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- Dr. Louis Bowers
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Louis Bowers
AH: What was it like coming to a program where you’re not breaking down barriers, you’re building something from the ground up? What did that feel like? What were some of the first problems you tackled together?
LB: The first one I can remember, there was an old traditional physical educational program with the senior class that needed to complete their final course work and their final internship to graduate. Here we were starting out with a group of new junior year students in the new program. It was kind of schizophrenic. You had to be able to differentiate. You couldn’t use the approaches that we were using in the new program with the seniors who were not ready for a new philosophy that they had not had their first year in the program. That first semester, teaching in both of those programs, we had to remind ourselves, “Okay, I’m going into the senior class now.” Let’s make sure that what they hear is based on what they’ve learned before in terms of philosophy and teaching strategies and so forth. That group endured us, the seniors did. The juniors, of course, were very excited about being in the new program. Some of the seniors were actually envious that we didn’t start the program sooner because they saw some of the good points of the new approach and they wished they had been a part of it. That was the thing I remembered most. The workload was heavy. I was teaching at least six classes that first semester. That would have been eighteen hours or so. It was temporary for that first year. That was the biggest thing for all of us, the workload that first year. Then we got into a natural rhythm of scheduling the new program and it became much easier. Plus, we were developing new courses for the senior year of the new program.
AH: What was it like, also, coming to a university where the accent was on learning and Dr. Allen discouraged talk about a football team? I realize athletics are definitely separate from physical education, but somehow there might be a bit of synergy between the two. On the one hand he didn’t really have much established athletics. I guess things were just getting started with basketball and so forth in the late 1960s. What can you tell us about that?
LB: I guess that’s one of the other things that attracted me here. I had been to the University of Maryland, which had at that time and still has a big-time athletic program. Then I was a resident at LSU, where I did my doctorate as well a faculty member for seven years at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Even though we were in such close proximity with the athletic department for all of these thirty-five years in the building, we got along well together. Partly, I think, because their philosophy was and continues to be under Lee Roy Selmon, that these are student athletes. We viewed both the athletes that belonged to the athletic department, so to speak, as our students. Some of them were our students who were also on athletic teams majoring in physical education.
We also had the campus recreation program there. They occupied the downstairs area of offices. We viewed the participants in campus recreation as our students, as well. I think that’s what made it work. We did have a policy that we enjoyed that in all scheduling of facilities, academic classes came first, recreation came second, and athletics came third unless it was a scheduled game athletic contest. That worked well for many years. Not that there weren’t some scheduled conflicts where we both find ourselves in the same room where we didn’t expect the other group to be there. I remember one situation where I was teaching a class in the physical education gymnasium and there were only about twenty minutes left in the class. Denny Crum and his Louisville Cardinal basketball team walks in early. They were supposed to be there at six o’clock to practice. Of course, they came in bouncing their basketballs. I went over and told them that I had a class in here that the gym would be available in twenty minutes. I don’t think he had ever been told at the University of Louisville or anywhere that his basketball team couldn’t come in. They waited there patiently, not happy, but patiently until I finished my class and we gave them the gym for their practice. Those occurrences were rare. We really managed to support and get along quite well when Dick Bowers was there and Paul Griffith and Lee Roy Selmon.
AH: That’s a great story.
LB: I was looking up at most of them. They were all at least a foot or two taller than me, the players, that is. Denny Crum was my size.