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- Dr. Bill Blank
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Bill Blank
Today is January 12, 2006. I’m Lou Bowers and I’m interviewing Dr. Bill Blank, a faculty member in the Department of Adult Career and Higher Education and a former chairperson of that department. Welcome, Bill. I thank you for coming this morning and sharing with us some of your experiences and memories of the College of Education here at USF over the time you’ve been here as we celebrate our 50th anniversary of the founding of the University. Before we get to USF could you tell us something about your personal and professional career before you came to USF? I’m sure you were doing something prior to arriving here on campus.
BB: Sure. Well, going back to the beginning, I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. I completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Memphis State University which is now the University of Memphis. This was in the mid–‘60s during all the social upheaval of that time and even though my bachelor’s was in engineering technology, I ended up near the end of the degree deciding that I’d go out and become a school teacher and sort of help change a little piece of the world. So I actually began teaching there in the Memphis area, you know without any education preparation whatsoever. Teachers were in dire need there so it was easy to teach without a certificate. So I taught a couple of years there in Memphis and then in the summer after that first teaching job.
Of course, I needed a summer income. So, I relied back on my engineering technology degree and started working for a manufacturing company. I also began teaching at a technical institute in the evening, engineering design technology. I got very interested in the whole technical education field and continued to do that for a couple of years, working at the manufacturing company and teaching at the technical institute in the evening.
After doing that for a few years I decided, boy, this teaching is giving me a lot more satisfaction than the engineering and production aspect. So I decided if I’m going to become a full-time educator that I needed to go ahead and go all the way with it and pursue a doctorate. I looked around at several doctorate programs in the country and found Florida State was a good match and got an offer for an assistantship and went to FSU and did a doctorate in career and technical education and finished that in early ‘76. I then started looking around for employment then USF was one of several hot prospects and I came down and interviewed and have been here ever since.
LB: As I recall you had a specialty in evaluating aptitude in terms of one’s vocational field and so forth. Is that one of your specialties?
BB: A lot of my early work was in setting up performance based or competency based occupationally orientated training programs.
LB: Now, your department has taken on many different names during the years. I found in the directories early catalogs reference to business education, vocational education, and adult and technical, and then those having been merged. When you served as chair what was the name of the department?
BB: At that time we were Adult and Vocational Education, and I think that is probably the longest running title of the department. It had that label when I arrived here in 1976. I’m pretty sure that was the name of the department then, Adult and Vocational Education, and somewhere in the next 15 or 20 years we began to have a lot of students not in the educational field who were involved with training and development in the private sector and we changed our name then to Adult and Vocational Education and Human Resource Development, which is certainly a mouthful. We had that title for a number of years and then six or seven years ago we merged with the Educational Leadership Department. They had become fairly small and somewhat vulnerable and we had also become small due to non replacement of retiring faculty members. We were old next door neighbors in the FAO Building and knew one another pretty well and decided well let’s join forces, so we officially merged and then came an after excruciating search for a name that would reflect adult education and career and technical education and educational leadership, we came up with the Department of Leadership and Development, which didn’t say a whole lot really specifically about what we were doing. So, that was a new name we used for several years. But that merger didn’t really work out in terms of the interest of educational leadership, which was strictly K-12 principals preparation and our higher educational program and our adult educational programs and our career and technical educational program were just too different in terms of their clientele and objectives so we unmerged a couple of years ago. We spent a large chunk of one faculty meeting after dissolving the merger coming up with our new name, which we use now: the Department of Adult Career and Higher education. We jokingly refer to that as the ACHE department.
LB: OK.
BB: We refer to the department chair as “the head ACHE.”
LB: Speaking of department chairs, some of the names that come to mind for me in the early days were Rex Toothman and Don Jaeske. Those were before your time weren’t they?
BB: Well, no, actually Rex was the department chair that hired me.
LB: OK.
BB: It was during the spring of my last year at FSU where I served as a visiting instructor for a year. Rex was the chair of Adult and Vocational Education who recruited and hired me. By the time I had arrived that fall, Rex was no longer the chair. Frank Johnson had taken over as the chair of the Department of Adult and Vocational Education and he served for only about a year I believe, a year, year and a half. Then after Frank, Ray Hill became chair and he was chair for slightly over ten years.
LB: So you became the chair after Ray?
BB: Actually, Clarence Collier then served for an interim basis for a year. I succeeded Clarence and served as chair for just about ten years.
LB: So when you add up the years I guess that brings us up to fairly recently. Now I always knew the department had been very active in various projects and grants and so forth. You were involved in some of those I’m sure and others you know about. Can you fill me in on the grant history of the department?