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- Dr. Jim Dickinson
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jim Dickinson
LB: You had Phil Post as Assistant Dean there?
JD: Oh, Phil Post was Assistant Dean and the secretary was Hetty Kerrebyn.
LB: That’s correct, Hetty Kerrebyn.
JD: Bill Dannenburg was doing more out of Adult Education then when he was in the Dean’s Office. Yes, it was kind of a jerry-rigged administration because in a sense we were holding the ship in place until Roger could come on board. We met once a week and he met once a month with us to keep track of what was going on.
LB: Now when Roger came he reorganized the College into groups I think?
JD: Departments and programs into a matrix organization.
LB: That occurred for several years, I believe.
JD: Yes, but that was after I had been there. I tell you what I think happened. During my year in the deanship, I really focused on trying to develop strong academic departments, departments that really had resources, had real obligations and responsibilities, both for faculty assignments and for student care for each student’s education. I think that when I exited the office, the department chairs were for the most part much more active in asserting their interests and seeking ways to negotiate the allocation of resources and faculty assignments to various kinds of tasks. I think with the earlier administration things were pretty much top down and you got the impression there wasn’t a heck of a lot of input from the departments back to the Dean’s Office. We also had organized a faculty council and if I’m not mistaken Russ Wiley, I think, was the chair of the council. Was that the right name?
LB: Russ Wiley? That’s correct, yes.
LB: Was that the first governing council in the College?
JD: It was the first college council. I made it a point not to monopolize those meetings in any way. I sat back and let Russ and the faculty members participate. One of the things that concerned me about USF was the silence of the faculty compared to the strength of the administration. I did not find that congruent with my views of what ought to be going on in higher education.
LB: Within your department, what were some of the things going on at that time? Were there any grants or projects that you recall?
JD: Well, you know after I left the deanship, I spent a year in Carl Riggs’ office as the Assistant Vice President for Budgeting. It was the worst job in the University that any human could have. I came back to the College and we were under the gun from the state to work with teacher education centers in lieu of or in addition to their regular academic assignments. The idea was get faculty closer to the practitioner teachers in their districts and gauge and shape their instruction to fit the needs experienced by these teachers as they were gaining skills in dealing with the changing student population. That happened when I was the acting dean. When the colleges of education in the state were asked to take that on, most of the deans at the University of Florida and Florida State were somewhat reluctant. I, on the other hand, thought that it probably offered some opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t be there for faculty.
LB: I remember many faculty members saying well we’re doing it for free now, but it will be good that we’ll now be getting paid for it.
JD: Well in some sense they were paid for it, but we had academic assignments on campus as well. It was a costly enterprise because people had to drive miles to deliver their activities and they had their own classes to teach on campus. I would be getting up at 4 a.m. for a meeting in Winter Haven at 7 a.m. and then return here to teach in the evening until 9 p.m. That’s a long day, even though I still had some fire in the belly and thought I could survive it.
LB: For the department at that time I’m thinking of the Guatemalan project.
JD: That was over, that had been over. I think by that time, Chris Anderson had come back and Don Peterson had gone I think into the Educational Leadership Department.
LB: What about the teacher corps? Was that still operating?
JD: Teacher corps was underway when I went into the Dean’s Office. Erv Johanningmeier and Bill Benjamin were, I think, the people running that. When I was the interim dean, I closed it down. I closed it down for a reason I thought was appropriate. In the teacher corps program, there was an effort to prepare people to teach mathematics in the high schools and they had a lot of other things going on too. I had asked Erv to make certain that the Mathematics Department had some say in what constituted the training of these people. Well, there wasn’t a contact with the Mathematics Department. The program was being done mainly by the College of Education. Frankly, I felt that undermined whatever relationships we had with the academic departments in particular the Mathematics Department. I could not imagine how we would unilaterally prepare teachers for math without as much as a how do you do from the math department. I may be misrepresenting the situation. I may not have my facts straight, my impression may not be accurate, but I’ll tell you that was my conclusion. I spoke with the president of USF about it and he told me I was setting an unusual precedence of higher education by turning down a grant, but he approved it. So yes, we had teacher corps and I got John Lizer and some folks from Hillsborough County involved before we closed it.