From behind the desks to in front of them, alumni across five decades have retired the pencils and returned to Ohio University to teach.
1960s
Long before David Payne found himself as the executive-in-residence for the College of Business, he was just another high school student, comparing costs of universities and caught in the Ohio State University vs. OU debacle.
“Since my dad went to Michigan, I knew I wasn’t going to Ohio State,” he said. “OU was important economically. It was important to attend a state school, and I thought OU was the top sate school.”
Costs of attendance have changed from the years when Payne was a student from 1965 to 1969.
Room and board during the 1968-1969 term was $330 per quarter, $2,834 per quarter less than what students at OU paid last year. The tuition and general fees that year were $170 per quarter for undergraduates, a little more than 5 percent of the price tag of last year’s quarterly fees, $3,179.
1970s
Five weeks before spring quarter ended, the university shut down. Graduation was canceled. Members of the graduating class of 1970, including Ginger Weade, professor in the Patton College of Education and Human Services, received their diplomas in the mail.
“It was a time of high sensitivities and big changes by quick actions,” Weade said.
Students protested the deaths of four students at Kent State University. President Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia. And draft signers were avoiding the war.
It was “a very confusing time,” Weade said.
“A lot of sit-ins, walk-ins, teach-ins, because of course, we did not have cell phones, or the same access of level to news,” she said. “People who did have some kind of connections to news on a more regular basis developed and scattered it quickly. … Whenever you did get the news, there was so much tragedy in it.”
The news of these stories was spread throughout the campus, not by Twitter feeds or Facebook statuses but by the screaming student protestors and the pamphlets they were handing out.
“I did walk by protestors on my way to class who were distributing flyers and saying some really nasty things,” she said. “They were saying I was supposed to figure out what was real, what was happening, and by going to class, I was wasting time.”
Tension began to rise among the students as they reacted to the changes in the world.
“At that time, there was unrest on campus all across the nation,” she said. “It wasn’t just OU; it was every university. There were huge changes in almost every aspect of life that you can think of. Clothing, housing, the student experience changed.”
She remembers when the “Athens bubble” was smaller and students rarely left campus, mainly because of lack of transportation. Weade did not venture to East State Street until her junior year.
“It’s not the East Street like it is today,” she said. “There was no Walmart. There were only open fields that flooded a lot.”
1980s
For Creative Writing professor Zakes Mda, his time at OU was due greatly to chance. He found an advertisement for OU’s School of Theater in a literary journal.
“It was fate. If I hadn’t seen that journal, I wouldn’t have come here,” he said. “Another chance I gave was coming here in as a visiting professor for one day in 2002. Things have developed for me in Athens by chance.”
In 2002, Mda came to visit a faculty member for a day but decided to apply for an open position that soon became his own.
At the university, students are able to have a broad social life. Though Athens has more than 20 bars, Mda wishes there were one more.
“I have fond memories of the friends I have, especially at a specific bar, The Graduate,” Mda said. “It was a wonderful place for us to gather together and get drunk. I was disappointed to come and back and find that it was no longer.”
Mda will never forget his time at OU as a student, he said, when he graduated in 1980 after studying telecommunications, a major that has since become theater communications.
“My time at OU was wonderful,” he said. “It was prolific.”
Teacher education instructor Perianne Bates had a memorable time at Halloween before Court Street closed. As a freshman, she dressed as a rainbow.
“Don’t ask me why,” she said. “I was eighteen.”
Despite OU’s current No. 1 party-school reputation, Bates said she thinks the ambience on campus is “much more serious” than it was in 1978-82, when she attended.
“Everybody is really focused getting things done for school,” Bates said. “They all have planners; they all look so stressed. Our schedules were never as busy as yours are.”
Since the time associate political science professor Michael Burton graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in political science, there was a major shift in technology.
Instead of receiving the DARS report, as is distributed today, students were sent a piece of paper listing all the classes they had taken. Students were provided with a time to go to The Convo and register for classes. Available classes were listed on talk boards, and students had to wait in the different departments’ lines to sign up for individual courses.
A process that today takes five minutes took an afternoon, Burton said.
“That’s not an experience I would wish on anyone,” he said.
In 1987, as a graduate student, Burton built a computer with a modem that reached out of the office.
“People thought, ‘Wow,’ ” he said. “They were amazed.”
1990s
Since Michael Pfahl, an assistant professor in sport administration, graduated in 1996, his feet have walked the Cav’s court and touched Thailand’s ground. But when they first met OU land, he knew instantly where he would study international business and marketing.
“I think I still have that same excitement about being here as I did when I was 17; there’s always something new to look at,” he said. “Every year, you see students exploring, which creates a sense of newness that hopefully will never go away. We truly are a great place to go to school.”
In the 10 years since his graduation, Pfahl said, he has seen changes within the dynamic of the campus.
“The feel of the campus is just completely different,” he said. “On the first warm weather days, everyone would be out on College Green. Now, it is just not as populated. Hacky-sack players and guitar players would play at the true center of the campus. Now the Baker Center has shifted the center of campus, and with just the general Internet and television connections available in the dorms, I don’t see that same vibe.”
While teaching managing and marketing courses in Thailand, Pfahl attended an alumni gathering in 2006, where President Roderick McDavis toured Bangkok and met with OU alumni teaching in the area. It got him thinking about coming back to OU, he said.
“I believe that what OU really fosters is a true sense of friendships,” Pfahl said. “I was part of a very big family of OU, and I carried that into my workplace, which paid off — not so much the networking, but the value of relationships that you develop at OU.”
2000
Matthew Vess, assistant professor of social psychology and 2004 OU graduate, said he believes his academic experience at OU directed the way his career path would take.
“I really made the most of the tier-three classes and the many diverse classes I took,” he said. “I got involved in research, which sort of laid the foundation that I needed to get to this point. I’m not sure I would have followed the trajectory that my career has taken if I had not attended OU.”
As an OU alumnus, Vess is able to reach students in a different way, he said.
“My experience here at OU as a student has provided me a unique opportunity to connect with other OU students,” he said. “I know the experience the students are having throughout the various time of years, because I had it not too long ago myself.”
sj950610@ohiou.edu
