officially being paid.
Turner: Yeah, yeah. And, then in late 2013, early 2014, Pratibha Varma- Nelson, in the CTL, approached me about coming to the CTL and working there to provide the kind of faculty perspective on the work they do that they needed. So, that’s how I ended up with that.
Mahon: Okay. So, what kind of things are you doing within the CTL?
Turner: So, I’ve worked extensively with helping faculty create and develop teaching philosophies, with documenting their teaching, learning how to do that. I’m working on the, the specific things I was brought in to help with is the curriculum enhancement grant project. Every year the CTL gives anywhere from, it’s been anywhere from like 18 to 28 or 30 of these grants to faculty that take place over about 18 months, and are meant to enhance student learning, or to do an intervention in a course or curriculum to make things better. So, we issue the call, we get the proposals, we set up review panels to look at it, and we make the award to some, usually 18, 20, 22, and then we sort of shepherd them through that process, more or less. And, in fact, right now what I’m doing is getting the final reports and making sense out of them, giving them the rest – they get half the money up front, half the money when they complete it. And, then keeping track of how this is working and it could work better and so on and so forth. I’ve been involved in other conversations, but those are the main things that I do.
Mahon: So, is there anything that you’ve done in the past five years now, I guess, that you’re particularly proud of within the CTL?
Turner: Oh, a lot of the work in there has been collaborative, so I don’t know that I could take credit for it. The work that we’ve done on teaching philosophies, also in evolving the CEG is something that…
Mahon: What is CEG?
Turner: I’m sorry. That’s the Curriculum Enhancement Grant, yeah.
Mahon: Okay, okay.
Turner: We’ve really moved that program along, partly to respond to changes in faculty life and the way faculty do things. So, that’s been good work.
Mahon: Okay. Well, we are kind of nearing the end of the interview, but I did want to take a moment to recognize a few awards that you’ve received during your time at IUPUI.
So, in 1980, you received the Liberal Arts Outstanding Faculty Award, and in 1995, the IUPUI Experience Excellence Award. I’m going to give a brief description of them each, just so it puts it into context.
So, the Liberal Arts Outstanding Faculty Award is awarded annually to a junior or senior tenure-line faculty, who have distinguished
themselves in teaching, research, and/or service. The Glenn W. Irwin, Jr., M.D., Experience Excellence Award, which is the full name for the Experience Excellence Award, recognizes faculty and staff members for service above and beyond the call of duty. Service for the benefit of the university as a whole or for any of its units, which is non-reimbursed and is not specifically job-related, will be recognized.
So, I’m curious to know now, after understanding your view that faculty work is often synonymous with philanthropic work, how you felt about receiving these awards? Did you feel that you were being honored for something that you just felt was your duty as a faculty member?
Turner: Well, that’s an interesting question because, in some ways, especially in light of what I was saying about everybody needs to have some sense of contributing to the common good and faculty tend not to have boundaries on their work, it would be quite, it would be reasonable to say, well, I don’t deserve this; I’m doing what I think everybody should do. But, I was glad to get the award. I had had, I mean, this was, you know, this was in 1980, I’d been there 10 years, and I had done a lot for faculty governance and in the school, and I’d done a lot of outreach trying to get interdisciplinary projects going, courses and collaborations of sorts. So, it was, I thought, I was glad to get it, and I thought it was, I think it’d only been put into place a couple, three years before, so it was, they didn’t really know what they were doing. But, yeah, no, I was glad to get that. The Experience Excellence Award was, I think – I got that after a couple of years as the Secretary to the Faculty Council, the campus-wide Faculty Council. Before that, I’d been in Budgetary Affairs, I’d done the Campus Promotion and Tenure Committee, so I’d done a lot of service. I don’t know that, I’m not sure I could argue that it
was all that much better than a lot of other people who’d done some good service. But, yeah, you know, I’d done some service. And, generally, whenever I served on one of those things, I tried to make a difference, to do it as well as I could, and not just to phone it in. So, yeah, so I was glad to get that.
Mahon: Yeah, very well-deserved, based on what I’ve learned about you. I was just curious what your thoughts and feelings were about them based on what I learned about your opinions and views.
So, now we are at the end of the interview. I just have a few more questions for you. You became Professor Emeritus of English and Philanthropic Studies in 2009, however I have learned that you have not left fully IUPUI still in 2019. But, do you ever look back on all of the positions that you held and find it hard to believe that you actually did all of that? Because that’s a lot to look back on.
Turner: Yeah. You know, it is interesting because I don’t, I guess I didn’t think of them as positions so much, but really just something I was doing to get to some kind of a goal, some change I wanted to make, and so I didn’t really, I don’t think of myself as somebody who’s had a series of positions so much as somebody who’s had some, actually a lot of really great opportunities to get some things done that I wanted to do. You know, there are other things that I wanted to get done that didn’t get done, but when I look back on it, I don’t, it’s not so much a matter of a series of positions because, at least as I’ve defined it, positions in an academic community are or shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s just that you’re doing that job for this period of time because the community needs it done. So, it’s really not something that you would be especially proud of beyond what the work was. Now, I have to say, that’s at least for the positions I’ve had. Not all Deans, but some Deans, deanship is a position that has come to be a thing, and that’s a constant pressure to do something and to do it right and to do it importantly, and to make everything really some leadership move that has some impact, so for some positions in a university, but at least not the ones I’ve had.
Mahon: So, how do you think, or do you think through all of those different roles you fulfilled that your position as a leader has changed? Do you think that your view on leadership has changed since you started in
academia at all?
Turner: Well, see, if you remember, I started off coming out of the ‘60s, and so leadership was a dirty word, and it certainly has changed from that.
But, I think I still find it important for leaders to be people who are very quick to, not sort of self-deprecate, but at least to not take too seriously their own importance. They should take whatever importance they have, actually have, they should take that appropriately and take that
seriously, but not so much as a thing in itself. So, if a leader, and some really important and powerful leaders do do that; some don’t. At least I’d say there are some people who are quite enamored of themselves and still are good leaders. So, it’s not a sine qua non, but I think it’s, in terms of my view of leadership, I think that somebody who recognizes that if they were to step out of that position, the world wouldn’t end, and somebody else, there’d be somebody who’d be able to do it, maybe not the way they did. So, maybe my position of leadership is – did I tell you about my coach, my basketball coach?
Mahon: You did, yeah.
Turner: About the pail of water?
Mahon: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not.
Turner: So, this is my – so, one day at practice, I think I was a sophomore, and we had – the center of our team then was about 6’3” – this was a long time ago, so 6’3” was tall. He was a wonderful basketball player, great hook shot, a very soft jump shot, he was just lovely to watch, but he was kind of a baby. So, this hurt, that had to be taped, and this wasn’t right; that needed to be a different way. So, one day at practice, Coach Murphy blows the whistle, just one of those whistle blows that you knew something was wrong. Everybody just froze. I was down at the JV team and he was up with the varsity team and he says, “Hart,” he said,
“go down to the locker room and get a pail of water.” No explanation, no nothing. So, he goes down, he comes back up five minutes later with a pail of water. He says, “Okay, now put your finger in the water.”
He does. He said, “Take it out; you see that? That’s the difference it’s going to make around here when you’re gone.” (laughing)
Mahon: Oh, and this was the tall, very good basketball player, okay.
Turner: Yeah, yeah. So, it was a, but that sense of that’s the difference it’s going to make around here when you’re gone, is a very important thing for people to keep in mind because it’s – everybody should try as hard as they can to make a difference, to make things better for themselves and everybody else, but you have to recognize that that’s you and that’s what you’re doing, but that’s not the only thing, and you’re not going to be there forever, and so that’s the difference it’s going to make when you gone.
Mahon: Right. Remain humble. (laughing) Turner: (laughing) At least that humble.
Mahon: Or somebody will humble you. So, looking back now, is there anything that you are particularly proud of, and if so, what is it that you’ve
accomplished throughout your whole career?
Turner: Oh, well, I think in my career, I think it would be, one would be the sense of community in the department. That’s what I set out to do, I was able to do it, and it worked, at least for a while. So, that would be one. The other one was that, what I tried to do for non-traditional students to get them to be engaged and successful in a field that had, as I look back on it, some really very narrow, high-culture habits of going about its work, was, as I look back on it I think important. At the time I was just doing it because I could and I thought it was worth it.
But, the movement now, in the last 10 years in my field, is all –
obviously not just in my field – but is all about moving things toward the experience of the reader. You know, that’s, that’s what I was doing. It’s also working toward a sense of accountability and assessment and, again, that’s what characterized the work I did. So, I’m pretty proud of that.
Mahon: So, this next one is actually my favorite question to ask people. It sometimes stumps them. What do you wish to be known for?
Turner: Oh, well, you know, that’s a question that I use in faculty development, because I try to tell faculty, “Look, you’re going along semester to semester teaching these courses, but you’re just teaching that’s all.
You’re not thinking about them; you’re not putting them in context;
you’re not measuring their impact. And so, you need to really stop and think about, you know, what is it when you retire, what do you want people to say about you?” So known for? I guess I would say I’d like to be known for sort of bringing a positive and supportive attitude towards faculty work, to making it good and productive for everybody, both the faculty and the students. And, that’s been, I think that would
characterize most of what I’ve done, what I’m still doing.
Mahon: Okay. So, I was going to ask what you’ve been doing since you retired from IUPUI, but you are still working. So, other than that, what else are you doing these days?
Turner: Well, I started playing golf in probably 2011. I just joined a senior league. So, that’s been good. I really enjoy that and I’m not – I like golf; I’m not sure how much it likes me. I can’t say that I’m getting very good at it, but I really like doing it, so that. And, it’s also not because of, but coextensive with being retired, I sort of have grandchildren. The grandchildren are fun. Two are here and two are in New York. So, I don’t get to see the ones in New York as often as we’d like, but we see the kids here pretty regularly. So, that’s fun.
Mahon: Yeah, that takes up a lot of time. I’m sure they’re…
Turner: Yeah, well, we kind of have tried to, as much as possible, be helpful to the kids so that we’re not just the people who come – the funny-
smelling people who come and visit occasionally on holidays, but to be part of the, to know them, to be part of what they’re doing. So, the way to do that is to babysit and take them here and take them there and do whatever it is. We show up a lot at school, on Grandparents’ Day and things like that. So, it’s mainly just being there and rather than having special one-on-ones occasionally. So, it’s been good.
Mahon: Okay. So, what do you think is next for you?
Turner: Well, you know, one of the interesting things about getting old is that people my age, we’re not hard-wired at all to think about this because when I grew up, people, pretty much everybody, you know, they worked and they retired at 65 and they puttered around the garage for a couple of years and then poof, then they’re gone, so there’s no 30 years of old age to think about. So, for people like me, what’s next is really hard to imagine, and I don’t mean just that – I mean, there’s a real uncertainty factor in that everything could change, you know, it’s a disease or an attack of some sort. That can change your life very dramatically.
There’s that, but even without that, you know, there’s no, it’s hard to think about what’s going to be next because there’s a lot of things that I can’t do today that I could do five years ago; a whole bunch other ten years ago. So, I really can’t predict what I’m going to be able to do. I got a new bicycle last year and I haven’t used it very much because it’s kind of a lot of work. (laughing) But we don’t know, and so what’s next is, you know, we just got back from Croatia and so that was a lot of fun and the travel wasn’t too onerous. So, there’s more places I’d like to see and, but then, I don’t know. I’m happy doing this work with the CTL, but I don’t know how long that’s going to work. I don’t know if I mentioned why I stopped teaching. Did I tell you that?
Mahon: I don’t think so.
Turner: Oh yeah. So, I stopped teaching because, in 2016, I was teaching a class. It was a great class, great bunch of students, freshman,
Philanthropic Studies class. But, a couple of times I couldn’t remember something that I needed – it wasn’t huge, but I couldn’t remember something and, in another place, I couldn’t remember what was next.
Now, if I am sitting around a table with other 70-year olds, if I can’t remember something or I can’t remember where we’re at, no big deal;
everybody does that. But, when you’re standing up in front of a group, 30, 35, 20-, 21-year olds, if you can’t remember something, that looks to them like you’ve just gone around the bend. And so, you know, if you’re going to ask students to do hard things, and we do ask them to
do hard things, they have to be able to trust and have trust in you. So, I decided I don’t want to do that. I know some people, as they get older and can’t remember things, sort of make that part of the class, “If I can’t remember something, prompt me or something,” but I don’t think that, I don’t think that works. Or, it may work for some, but not for others, and that’s not fair. I could still teach online, asynchronous courses because that’s not an issue. If I can’t remember something, I just wait 15
seconds. So, anyway, yeah, so that’s why. So, I don’t know like with the CTL stuff, it’s still working, we’re developing new ideas and
presenting at conferences, working on articles. So, that stuff is going, but I don’t know. I have no way of knowing that my focus for that kind of work will continue.
Mahon: Are you still publishing?
Turner: Well, I’ve got, I can’t get my colleagues over here to – I’ve been drafting things to get them, but they’re busy with other things, and so yeah, so I’m still drafting things and developing articles and we’re presenting.
I’ve presented in the last couple years at conferences, and everybody agrees that we should turn that into a paper and then when I draft something, it’s hard to get – so, yeah, I am still publishing, or I will be if I can get them…
Mahon: Trying to. So, my last question is, is there anything that I have not asked you which you would like to say before we finish?
Turner: Oh, no. I actually feel like I’ve been having a wonderful time just talking about myself. (laughing) I can’t imagine anything else, so, no, I’m fine.
Mahon: Okay. Well, on behalf of the Administration of IUPUI and the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, I really thank you for sitting down with me for this.
Turner: Well, thanks. I’m glad to do it.
(END OF RECORDING)
