by William Trollinger
My first college teaching position was at the College of the Ozarks (C of O). When I say this to people who know something about the school – who have heard that it has been rated the most anti-LGBTQ college in the nation and/or that the president issued an edict that the school’s athletic teams will not play any school that has any athletes that kneel during the national anthem — the response is often a combination of astonishment and horror.
In response, I point out that the college I taught at was very different from today’s Christian Right bastion. Even the name was different: The School of the Ozarks (S of O).
I arrived at campus in the fall of 1984, a shaggy-haired, left-leaning, newly-minted Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had never heard of Branson, I did (and do) not care for mainstream country music, and I was now living in Nashville West. Coming from Madison, where I had been depressed for weeks because a New Deal Democrat defeated a mayoral candidate with socialist-leanings, the politics of southwest Missouri were farther to the Right than anything I had ever experienced (for one thing, the Klan was active in the area). And having never lived in the South, I was now just ten miles from the Arkansas border.
In short, the move from Madison to Branson was jarring. Ditto for the move from the University of Wisconsin to School of the Ozarks, where I was assigned courses ranging from Colonial America to the American Presidency to U.S. Women’s History, where I was required to teach eleven courses over the fall, spring, and summer semesters (a 4-4-3 load), and where in academic year 1987-88 I taught 323 students (all the while trying to finish book revisions).
For all of this, I look back on my four years at S of O with great affection. As is still the case today, students worked on campus for their tuition, room, and board. Most students came from Missouri or Arkansas, and many or most were first-generation college students. Some came from families of very limited means – I had students who had grown up without indoor plumbing in their homes – and this was their chance to secure a college education. And they knew it. While many arrived at S of O poorly prepared for higher education, I have never taught students more eager to learn (one sign of which being how many students wanted to take independent study classes with me, on top of their regular load). Thanks to my time there, I have retained an extreme impatience with upper-middle-class students who refuse to see that a college education is a privilege most people on the planet do not have.
I will never forget my first commencement ceremony at the school. Exhausted from my first year at the school, and vocally unhappy that I was required to attend and wear regalia, I was in the bathroom washing my hands before I had to line up for the processional. I looked up into the mirror, and saw two men in their dress overalls – who I took to be a father and grandfather of a graduate – staring at me. I turned around, and the father nervously said to me, “Are you a professor?”
Thus ended my whining.
I assume that there are some current C of O faculty members who would share some of these sentiments. But in contrast with the militaristic patriotism that is at the heart of President Jerry Davis’ claustrophobic educational vision, at S of O we offered our students something much more in keeping with a traditional liberal arts education.
One way to see this is to contrast the outside speakers who have come to C of O recently with the speakers who came to S of O when I was there. Speakers at C of O convocations and forums over the past few years have included Newt Gingrich, Ben Carson, Sarah Palin, and the late Charles Krauthammer (and of course, there was the recent visit of “Fox and Friends”). In contrast, during my four years at S of O students had the opportunity to hear feminist author Susan Brownmiller, First Amendment absolutist and anti-abortion activist Nat Hentoff, former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, who spoke in a variety of classes and then – in a remarkable evening convocation to an overflow crowd – on the dangers of technological “progress.”
Moving from Madison to Branson was a shock to my system. But I could not be more pleased to have spent the first four years of my college teaching career at the School of the Ozarks. And while I could not have known what was coming to the school that I had come to love, I was so fortunate to have driven away the very week that Jerry Davis arrived.
Even if I had wanted to, I would not have been allowed to stay.
.. . and I for one am thankful that you didn’t stay, though I do remember a very pleasant visit to the school. You can run but you can’t hide.
Your time at SofO coincided with mine. I was a student from June 1984 to June 1988. I earned a quality education, partly in your classes. The school is not the same now. People who know me are usually shocked when they learn of my undergrad alma mater. I heard Nat Hentoff, George McGovern and George Plimpton there, as well as other fine speakers from both sides of the political and religious worlds. I cringe now whenever I hear of a new speaker because I know only one narrow view is being presented. I have spent most of my career involved with informal education (museums). An important part of education is teaching how to think critically. Not WHAT to think.
Lisa, it is great to hear from you. You are so right: you did indeed receive a quality education at S of O, an education that is far different from what is being offered now.
I, too, was at School of the Ozarks from January 1985 to August 1988. Most pivotal and best years of my life. Although I am definitely right leaning, I did enjoy the mostly respectful dialogue that went on there between different viewpoints. Hard to find that respectful dialogue in the political climate today.
Thanks, Amy, for your response. And your characterization of S of O in the mid-1980s was precisely my experience. There was lots of lively dialogue between wildly differing viewpoints, but it was always civil. The S of O you attended and I taught at was very different from the C of O of Jerry Davis.
I was there in the 60’s and it has by necessity changed. I don’t remember politics being a big part of my education there in HS and/or JC. President Dr. Clark and Dr. Good were both there and I had many personal interactions with them as well as the entire faculty and staff. I loved my time there, I grew up there, and I was taught self reliance and work ethic and learned to love learning. It has served me well over the past 60 years.
I can’t speak to the current climate at C of O, but I hate to think there is an indoctrination to stop thinking broadly and only teach a narrow view of the world. I also get disgusted at the liberal colleges who teach only their doctrine, so it works both ways.
Hi! I graduated in ‘74 from SofO a liberal arts college. I was a theater kid and wouldn’t last two weeks at the current school. My best friends were gay and weird. Fun, challenging and life-changing
Hi Myrna. I love your comment . . . and I suspect that you might not last even two weeks at the current CofO!
I was pleased to read this post by someone who also spent four years there and who agrees with me about the terrible trajectory of my old high school, now a liberal arts college, into disgusting, unAmerican, rightwing absolutism. S of O was not that way in the ’50s. News about politics–about anything going on in the outside world–was (alas!) simply unavailable. No newspapers, no radios, no unchaperoned off-campus trips–we had only the monthly 2-hour shopping trip to Branson or out to a field to pick beans or tomatoes for our canning factory. The focus was on work, passing classes, and practicing mainstream Presbyterian Christianity . . . the only political thing I ever heard about there was that we accepted Not. One. Cent. Of. Federal. Money. So, I guess we were Republican. The focus back then was getting a high school diploma. There was no thought given to the few of us who went on to college. We did not have a counselor. We never had a high school paper. We didn’t even have yearbooks for my last two years there, 1953 and 1954. Still, all in all, it was a good four years for me at S of O–four safe, happy, stable years that gave me treasured lifetime friendships. We knew about Korea–one classmate had a POW brother; another had lost a sweetheart there. But I never heard a word about McCarthyism until I went home for summer vacation.
Ann, thank you very much for this very good comment. The “disgusting, unAmerican, rightwing absolutism” of today’s College of the Ozarks was definitely not our experience. And while the school of the 1980s was less isolated than in the 1950s, the focus on work plus classes was certainly central to the S of O of the 1980s. Anyway, I could very well imagine a very interesting history of the school from its inception in 1906 until the beginning of the Davis rightwing regime in 1988.
I attended S of O from 1952 – 1956. I worked many different jobs but spent my Senior Year in Dr. Good’s office as one of his student secretaries. It was a special privilege to work with Dr. Good and share his many stories and ideologies. He had friends everywhere and we would pack flowers and fruitcakes and other items from the school and ship them out to those friends. He would tell me about each one and how they were friends and how they had helped the School. I shudder to think what he would think of what Dr. Davis turned the school into, and what it is perpetuating. Several years ago, when they announced that they had decided to reinstate the high school, I took my Grandson to check it out, thinking he would benefit from the experience as I had. Halfway through the introduction of the future plans for the School and the curriculum, I chose to leave. This was Not the school experience I had had and could not see as a future for my Grandson. In these last 69 years since my graduation, I have been very disillusioned and disappointed in the School’s direction. I’m glad Mr. Trollinger published this article and spoke out. And Ann clearly described the S of O I knew also.
Thank you, Maxine, for this very good comment. Thank you for referencing Dr. Good, and highlighting the contrast with Jerry Davis. So glad you were able to keep your grandson — I hope! — from the right-wing indoctrination now perpetuated at the high school. Disillusioning and disappointing, indeed.