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- Dr. Michael Curtis
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Michael Curtis
LT: Today is November 5, 2005. I am Dr. Les Tuttle. This afternoon I am going to be discussing the history of the College of Education with Dr. Michael Curtis. Mike, I want to welcome you here this afternoon.
MC: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
LT: I wonder if we can start off by you telling us a little bit about your professional background.
MC: My professional background is as a school psychologist. I received my doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. I spent 19 years on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati before coming here. I continue to be actively involved in my field as a school psychologist, primarily through state and national organizations.
LT: What year did you come to USF?
MC: In 1993. I’ve been here 12 years.
LT: Could you tell us a little bit about the circumstances and your motivation for coming to USF?
MC: I was at the University of Cincinnati where I had been a department chair for four years. It was just one of those life circumstances when my son was about to graduate from college, and I had begun to think about options. At that time, someone from the University of South Florida contacted me about an available department chair position in Psychological and Social Foundations and asked if I would be interested in applying for the position. I guess from my point of view, because of my involvement with school psychology through our national organization, I was very much involved in program approval, accreditation, and knew about USF. I was very much interested in only exploring opportunities in universities that were known to have high quality school psychology programs. Even though the people at USF were interested in me as a department chair, I personally would have found it difficult to go someplace that didn’t have at least the potential to be what I would consider to be a very strong program. I did and still do believe that a strong academic home is very important for a department chair. So that to me was one of the attractive things about the University of South Florida.
LT: So had USF been on your radar prior to your being invited?
MC: Only through a couple people at USF who I had known, like George Batsche, who also had been involved with the National Association of School Psychologists. He and I both had been involved with that organization for a number of years. Knowing that George was here and knowing the kind of quality work that he did and what they were trying to do with the program was one of the things that made me aware of the University of South Florida. I also had known Howard Johnston at the University of Cincinnati. Howard, at the time, was the chair of the Department of Secondary Education. My contact with George and Howard gave me some familiarity with USF. What I saw was a very young university growing in leaps and bounds, and that made it very attractive in some respects.
LT: Well that leads me to another question. When you did accept the position here and when you arrived, what did you find here at USF? How did that compare to your previous experience?
MC: It was an interesting experience. I wish I had taken notes back then. I know that one of the real learning experiences for me here, somewhat in contrast to the University of Cincinnati, was there seemed to be at the University of South Florida. I have since come to believe that it is not the University of South Florida; it’s the state of Florida where the level of administrative involvement in the every day life of the universities, its faculty, staff, and students is very high. That is something to which I was not accustomed. I was accustomed to academic units having considerably more autonomy within the larger parameters of the institution to pursue their mission, and what I learned here very quickly was that a great deal of your work as a department chair is invested in satisfying all of these administrative requirements, some of them quite trivial. Quite frankly, I view it as bureaucratic intrusion into faculty life. I viewed my role as department chair as that of an academic leader. But I came to believe that one of my primary roles was how I could protect my faculty from the intrusion of those administrative requirements into their work.
LT: Very Interesting.
MC: So, it took me in a different direction than what I was accustomed to and what I had anticipated.
LT: Since you’ve been here has that bureaucratic dimension intensified do you think?
MC: I certainly don’t think it’s diminished. I think the University has been going through an interesting transition in recent years. Of course, no longer being part of the State University System as when we were under the Board of Regents, having our own Board of Trustees and so forth, it seems to me that there’s a transition period that we’ve been going through here the last few years. I think there are some mixed emotions and issues of confused role identity here at the University in trying to move in the direction of being a Research I institution. I personally like moving in that direction, but there stills seem to be some fundamental contradictions concerning what faculty members do with regard to being at a Research I institution. I still hear all these issues about student credit hours and so forth. I think that’s something the University is still working through, and we’ll have to see how that plays out.
LT: Now, you came down here as Chair of the Psychological and Social Foundations of Education Department?
MC: Yes.
LT: And it would be interesting to me if you would talk a little about what were the strengths of the department when you arrived and how that’s changed over the years.
MC: I think there actually have been some dramatic changes in the department. When I came in 1993 we had, I believe, 30 faculty members at the time. Of the 30 faculty members, there were only four women. Today, 60% of the department members are women. When I came, there were no ethnic/minority faculty members in the department. In my discussions with faculty, I think someone once said, “Well, we had an Asian faculty member back in the ‘70s.” Other than that, they couldn’t recall any diversity in the faculty with regard to ethnicity. Today, 36% of our faculty members are from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. So there have been, I think in some regards, really dramatic and positive changes in the make up of the department as well as in terms of strengthening the academic quality of our programs.
I think that was an agenda when I came. Not just for me, but of some other faculty who really wanted to move forward academically. In fact, we built some programs of academic excellence, and the department put a lot of time and energy into that. I think in some respects the department has been very successful, and in other areas it is still developing and growing. The other thing I encountered when I came, as you know, with the University being so young, there were a lot of faculty who had all been hired at about the same time. For example, in Educational Psychology, which is in Psychological and Social Foundations, the most recent faculty hire in that program area had been 24 years earlier. Of course today, that’s only 12 years after I came. There are four faculty members in the department who remain from 1993, and even that includes two faculty members who are in the retirement drop program. So there has been an almost total turnover. There really will only be two faculty members remaining from 1993 after about another year. There really has been a dramatic change in the faculty composition of the department.