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- Dr. James Barnard
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. James Barnard
Today is November 30th, 2005. I am Lou Bowers, and today I will be interviewing Dr. James Barnard, who is a retired faculty member from the College of Education.
LB: Thank you for coming in today.
JB: When you asked me to do it, I thought, I really want to do this. That’s good.
LB: Why don’t we start with your life, personal and professional? Before you heard about USF, what were you doing? Where were you?
JB: Well I’ve moved around the nation. As a matter of fact, I was born in New York City, in Manhattan, right in the middle of the Manhattan. I lived and worked in various places including University of Vermont in Burlington and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Then I went to Nashville and worked at George Peabody College (GPC) for a number of years. It was a very interesting place. Nashville in those days was very much a contradiction, and although it has changed, it was at that time very much racist city. I did work primarily in the area of child development and mental retardation. That really had been my major interest. I got my degree at Yale University in clinical psychology and for a while I was going to be in private practice. I actually worked in a private office and had people come in for 50 minute sessions. I tried it a little bit and I thought, “This is silly because after all this is very contrived.” People don’t lie on a couch and talk to you usually, so I gave that up. I went to George Peabody College and worked there in their Department of Special Education, and I learned an awful lot. I became very interested in mental retardation. As a matter of fact that really has been my major field every since. They had a very strong special education department, and I got involved in the institutional life of people who were labeled mentally retarded and who were significantly retarded. People felt that these people couldn’t be on their own. They have to be some place, so the best we could think of in those days was to put them all in a big institution and keep them there. I spent a lot of time there, seeing what it was like and taking to people and trying to help people.
LB: How is it that you came to hear about USF and what attracted you to USF?
JB: Well, I was at GPC and I was ready for a move. At a conference, as it happens many times, I met Marvin Gold who was a hot shot in special education. He said, “Would you be interested in coming to USF?” He said, “We have an opening for somebody in a research institute at USF?” I said, “That sounds interesting.” He said, “Well come down to Tampa for an interview.”
LB: He was at USF?
JB: Yes, he was at USF. And so I came down. He showed me what there was of USF. I think it was in early 1968 and there wasn’t very much. But the neat thing was that I could see that I would be able to do the things I wanted to do. GPC was wonderful, but they had a way of doing things within the bureaucracy. At that time, believe it or not, USF did not have a great bureaucracy so you could pretty much do your own thing. So that’s really why I came here. I was going to be able to work in this research institute which was focused on problems in special education, and I thought this is great and I could teach a course or two now and then. So it was perfect.
LB: So you were involved basically in the beginning of special education as we know it today in this country, with your psychology background and experiences in institutions for the mentally retarded.
JB: Right, yes. I certainly was there near the beginning, but it was remarkable how many things already had been on-going. The field itself had already established procedures and processes and had a lot of bad ideas about what mentally retarded people should do or could do or couldn’t do. So the position was great and it was flexible. The USF Special Education Department was already in existence, but small. Again, there was this feeling that you could do pretty much anything you wanted to do. There was this tremendous hierarchy of what special education should be in some other more established programs, but not at USF. Marvin Gold was a great guy. He only stayed a year. I think the first faculty meeting he called was to announce that he was leaving.
LB: You said, “Marvin how you could do this?”
JB: There were three of us that had been newly hired at the institute. We had our way, we really did. It was wonderful. We held a conference that first year. We had people come from all over the country talking about various aspects of special education. They were not necessarily special educators. They were people in psychology and in social work, but sort of cutting edge people.
LB: Now, in doing my initial research, I found several institutes, projects and so forth, some with your name associated with them. Perhaps you could enlighten me about them. What was the Southeast Materials Center? What was the purpose of that center?