Home / Summer Table
of Contents / Esther Terry / John
Mullin '67 / Aura and Zvi Ganz / Bruce
Penniman
IN 1960, OR THEREABOUTS,
when Esther Terry, then a student at Bennett College, an all-women's
and predominantly black college in Greensboro, North Carolina,
was among a group of students who directly challenged the prevailing
Jim Crow regime by taking seats at the lunch counter in the Woolworth's
department store in the city, there was nothing called a "Civil
Rights Movement" going on,at least in the general public
consciousness, to serve them as a reference point. There were
no celebrity leaders there to urge them on.
In historic retrospect, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins are now perceived as among the very first spontaneous bubblings-up of what would become the great, wide river of protest that we now know to have been one of the epic stories of twentieth-century American life.
Terry, however, will immediately challenge any attempt to depict these events within an historical frame that makes them appear larger or more dramatic or more original or makes the participants out to be more heroic than she knows to have been the case. And she objects to such a characterization not out of modesty but because of what she knows of the truth, coupled with her lifelong habit of speaking it.
From the time Terry was a girl, growing up the youngest of twelve children on a farm in segregated Warren County in the dull and featureless Piedmont Plateau of "apartheid North Carolina," she had heard stories told by her parents, and by the kind and honorable black friends and relatives who visited them on the farm, of the repeated injustices they had suffered, and also of their struggles to maintain their dignity and improve their lives in the face of harsh discrimination by the dominant society.
Her parents' strategy for child-rearing, given such a social reality, had been to keep the children away from the local library, from the local movie theater, even from the corner grocery store, anywhere where it was clear they were not welcome, which was pretty much everywhere.
"Our parents kept you away from everything they could keep you away from that was not welcoming, that didn't open arms to receive you," Terry recalls. "You came to understand the responsibility you had not to participate in your own devaluation." Fortunately the farm 117 acres that remain in the family to this day, though it has been years since anyone farmed them was "big enough to hold us."
Meanwhile, the stories provided another kind of sustenance and preparation for surviving in for more than surviving, for overcoming the world.
Young Esther Terry developed "a sharpened sense of justice and injustice." The stories she drank in "took any stardust out of your eyes about the world being a place that did not require anything of you but just living in it." She came to the understanding early on "that until everyone was treated justly you shouldn't feel secure or comfortable yourself. You have social responsibility, simple as that. And you're not allowed to get out of your social responsibility by pleading, `I didn't know.' One is required to know."
The struggle for civil rights, she knew from the stories, did not begin at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960 when the black coeds said to themselves, "It just doesn't make any sense that we are not allowed to sit down and have a Coke when we can go into the next aisle and buy a Coke. So then we decided we would go sit."
She knew the struggle that had begun long, long before, was always and would always be going on was, in the terms of academic understatement that she enjoys, "rather continuous." In the terms of mythic diapason into which her language sometimes stretches out and rolls, she says, "You know that a fire is blazing, then it dies down and is only coals. Then a certain wind comes on and whips the coals up into another flame."
Terry went on from Bennett to enroll for her master's degree in the predominantly white UNC at Chapel Hill. From there, she had decided to study for her Ph.D. at Howard University under the poet, essayist, and critic Sterling A. Brown. But Brown informed her he was in the process of retiring, and referred her to Sidney Kaplan, the late, great professor of English literature at UMass Amherst. She found a mentor here in Jules Chametzky, now an emeritus professor of English, and she found what would become her lifelong calling to teach and her intellectual home.
She would help to found the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies in 1969, and in 1998 the doctoral program in that department, one of only two such programs in the country. In 1981 she would be one of the founders of the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities. There have been many other accomplishments over a career of now three decades and more. Beginning in 1978, when she was named vice provost for affirmative action, she has repeatedly been called upon to help advance the administration's social justice policies. Last year she succeeded Fred Tillis as associate vice chancellor for equal opportunity and diversity, with responsibility for urging and monitoring minority recruitment of faculty and staff throughout the campus, and for insuring equal opportunity for all employees.
She has become part of the fabric of an institution that she has in the process come to love and believe in deeply. It's the reason she gives for loving it that one senses is so good for UMass.
"The thing about the university for me," she says, "is that from the time I came here, it never gave me a sense that it was completed, that it was finished. That was a wonderful thing for me . . . It was always becoming, and for this reason, in a wonderful way, it reached out to people.
"It has. It can. It doesn't always. It's not perfect, " she says. "But still there is that unfinished quality that can pull you forth to finish, to do." ·
JOHN MULLIN '67,
a professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at
UMass since 1978, is a most peripatetic scholar. Mullin estimates
that he travels about 35,000 miles a year, mostly within Massachusetts,
consulting with cities and towns on economic development and
land-use issues and supervising the dozens of graduate students
he's sent out to do field surveys and research. He wears additional
professional hats as a private consultant and as director of
the Center for Economic Development, a federally funded program
which his department houses.
Last year alone, Mullin figures he attended roughly 140 town meetings, and led forty to fifty "charettes," or workshops, all designed to help citizens get a handle on the direction in which they want their cities and towns to grow.
His intellectual predilections would have suited Mullin to the donnish life. He is a passionate student of city and industrial planning, with a strong bent for archival research and writing. His doctoral thesis was on German city planning in the 1920s. He has an abiding scholarly interest in utopian thinking and in the history, politics, and great figures of his craft.
But his professional life is the antithesis of the retiring scholar's. As may suit the pragmatic nature of his discipline he claims to teach the only course in industrial planning at a major American university Mullin is the most engaged of academics. (This seems to be the place to add that one of his hats is an officer's: he will soon be named a brigadier general in the Army National Guard.)
Mullin's office on the fourth floor of Hills North knows him only as an occasional blur. Indeed its primary function seems to be to house a floor-to-ceiling collection of brown cardboard file boxes stuffed with reports and abstracts. The line between academia and the world of everyday people and events does not exist for him: "We view Massachusetts as our lab," he says.
His exceptional sense of mission may be explained
in part by what he calls "topofilia," or love of place.
He was brought up in Maynard, a fairly typical New England mill
town in central Massachusetts. Four generations of the Mullin
family worked in the colossal Assabet mill in Maynard, including
his father, who went on to become principal of Maynard High School,
and later when they were students, John and seven of his eight
siblings. The various Mullinses worked for different employers;
for one glorious stretch of time, the former woolen manufacturing
facility was occupied by Digital Equipment.
The many changes in the use of the Assabet mill through time are a part of the story Mullin tells. He became an expert on the issues involved in recycling old factory buildings, and an advocate for "brownfields" legislation that provides economic incentives for cleaning up the contamination that is a frequent legacy of the industrial era. This is but one of an interdisciplinary slew of topics relating to municipal economic development in which Mullin is steeped: demographic and employment trends, education and training issues, topography, trends in industry, finance and transportation.
When he goes out on the hustings Mullin shows off a marvelous head for facts and figures. But this is only half the reason he keeps getting invited, notes Stuart Beckley `89G, Easthampton city planner and one of Mullin's many proteges. The other half is his gift, rare among reflective planning types, of making all this knowledge come alive with wit and humor, of really engaging his listeners.
This is to say he's got a political knack. It seems it's in the genes: three Mullin brothers followed in their father's footsteps and are serving as selectmen in various Massachusetts towns; one recently ran for lieutenant governor.
The thing is, says John Mullin, any strategy for economic revitalization has to begin with an understanding of a community's intrinsic character call it the genius of the place. Before anything else can be done, the planner has to get a feel for what that is, tease it out. In his case, this comes naturally. "I have a real affection for these places," he says. ·
AURA AND ZVI GANZ, an Israeli-born couple who emigrated to Amherst from Haifa in 1988 in order for Aura to teach and for Zvi to pursue his Ph.D. at UMass, decided about four years ago that the time was ripe to attempt to fulfill their dream of creating their own high-tech company.
Their idea was to combine their complementary talents to conceive, develop, and market cutting-edge products for the computer networking and telecommunications industries. In particular, they had an idea for software to improve the currently spotty quality of sound and image communication within wired and unwired low-capacity local area networks, or LAN s.
Their idea had huge market potential, the Ganzes believed. The demand for multi-media LAN s, in applications ranging from video conferencing to distance learning and information retrieval, is expected to grow into the many billions, Zvi's market studies indicate.
The son of a retired hardware store owner in Haifa, Zvi Ganz, 43, has entrepreneurial drive along with experience in business and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research. His expertise is in the area of mathematical modeling and optimization, roughly defined as the science of making intelligent decisions based on an analysis of masses of data.
Aura Ganz, 41, is an expert in computer networking. The only daughter of an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, she earned her doctorate in computer science from Technion, Israel's foremost technical university, where Zvi got his master's. From there she followed a well-beaten path to the States seeking wider opportunities and a tenure track appointment. She is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass, where, on top of her teaching load and a dizzying array of administrative responsibilities, she runs the multi-media networking laboratory.
The Ganzes' Aim Engineering was one of the first start-up companies to be housed in the so-called business "incubator" in the new Mass Ventures Center in Hadley, a university-supported project to stimulate business development in the region. For the first three years, the Ganzes put their efforts into developing their concept. They achieved an important milestone last year when they reached an exclusive licensing agreement with UMass. The university acquired equity in the company and the promise of future royalties; the Ganzes retain the right to market the results of laboratory research.
The big question at the moment, the couple said this spring, during an interview punctuated with bird song on the sunny back porch of their North Amherst home, is whether they can get the financial backing they need to take their company from in the parlance of high-tech business development alpha to beta stage, the stage of developing a prototype and putting together a management team. They have a handful of strong business partners; now they need serious investors. Conservatively speaking, they need backing to the tune of $250,000. It's a challenge to find people to plunk this money into "an early stage seed company." But not only investors but the university stands to gain in terms of income, prestige, and opportunities for graduate students, the Ganzes say.
It's a tense time for the Ganzes, in part because they know precious time is ticking away. The telecommunications world is "moving very fast" and so is the competition. Their personal stakes are high: Zvi has invested thousands of hours of time for which he has not yet made a cent. Asked whether he wasn't accustomed to risk, having served several years in the Israeli navy Aura served in the army Zvi replied, "Yes, but this is a different kind of risk. In the military you have intelligence, resources, a team." He feels at the moment quite alone and exposed. The Ganzes, who have a son at Brown and two younger children in the Amherst schools, love their adopted home. They think the area has the potential to become a high-tech center comparable to the network of Stanford spinoffs that became the legendary Silicon Valley. They'd like to help show the way. ·
ONE OF HIS MOST
formative experiences as an undergraduate, says Bruce Penniman,
was the time he spent in the basement of Memorial Hall as a part-time
editorial assistant for The Massachusetts Review.
The work wasn't terribly exciting. Mostly his job was to send out subscription notices and poetry rejections. It was getting to know the editors, writers, and board members that was so worthwhile: "The conversation was really stimulating," he says.
In 1994, Penniman, a veteran English teacher who has spent his entire professional career in the Amherst Regional junior and senior high schools, found himself beginning a four-year stint as editor of The Leaflet, the tri-quarterly journal of the New England Association of Teachers of English, or NEATE. It is an organization of which he is currently president-elect, and to which he brought special honor and attention last year by becoming not only Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, but a finalists for the title of National Teacher of the Year.
Shepherding a publication was nothing new to Penniman. One of his many roles in the last decade has been as adviser to Amherst Regional High's student newspaper, The Graphic. (In that capacity he is a familiar presence in the production department at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, where he can often be seen, late on a weekday afternoon, shirtsleeves rolled up, bent over a computer terminal or leaning on a paste-up table, assisting students as they scramble about to meet their deadlines.) And that says something important about Penniman: although he could have left public school teaching on any number of occasions for opportunities in higher education, he feels public school is "where the action is." As a student of his craft, he says, he could never find a livelier lab.
A professional journal, however, presented special opportunities. One of Penniman's first editorial decisions was that The Leaflet needed more articles by teachers. It was perhaps at this point, that the memory of all those rejection notices he'd mailed off as an undergraduate came back to help him: he set a policy of never rejecting a submission outright, instead providing "detailed feedback to the author." This required another change at the journal appointment of an editorial board to help him review submissions and consult with contributors.
"Happily," he says, "many people gladly rewrote their pieces and produced some really fine stuff."
It would surprise no one who knows Bruce Penniman or has followed his career that he'd turn a professional journal into a kind of advanced writing workshop, and that he'd use his editor's office to advance the intellectual reach and professional influence of everyday teachers. His two great passions are the craft of writing and the advancement of his chosen profession. He has found a way to pursue both together.
Since the late 1970's, when he began doing his doctoral research on ways to update the classical rhetorical idea of "invention," Penniman has been involved in a broad-based movement to better understand and teach the writing process. He has seen "a sea change" in the teaching of writing, he says, from an emphasis on rigid protocols geared to a finished text to a more experimental approach based on a growing body of research.
The way writing works turns out to be more messy than predictable, Penniman notes, and to be different for each person. Some people do better with intuitive methods such as "free writing." Others prefer systematic approaches such as the classic reporter's "five questions," or Kenneth Burke's "dramatistic" theory, which employs concepts of actor, scene, and so on, to help organize the writer's thoughts.
Having enrolled in the summer institute of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project in 1994, Penniman became a co-director of the UMass-sponsored project the following year. He has remained in that position, helping to administer a variety of programs that encourage teachers to write, and therefore become better writers themselves and better teachers of writing. The model of the National Writing Project, with which the regional project is affiliated, "assumes that experienced teachers have valuable knowledge," says Penniman, and that the best teachers of teachers are other teachers.
"The intent is to provide an opportunity for professional conversation," this master teacher says. It was always that vital and stimulating conversation that he wanted to be part of, and to help to enlarge.
