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- Dr. Louis Bowers
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Louis Bowers
AH: Would I be right in saying this was 1969?
LB: Yes, it was about that time.
AH: I’ve been studying through the Oracles and they followed this story and of course that SDS was known for violent protests around the country and college campuses.
LB: Later, I learned that.
AH: You never would have known from the answers they gave?
LB: No. They seemed like they were very well mannered and a serious group. I didn’t want to be against democracy in the students or a democratic society.
AH: Were you the only one who voted that way?
LB: I’m pretty sure I did. I don’t know why the vote would have been made public, a show of hands or something. That was my first taste of campus politics.
AH: Is there anything else you remember from that time?
LB: I can remember some times that there were some student gatherings, but mostly in the evenings and so forth, when I wasn’t on campus. With a family, I tended to be involved in activities with my four children when I did manage to get home about 6:00 or 6:30 p.m.
AH: You probably counted yourself lucky to get home and leave campus behind. We have a long period in between you getting a professorship in 1971 and then you becoming a distinguished professor in 1996. Fill us in. What were some of the progress going on in the department? You mentioned adaptive physical education. Were there other specialized programs that were coming up? What were some of the things going on in the program at the time?
LB: The main thing was that we added a program for wellness specialists. There was a growing need within private industries and corporations and such that they were becoming conscious of the importance of their employees being well and in a state of wellness in order to be more productive and in order to lower their insurance costs and so forth. There weren’t people prepared to do that. We began to get physical education majors who were interested in wellness. They would get the physical education degree rather reluctantly and then go and get a job in wellness. It didn’t take us too long to realize that what we needed here was a program of wellness for these persons.
We started that program about fifteen years ago, and it was very successful. Students graduated from that program maybe because they were the first ones out there, they quickly made a reputation. There were a lot of requests for jobs at that time. The internship that students would do was mostly within this area, but many went out of state. We would leave it to the ingenuity of the student to arrange for an internship, as long as they had the appropriate supervision. We’ve had students go to the Aerobic Institute in Dallas. One interned at the White House at the gym there. Most of the hospitals in the area let our students serve as interns. We had that much interest that as the program grew it became equal in number to our physical education majors program.
The athletic training program was added more recently and is a smaller program, but one in which joined forces with the athletic department so that we provide experiences for students with the athletic teams. We can provide the teams with some free service at the same time giving our students some experience before they go out for final internships with other teams in the area. That program, I think, is coming up for accreditations this next year. I had started that program and then turned it over to Dr. Mike Stewart. He replaced me as the director of the School of Physical Education, Wellness, and Sports Studies. Accomplishing that was quite a challenge, too. To get recognized as a School you have to show not only that you’re unique, but that you have a high enough quality to get that because it goes all the way to the Board of Regents for approval. We worked a few years to get that done.