Home- College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
- Dr. James Paul
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. James Paul
LB: Today is January 10, 2006. I am Lou Bowers. I’m interviewing Dr. James Paul, who is a former chairperson of the Department of Special Education and is now a faculty member in that department. Thank you, Jim, for coming in and sharing with us some of your experiences here at USF. Before we get to USF, perhaps you can fill us in on your personal and professional experiences before you came to USF. I know your career was well under way when you arrived here.
JP: I did my doctoral work at Syracuse University. After that, I had two jobs. I was the children’s consultant in the Department of Mental Health in state of North Carolina. At the same time, I was on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After about four years, I went full time in Chapel Hill and was there on the faculty until I came here in December of ‘88. During my time at UNC Chapel Hill, I was, at different times, chair of the division of Special Education for seven or eight years, the acting dean for a year, and director of graduate programs for a period time. I held a joint appointment in the Frank Porter Child Development Research Center. I was also elected chair of the faculty in the School of Education. I had a wonderful life as a professor at UNC Chapel Hill.
LB: How did you hear about USF and the position? I guess the position was that of the chair of the Special Education Department?
JP: Bill Katzenmeyer, who was the Dean of the College of Education at USF at the time, called me. I had known Bill when he was the Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Duke. We hadn’t really worked together, but we had been together on some research projects at the Learning Institute of North Carolina. Bill called me in Chapel Hill and invited me to consider coming to the University of South Florida to chair of the department of Special Education. He and Dr. Allen Sproles, a faculty member here, had visited me in Chapel Hill while I was Chair of the Division of Special Education to talk about the program.
When Bill asked if I would consider the position, I said no. I really didn’t want to leave Chapel Hill. He then asked if I would come down as a consultant to evaluate the program. I did that, and after a couple of days of talking with the faculty and evaluating the program, I shared with him my thoughts about the program. Again, he asked me to consider coming to chair the department, and I again said no. However, at that time there were some things going on in my personal life, and I said I would consider a leave of absence for a time. So, they went ahead with the search here, and I applied with the understanding that if I were selected I wouldn’t accept the appointment for a couple of years. I was selected, and took a two year leave of absence from Chapel Hill.
We enjoyed living here. My wife, Maria’s family, her mother, her sister and her family, live over in Clearwater. The whole area is so different from Chapel Hill. At that time, Chapel Hill wasn’t a sleepy college town, but it was relatively small. Of course, it has grown a lot since ’89, but the area here was much larger and more diverse. I had serious interests in trying to rethink some of the things going on in special education as a field.
There were, and continue to be, some real challenges in special education. Here with the large, complex, urban area of Tampa, there were opportunities to do things that just didn’t exist in Orange County, Chapel Hill. I decided to stay because of the challenges and opportunities to do things differently, and because of a personal issue with respect to Maria and her family.
LB: Now, those two years you were functioning as Chair of the Department of Special Education.
JP: Interim.
LB: On an interim basis, yes. You had 12 or so faculty members who had been here for a few years, but then after that the program grew in terms of faculty members, projects, and grants. Could you describe some of those activities?
JP: Sure. There was a teaching service environment in the department when I came, and we recognized the need to develop an academic culture to support research and scholarship. Of course, USF at that time was not really a research university. In my view, USF has been going through a process for a couple of decades of becoming a research university, and so the first challenge was to try to develop an academic culture in the department. One strategy we used was to invite three senior scholars. All three of them had been professors of psychology at the University of Michigan. All three of them were recognized international leaders in the field of special education. You can go to a special education program anywhere in the country, or outside the country as far as that goes and people would recognize the names of William Cruickshank, William Morse, and William Rhodes. At that point they were in their late sixties and still very productive.
For them, this was a kind of unique opportunity as well. We worked out a wonderful arrangement. People that lived in Ann Arbor and through the Ann Arbor winters were kind of happy to be in Tampa for a time. The deal was we basically gave them enough money to cover their expenses, and they gave us their time and expertise and really dedicated themselves to helping us build a doctoral program and a research culture. That was one strategy. Another was to develop collaborative research groups. We had about seven collaborative research groups made up of faculty and doctoral students in the department and faculty outside the department. Some of them were in other colleges, and several in other departments in the College of Education. These were very vibrant, active groups, each of them meeting two hours a week. Each had its own agenda and they were very productive. There were several research proposals and training grants written and funded. We had several articles and books come out of the work of these groups. However, if you can imagine seven groups, each meeting two hours a week, that’s 14 hours of intensive, academic work. That, coupled with the senior scholars, turned out to be successful strategies for building an academic culture.
We were also able to add some new faculty. One of our commitments was to developing a diverse faculty and taking seriously some of the challenges in special education with respect to the kinds of services provided minority children. That is a big issue in the history of special education, as you well know. We were able to add four, ultimately five, minority faculty members in the Department of Special Education. That was a landmark for our department and it was a fun time.
One of the big commitments was developing a better relationship with schools and we had an area strategy we were working with at that time. Fort Myers was still one of the campuses, and so we had an area program working with the various counties in the area served by USF at that time. We also had very specific collaborative arrangements with Hillsborough and Pasco Counties in particular. One of the first activities was to work with the Weightman Middle School as a professional development school. Oma Pantridge, who was the director of Special Education at the time, and I were meeting at a restaurant out on Dale Mabry trying to figure out how we could get the university program and the public school program better articulated. Out of that conversation came a commitment on both of our parts to try to focus on one school as a training and research site. That turned out to be a very good venture. Hilda Rosselli had just finished her doctoral work when I arrived, and we were fortunate to be able to keep her here on the faculty. I remember talking to Hilda about the Weightman Middle School project when we were first getting started. I described the project to and said I thought she would be ideal to link our program to the school. I remember Hilda asking, “Do you think I can do that?” And I said, “Well, if anyone can do it, you can do it.” Well, she did a wonderful job. And as you know now she is the dean of a college of education in Oregon. She spent a lot of time in the school, really a lot of hands-on work in the school with our doctoral students. A lot of good stories come out of that time.