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- Dr. Jim Dickinson
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jim Dickinson
LB: Today is January 10, 2006. I’m Lou Bowers and I’m interviewing Dr. Jim Dickinson, a former chair of the Department of Social and Psychological Foundations of the College of Education and former faculty member in that department. Thanks for coming in today, Jim, and sharing with us your experiences, your thoughts, and perceptions of your years at USF. But before we get to USF, could you tell me a bit about your personal, professional experiences prior to hearing about USF and coming here as a faculty member.
JD: Well, I got into higher education right after my undergraduate years at Miami University in Ohio. Then, I went to Ohio University where I was an assistant head resident in a dormitory and really sort of thought I would like to follow a route to become a dean of students or something like that for a professional career. From there, I went to the University of Minnesota after getting married at Ohio University. I went to the University of Minnesota in 1959. I majored in educational psychology, which had a lot of strands in it, but I became more interested in my psychology experience and background and became very interested in human learning and somewhat in development.
LB: You taught at University of Minnesota?
JD: I was actually on the faculty of Ohio University for two years, taught at Minnesota, and then at Augsburg College. Then, because Don Lantz was a colleague of mine, I heard about South Florida. Don had come here early on. In 1964, I interviewed down here just with the thought that there might be something and in part I was just curious about Florida. But I was offered a job as an assistant dean and assistant professor in the College of Student Affairs at Iowa, so I went there. I did administrative work for a couple of years, but really didn’t like it much at all and ended up on the faculty there in Counselor Education Program teaching student affairs classes for my last two of my five years there. I had been offered tenure and I was set. I could see my life mapped out for the rest of it. Then, Don Lantz contacted me again. It was the middle of the winter and it seemed like a good thing to go to Florida and take a little break from the winter in Iowa. I came down, and honest to God I hate to say it; I saw those instructional machines on the first floor of the Education building, the Chester learning machines or whatever they were and I thought, “Wow, I could really be interested in that.” Almost on a spur of the moment, I let Iowa know I was not returning and I came here. So, I’d had a number of years of experience in higher education prior to coming here.
LB: Don Lantz was a colleague at the University of Minnesota?
JD: Yes, we were office mates at Minnesota.
LB: You visited here, so you could have come in 1964?
JD: Correct.
LB: But actually you came five years later?
JD: The University of Iowa was an attractive option if you had the notion of the Big Ten as a place to be. I certainly had all the social support from the University of Minnesota to go to Iowa.
LB: Now, since you had experience at both Minnesota and Iowa, what was your feeling as you arrived on campus here in terms of the University? Did you have any idea that it would grow into what it is today?
JD: Well, I’ll tell you what. I really had a narrow kind of parochial view and had to do with my own professional opportunities. I saw USF as one of those schools that clearly had made opportunities available to kids who otherwise wouldn’t get into higher education. I met several people from South Florida when I was on the faculty at Iowa. One of them was a student who had been in a developmental training program that I ran, and she was a charter graduating class member from USF. She was in a clinical psychology program at Iowa getting her Ph.D. She’s now back here practicing professionally. So, I knew a little bit about this place and also knew that it had a terrific reputation in general education. I thought gee it sounds like an intellectually challenging place, loads of opportunities for somebody in educational psychology and this gave me a chance to get in on the ground floor in educational psychology. That was kind of my motivation. In terms of what would become of the University and how big it would grow, that never quite registered with me and I wasn’t much concerned. I’d been at big universities at Minnesota and Iowa which were bigger than South Florida at the time. It wasn’t a question of being part of an enormous organization that appealed to me. A larger commitment, struck me as important, kind of fit my momentary romanticism about higher education.
LB: Now in 1969, as you arrived, the departments were just forming actually out of programs and was it Social Foundations and Psychological Foundations together?
JD: We were the Foundations Department and we had Social and Psychological Foundations together and oddly enough I had an opportunity to teach in Social Foundations if I wanted to do so.
LB: Now as your teaching progressed, it’s not too long before I see in the records that you were the Acting Dean of the College. Is there a story behind that?
JD: Well, you know once again if I’m not mistaken, Don Lantz was on the search committee for the deanship and he importuned Roger Wilk to apply. Roger had been my major professor at Minnesota and so that was the linkage there. I was as stunned as anybody else was when Roger suggested that I might take over as the interim dean. It was not anything I sought and I must tell you that for a couple of days I really stewed about it before I agreed to give it a try.