Home- College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
- Dr. Louis Bowers
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Louis Bowers
AH: Tell us, what were your impressions of the campus when you first came on, looking around physically at the campus?
LB: The main difference is the trees. They were little scrub oaks, a lot of sand, not many sidewalks and few buildings. There were not any parking problems, but there wasn’t that much here. This library used to be, of course as you know what is now the student services building. I can remember the day that we carried all the books over from that library to this library. Students volunteered and so forth. The campus has grown. I can remember saying, what are we ever going to do with all this land? It wasn’t too long before we started saying, you can’t put a building there because it’s already spoken for. It’s gone to now where it’s hard to find a space on campus that you might put a building or plan a building with the parking garages and everything else that have been built. We couldn’t have foreseen the tremendous growth in a short amount of time. When I came here we had probably 12,000 students. I was leaving the University of Southwestern Louisiana with 12,000 students. I recently went back to the University of Southwestern Louisiana and they still have 12,000 students. We have what now, 36,000 students or more? The growth was unexpected by those of us in the early days. AH: You started your climb from assistant to associate in 1969?
LB: Yes.
AH: Tell us about becoming more involved, of course you’re always involved. But as time went on, soon after 1971, you were chair of the Physical Education Department. Tell us about getting more involved in actually running a department. What was it like?
LB: I’ve never aspired to be an administrator. Our faculty asked me if I would do it, and I agreed to do it if we would set it up on a three-year rotating basis. I took that responsibility and then passed it on to another faculty member because I realized very quickly that being a full-time administrator and teaching full-time, which we did and I continued to do, was going to get in the way of my research interest, which was the reason I got into higher education to begin with. It was quite different to have to be responsible for all the scheduling, to make sure that all the faculty knew where the rooms were, and the students were, and that there were no conflicts or overlaps and so forth, and grades were in, and all of the other payroll issues were taken care of on time. That was quite a learning experience for me to have administrative responsibilities. In those days, things were very much less complex than they are now. There were not as many forms to fill out. We didn’t have time forms to account for how many hours we spent doing what type of activity and so forth. We were trusted. They knew they hired good people and they trusted that they would do the job. It was only later when the legislature got involved and started putting all these added requirements that took more time to report that we could have been doing more valuable kinds of activities.
While I was a teacher and an administrator, I also had an interest in grant writing. I had written two grants in Louisiana which had been funded. I wrote my first grant to start our master’s degree program in adapted physical education. The first year was a planning grant. The second year we started the program with graduate assistantships. We were one of five programs in the country that were awarded funding. These were the first programs to prepare teachers with a specialty to teach physical education for children with disabilities. Several of the grants were at the doctorate level. Ours was one of two, I think, on the master’s level. I was able to bring in Dr. Steve Klesius on the grant from Wake Forest University whose background was adaptive physical education, as well. The experience I gained as a graduate student the University of Maryland was working with children with disabilities. The grant started out at $20,000 that first year, and we kept the funding from the US Office of Special Education going for some thirty consecutive years.
We prepared the first teachers of adaptive physical education in the state of Florida. I remember in the beginning we were preparing more teachers than Florida was prepared to use so we had an agreement with Los Angeles City schools that they would hire any graduate that we could send them. They were a large school system and they needed teachers of adapted physical education then. We have a west coast contingency out there that went out there because that’s where the jobs were and remained there. Most stayed in the Tampa Bay area. Students would come from all parts of the country. First semester they couldn’t wait to graduate to get back home. Then when January came and they enjoyed the warm weather and the spring-time year-round, they started to think, “Could I possibly get a job here in Tampa?” Most of them stayed. We were happy about that. We were able to attract good people at the graduate level, prepare them, and have them stay on. The graduate program had many of the features of the undergraduate program, particularly with the idea of getting out and working with the students in the local schools in the year-long program. From the very beginning, they were out working with children with disabilities. They provided a lot of service to the Hillsborough County schools. It was an additional help coming from us, free of charge, of course, the pre-internship that they did the first semester. By the second semester, they were ready to start teaching. They already had degrees in physical education, but now they had specialization for all types of disabilities that children might have. Other special education teachers would be a teacher who was skilled to teach mentally retarded children or a teacher with skills to teach children with a learning disability and so forth. Our graduates had a wide spectrum of disabilities they were prepared to teach. All the kids came from different classes but to one physical education classroom. That was a program that I felt real good about that we were able to provide so much funding for program development and graduate assistantships in adapted physical education. Later we did the undergraduate preparation in adaptive physical education with scholarships as well.