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- Dr. Louis Bowers
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Louis Bowers
AH: Today is December 15, 2003. My name is Andrew Huse, a program assistant for the Florida Studies Center. Today, we continue a series of interviews in our studio here on the Tampa campus library with USF faculty, students, staff, and alumni in order to commemorate fifty years of the University’s history. Today, I’ll be interviewing Louis Bowers, who came to USF in 1967 as a professor. Currently your position is…?
LB: My title is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, which means I have an office on campus, and I continue to do research and some consulting. I am writing a book now. I still have a home on campus. Although I’m not employed officially, I have use of the library, parking, and things of that sort.
AH: Only the most distinguished of professors get such treatment, so it will be interesting covering your time here and seeing what led you to your emeritus status. First, we’ll just start with the beginning. What brought you to USF?
LB: Ironically, I first learned of USF when I was teaching in high school in Baltimore, Maryland in 1960. I wrote a letter here to inquire about a position. I read about the University in Time magazine and it sounded adventurous and exciting. I wanted to be a part of it. I also wrote a letter to my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I didn’t hear from South Florida, but I did get an invitation to join the faculty at Southwestern. I went there for seven years and taught and did research and earned my doctorate in the meantime, which was probably one of the reasons USF wasn’t interested in me with only a master’s degree at the time I first applied. I was there at the University of Southwestern Louisiana for seven years and was enjoying it but having been a student there, and working with faculty who had taught me, I felt a little bit limited in terms of how I was viewed. I was ready for a change.
Fortunately, I was on a plane coming from a conference in Richmond, Virginia, and a gentleman got on the plane. He was the last person on the plane, and took the only seat left on the plane next to me. He sat next to me and we start talking about our professional interests. By the time the plane landed in Atlanta, he invited me to Tampa for an interview in two weeks for a position they had here on campus. It was a twist of fate that after having an interest seven years earlier, I was introduced again to the University of South Florida. After arriving here and meeting the other three faculty members who were starting the Professional Physical Education Department, a new undergraduate program to prepare physical education teachers, I knew this was the place for me to be. It was a very exciting time to start a new program to not to have to break down any barriers but rather to build from the ground up and do what we felt would be the right way. That happened, and I happily joined the faculty here even though I was an associate professor at Southwestern and the position here was for an assistant. I didn’t mind it because it paid me more money. I eventually made up the time and advanced to associate and then full professor.
AH: Who was the person that sat next to you on the plane?
LB: His name is Jack Stovall. He was chair of the Department of Physical Education at the time. I joined him and Margaret Crickenberger, who was the faculty member who had conceived starting the new program with Jack and Dr. Hugh Hoffman. Dr. Charles Smith and I joined them. So we had five people that first year doing a program that were quite different. We put the students out in the schools the first semester when they came in during their junior year and they were out in the schools all four semesters until they graduated.
It was particularly hard because I had been teaching kinesiology and exercise physiology. They wanted those courses to be integrated so students wouldn’t be taking varied courses here and there and not putting the information together for what they were preparing to do, to become teachers. I was able to teach a course titled, Biokinetics, in which we indeed integrated exercise physiology and kinesiology and added some elements of measurement. It was a six-hour course which students attended every day of the week. My assignments to them were to go out in the schools and study children take measurements, solve problems, and report their findings. It was a very exciting time. In the program we formed small teams so that students would have a continuous relationship with a faculty member from the time they joined the program. With a professional seminar every semester, they would always know what their progress was, having seen where they were when they began and where they ended up upon graduating.
It was a very close-knit program. The faculty worked really hard and worked closely with the public schools. Over the years we graduated, up to the time I retired, some 1,200 physical education teachers. A few years ago, I did a survey of Hillsborough County and over sixty-five percent of the teachers in elementary, middle, and secondary schools were graduates of our program. It was not quite as high in Pinellas County, but probably was around fifty percent of the teachers there who were graduates of our program. This is a program that still continues.
We added the wellness leadership program and the athletic training program over the last ten years. Those programs are going very well, also. The undergraduate physical education program was where it all started. During my first year here, 1967, the Physical Education building was just completed. We were the first group of faculty in the building. We shared the building with athletics and the required physical education faculty. The building is still there and we’re still sharing it with athletics. They’re getting their own building in the spring, so they will be moving out. There will be only physical education faculty in the building; I hope that would provide more room for the new programs.