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| Group Picture: Last Day, Last Session of Calls and Responses |
When I introduced Craig Werner at a Springsteen conference in
2005, my friend Charles Hughes tells me I said, “I could go on about all the
accolades this man deserves, but I want to sum up the most important part:
Craig Werner builds community.” I knew it because about half of my favorite
music writers were either his former students or his associates. I didn’t know
it near as well as I do now.
I wrote the draft of this
blog after returning from an April conference at the University of
Wisconsin—Madison, where a dozen or so of the people I feel closest to in the
world (alongside a couple hundred more) were celebrating Craig’s career (alongside Nellie McKay, Tim Tyson, Danielle McGuire, Ed Pavlic and many others) building the school’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Because Craig didn’t want it
to be about him, the conference was named “Calls and Responses: A Symposium on
Teaching, Writing and Community.” It was a revelation. I didn’t know something
like this could happen around academia.
I’ve been in—and of—and angry
with academia for most of my life now, and it’s easy to see the limits—the more
you know, the harder to see possibilities. I first realized this when I was
just about 22 years old in my first year of graduate school. I stayed at the
college where I was an undergraduate mainly because I had very little direction
(sorta still wanted to be a musician despite nothing anyone would call talent),
and my new wife needed to be there for her graduate degree. I had a wonderful
undergraduate experience—the only really positive institutional, extended
educational experience of my life. But when I went into graduate school, I saw
the politics behind the curtain, and it robbed me of any illusions.
No need to break all that down. I liked my school, and loved a
good number of my professors. Let’s just say I saw the caste system, and I saw
the pettiness, and I saw that people loved rules more than ideas in school at
about the same moment I began to understand all the dead ends in the larger
political system. The way people are feeling right now, I relate to it from those days because of
Iran Contra, Plantation Week at Oklahoma State University, and the fact that my
thesis defense came down to a debate over my unconventional use of commas (in
works of fiction). The institution I was in seemed obsessed with the trivial
while overlooking the big picture.
Writing about music took me
out of the confines of academia, and I must admit I’ve never been able to write
to academics in any way I find as satisfying as writing to people far outside
of schools. I have been most consistently inspired by people who never had “higher”
education or were actually thrown out of their schools. So, on the third day of
“Calls and Responses,” when travel problems kept several presenters from one
session and Craig tapped me to maybe fill in, I knew I had something to say and began taking double the notes I
normally take—and I take a lot of notes—just in case.
Thankfully, there was no need for me to share it then.
I feel a need to share it now.
I think I can put this quite
simply. Most of the people who have inspired me to think I could make a
difference work in some antagonism with academic systems. We can start with
musicians, who have often sent me driving miles past the turn off to my campus jobs before I turned back around. The writers and editors who taught me how to write
included J-School grads and English teachers but were more often and
impressively homemakers, homeless organizers, bricklayers, steelworkers,
printmakers, and commercial music writers who dropped out to go into the work.
These same people—and my students—taught me most of what I do right in the
classroom. I teach veterans of many wars and refugees of crises around the
world, and they each add something different and essential. When I went to this
conference, I was "teaching" a nurse who was my age. She worked all
night and attended my class at 11:00 a.m.
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| Bianca Martin, Riah Werner and Tim Tyson |
So I was watching this panel that had been somewhat reshaped to
fill holes. Riah Werner, a teacher on the Ivory Coast, talked about how she
improvises with next to nothing and how she learned to do that and how she
learned to work around the system by growing up in and around this Afro-Am
Studies Department. Bianca Martin, producer of NPR’s 1-A, talked about how
Craig in particular actually listened to her unlike what she’d encountered
before and pointed her toward the resources she needed. Sagashus Livingston,
who founded the Infamous Mothers’ Project, “an education and media company that
focuses on women who mother from the edge,” testified that the department
helped her stay in college and then gave her the strength to go out on her own
and start this business. Kevin Mullen, who moderated the panel, introduced us
to the Odyssey Project that extends college education to those who normally
would have no access. I have seen such work around the margins in my life, but
it was almost never something supported by the places I work for a living.
I have this quote from Ms.
Livingston, “even my professors were afraid,” as a step in the calculus that
led her out of college and into her business. For me, that’s it. In the world
we live in today, even your professors better be afraid. The fact that students
and teachers communicated that honestly and openly in this department defies
about 90% of my expectations in the ancient, gatekeeping systems of academia.
During the phenomenal veterans’
panel, the department’s Anthony Black told a story I told every class I had
when I got back to my classroom because I remembered all too clearly when I
first started teaching and the mantra from on high was “weed em out.” He told how, at the
height of the Vietnam War, teaching assistants literally held the fate of their
composition students in their hands. The school relied on Comp I as a
gatekeeper, and if students didn’t pass, they would face the draft. “The TA’s
stood up,” he recounted, touching on various kinds of rebellions led by English
teachers in this time of crisis.
The “modern university” dates
back to around 1079, and as with all such institutions, it is built to resist
any challenge to its hierarchy. However, at a time when changing technologies
challenge the very nature of work and never-ending war seems to be just another
component of keeping the system in place, the university is facing a call to
change unlike anything that’s happened in our lifetimes. (I believe in well over
a thousand years.) Before this weekend conference, I assumed all such
structures would ultimately crumble and fall. The Department of Afro-American
Studies in Madison showed just what a revolutionary role such institutions can
play.
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| Dave Marsh and Chris Buhalis help me make sense of it all |
In general, I remain
skeptical of existing institutions, but, in April, I saw what I saw and
experienced what I experienced. Some of the finest writers, artists, teachers
and musicians on the planet took me down a dark country road in Alabama, into
the thickets of Vietnam and under the Iraqi desert sky and even the eastern
Oklahoma hills of my former Cherokee home, and they played me, among other
things, Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” As improbable as it was, I not only went
there, but I didn’t feel alone. Beyond that, I left with a conviction that we
will continue to carry the dialogue outward and bring what we learn back home,
wherever that may be.
Because the words are true,
you know, however we find a way to live up their call—
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| Craig Werner, David Cantwell and CJ Janovy |
“When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No, I won’t be afraid
No, I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand
Stand by me”
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No, I won’t be afraid
No, I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand
Stand by me”
--That there, the secret of
the universe.
Special thanks to everyone
mentioned above, my friends C.J. Janovy and David Cantwell, who got me up
there, and every other person I heard or with whom I talked and laughed and
dabbed my eyes.
"Whenever you're in
trouble..."
