UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PH.D.
MEMORIES
(1977 – 1982)

Following the August of 77 when I had received my master’s degree from West Texas State University, I had driven a Cadillac back to Atlanta for my father to use; I guess you could say the child has become the parent.  It was on that trip back to Atlanta that I decided I would swing by the University of Oklahoma (OU) and check out the possibility of getting into a doctoral program.  I had made this decision simply because it was one of those universities that were close enough to within the 500 mile radius of Albuquerque that was part of my criteria of being rather close to my business and home.  The other reason I stopped by was that the University was some 20 miles south of Interstate 40; the route that I had chosen to return to Atlanta because it would take me all the way through Tennessee to Nashville before I would head south down to Atlanta.

When I had reached Norman, Oklahoma, the home of the OU campus, I remember that I had talked with one of the professors in the Department of Higher Education because the chairman was not available.  I took the time to explain to him that I was interested in a program that would lead to a Ph.D. and that the proposed program could be completed in a timely fashion.  I had already sent my transcripts ahead of this trip from the other universities that I had previously attended.  I remember my inquiring as to whether I could study in the area of student personnel.  Apparently I had made a rather good impression both with my impromptu interview and the transcripts from the others universities.  I was quite surprised and pleased to have received an acceptance by the time I had returned to Albuquerque.  So, with no excuse for my hastiness, I had decided to attend the University of Oklahoma that very fall.

In Albuquerque I had left a good friend and ATΩ fraternity brother of mine, Bob McKinnon to continue looking after my apartments as well as collect the rents.  Bob said that he would be glad to remain there until I had finished my Ph.D. program.  Bob was already a resident living in my three-bedroom apartment and most certainly very trustworthy.  It is so, that his presence was very timely as if he had not available, it could have been very possibly that I would have never entered any doctoral program.

Even though my graduate program was entitled the administration of higher education, I was so pleased that the program also included a great deal of the history of Western education and thought, which went all the way back to the first educators for our part of the western world; the Hebrews.  The higher education of any given culture is more than apt to give you a better understanding of that culture than any purely historical source.  That is especially true of the Hebrews as the totality of their educational efforts were solely based on their religion and the recording of the oral history of their theocratic culture.

The University of Oklahoma had a chair for the history of higher education and the course that I had taken from the professor that occupied this chair was certainly one of the high points in my doctoral education.  I feel that I had learned more useful information from this gentleman that any of my other elective courses.

It was during my first semester at OU that I fortuitously switched my major area of study from Student Personnel to the Administration of Higher Education.  It isn’t usually prudent for doctoral students to be changing majors as that can often expose some degree of insecurity of the student.  I later found out that I had been accepted in the program specifically because of my more than real-world business and administrative background experiences. “We were all taking bets as to when you were going to switch majors.  We all expected it, but not necessarily this soon,” is what one of my professors, Herb Hengst had said to me when I cautiously approached him with my proposal to switch majors halfway through my first semester at OU.  Herb Hengst later became my major professor, when my original major professor had died of breast cancer the summer following my first year in the program.  As Herb was the professor that I had first suggested my change in major, that should be a good clue as to the degree of faith that I had placed in him.  And as usual the unplanned outcomes due to many of the changes in my life, appear to be all for the best of my own spiritual growth.

I do not remember the cause of my speaking with Secretary of the Department of Higher Education, but I do remember what she had said to me, “You may be interested to know that we have some 27 or 30 new students attending courses in the program that have not been officially accepted.  You happened to be one of the three students that were officially accepted from the very beginning.  You should be very proud.”

It was during my second year at OU that I became the first single male foster parent in the state of Oklahoma.  The teenage boy that I was given was 17 years old and I was sort of to serve as a transition home as at the age of 18 he would have had to leave the all-boys home that he was then in residence.  The actual reason that I was given this young man was that the director of this all-boys home was another ATΩ alumni brother.

After the completion of an award-winning dissertation, I received my PhD in December of 1982 at that pivotal age of 40.  It was during the fall of that year that I granted the Ohm Award that was granted in honor of a former dean of the University of Oklahoma’s College of Education.  I had received the $250.00 Robert E. Ohm Memorial Dissertation Assistance Award to use in completing my dissertation on the “Profiles of Short-Tenured Presidents of Large State Universities.”  I was the sixth and last winner of this award.  

          When I finally returned to Albuquerque after receiving my doctorate at the University of Oklahoma, I took a little time off and later that spring made a three-week tour of Russia.  This trip, which was a Smithsonian sponsored event, was a gracious and most appreciated graduation gift given to me by one of my maternal aunts, Vivian Little.  She had received her own PhD in Romantic Languages from John Hopkins University at a time when women were still discouraged from seeking higher education, unless, of course, in was in some traditional woman’s profession like that of teaching or nursing.  She was so proud that another member of the family had gone on to seek that ultimate higher degree that she wanted to reward my effort.  She actually gave me a choice of either China or the Soviet Union, and then pragmatically suggested that China would probably become more liberated in the future and would likely become more accessible for travel while the future of Russia at that time was uncertain in her estimation.  Vivian’s rather significant relationship to San Damiano will be revealed later in this autobiographic narrative.

          It was Herb Hengst that hand once questioned me as to my plans after receiving the Ph.D. to which I remember responding, “Well, first I will probably hang the diploma on the wall and bloat a while.  Then I would like to buy a South Pacific Ocean island and become a conchologist.”  You may remember that as a child I had collected seashells while I was living in Pompano and Lauderdale by the Sea, Florida.  Well, a conchologist is a scientist who studies seashells and the first part of the word conchologist is “conch” that is the name of a large seashell that is very common through out the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean.  It is this same large spiral shell with its distinctive pink throat that is often seen on the outdoor displays in many of the South Florida’s road side tourist businesses.