Oral History Project - Current Faculty
Dr. William G. Wraga
Professor
Program in Educational Administration and Policy
Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy
(1995 – present)
Interviewer: Ed Bengtson
Date: 16 October, 2007
Q: Tell me how you came to work at the University of Georgia?
A: I had received my doctorate, I was a curriculum supervisor. By the next couple of years, I had accomplished all that I could in that position. So I was ready to move to the next stage of my career. I applied to about a dozen positions a year. Within that three- to four-year period UGA was the first and only one to make me an offer. So that’s how I got down here.
Q: When was that?
A: I started here on Jan. 5, 1995.
Q: What was your position when you first started?
A: I was Assistant Professor.
Q: And, what kind of work did that involve?
A: Teaching assignments in curriculum, and research and service in curriculum, basically what I do now.
Q: Tell me a little bit about the service in which you got involved.
A: Well you know, when you’re an assistant professor, you start out by volunteering to review books for journals, articles for journals, and to serve on committees in learned societies. If you get involved in that work and you know, you do the work, you get more opportunities.
Q: What were your plans when you started working at UGA?
A: Work harder than everybody else, so that I could stay here. So, as an assistant professor, I went about writing article manuscripts. My thinking was that there was a limited time you have to make rank, and the best thing to do was to put in that limited amount of time. Expectation is equivalent to two refereed journal articles. I was playing it safe and writing an average four and a half manuscripts per year.
Q: Who were some of the more influential people when you first started in the College?
A: Dean Yeany hired me. I knew everyone in my department. Ed Pajak, Jerry Firth was a faculty member then. I was actually hired to replace Jerry. I was worried because even though I was hired to replace him, he didn’t retire for another six years, so I was concerned that I wasn’t doing a good enough job. They were the people that I was mentored by. As an assistant professor I really wasn’t that involved in the Faculty Senate, it wasn’t as proactive as it is now. I wasn’t that aware of a lot of people outside of my department. I knew some people in Social Studies Ed because before I came to UGA I was a Social Studies supervisor and had done a lot of work in Social Studies with the National Council of Social Studies. I moved away from Social Studies to general curriculum because that was my role at UGA.
Q: You mentioned Ed Pajak and Jerry Firth. Any memorable experiences you had with them that you would like to share?
A: Well, personally, they were very supportive of me. We had spent the first eight months that I was here trying to sell a house back in New Jersey, 800 miles away, and my wife and two sons were up there and I was down here living on my own in married student housing. I kind of became a member of the Pajak family. They wouldn’t actually say that but they would invite me for dinner probably at least once a month to the extent that there was a chair in their dining room called “Wraga’s chair.” The Pajaks were really supportive, Ed was supportive of me professionally but they also were great friends in showing us around. So, I was disappointed when Ed left to go up to Johns Hopkins because I lost a good colleague. And of course, the Firths too, I spent a lot of time at the Firth’s house. They took an interest in you both personally and professionally.
Q: Thinking back over your career here, what are some critical events that have occurred?
A: Well, the first one would have been the University-wide move from quarters to semesters.
Q: How did you feel about that?
A: It changed your work load. Actually I believe it was worse. It took away time. It took away time between terms, what happened was there was less time to write. That was one thing that happened. Another one would be the reorganization.
Q: And that was the 19 departments merged to…
A: Nine.
Q: What were your feelings about that?
A: I think it needed it to be done. I was a supporter of it at the time. Regretfully, I think I lost some friends along the way. I had to support what the dean was advocating. At that time I was the interim department head. Ed Leadership was already going through a review. We were looking for approval for what we were doing and facilitating that. That was very difficult. The Board of Regents had just approved a new department. We had a charter for a new department. Karen Watkins was working with them on that and got everything in place. Then the reorganization started. I assumed that since we had just gone through the reinvention of our department, which was very, very difficult, we wouldn’t have to merge with another unit. Then I realized at that first meeting that we were actually expected to merge with somebody else. The reorganization of the College added a layer of complexity. The old department of Ed. Leadership basically was put into a holding pattern. The faculty was divided and the Department of Educational Administration and Policy was formed. Some faculty went into that and some stayed in the program of Ed Leadership.
Q: And the merger you’re referring to was the merger with Adult Education?
A: What happened in the reorganization, all the departments were expected to merge with some other department. And once I realized that we were expected to do that too, we ended up merging with Adult Ed. We had explored the possibility of merging with several other departments; in fact, the Education Administration and Policy faculty met several faculties and met with several department heads but it never materialized.
Q: So, you actually had some control as a department as to who you were merged with at some point?
A: Well, everyone was told “Find a partner.” So as soon as I realized…fortunately, we realized that early enough… that I started looking. So you had control to the extent that you were expected to go out and seek mergers, but if the other people didn’t agree… and we had a couple of cases like that.
Q: What were some other significant events?
A: Well, I’ll tell you one of the most satisfying and fulfilling experiences that I’ve had here was with the Deans’ Forum, which I believe was founded by Russell Yeaney and Wyatt Anderson. But what the deans from Arts and Sciences and the College of Ed did with the Deans’ Forum was promote potential collaborations for teacher education. It predated me by a number of years. But we also got together and worked on other projects such as course evaluations. We reviewed the recommendations and practices. I was only on it for two years. The benefit of that was that I met people from elsewhere in the College of Ed. You know the College of Ed being so big, and being in at least three buildings. Often, when I was an assistant professor, the only time I would see colleagues in the College of Ed outside of the area of Ed Leadership was at AERA (American Education Research Association).
So I would be in San Francisco or Chicago and see people like Sherry Field who used to be here in Social Studies. The only time I saw her was once a year at AERA, you know, a thousand miles away. And that was when I was in the same building. So there is a lot of space between those floors at Aderhold sometimes. So, I met people elsewhere in the College of Ed., also people from around the university. Out of philosophy, and romance languages, biology departments, there’s a whole bunch of biology departments. So it was great to see not only what was going on in my department, but also that each of these fields is very different. There’s a different culture and philosophy in the romance languages than there is in microbiology or there is in curriculum studies. It was really an eye opener to see what else was going on in these different departments.
Q: And so was there an end product to the Dean’s Forum initiative?
A: There were committees with different interest areas and each one each year would work on their project recommendations. I believe there were some practical things that came out of it. I was on the committee that worked on end-of-course evaluations.
Q: And the intention was teacher education?
A: I think initially that’s what it was, but that’s not all we talked about. Also, it was professionally rejuvenating. We would go on retreats. We would go down to Jekyll Island. We would have seminars and workshops, but we also would have time for people to socialize. That, professionally, was the highlight for me.
Q: That was around what years?
A: Early 2000’s. I think 2004 was the year that I went. There always was a reception. The reception would always invite not only current members of the Deans’ Forum but past members as well. That’s were I met Art Rosenbaum, a professor in the art department. He was in the art department, but he also was a large folk music collector. When I was in college, I thought I was going to go into the folk music scene and I thought I was going to become a musicologist for awhile, and was familiar with his folk music instruction books. I was quite tickled to meet him. And he’s a great guy. He makes really interesting art. It would be at one of those Forum meetings that I would be talking with Art Rosenbaum about art, about his painting, and about collecting folk music and different versions of different traditional folk songs, and I would be talking with someone from microbiology about the fragmentation in the, in the field of biology because there’s a half dozen or so departments.
Those were the kinds of things that I thought higher ed would be about all of the time. Unfortunately those things have really gone away. Even now, I am on the University Council now, so when I do associate with people from the university it’s usually in some kind of work function where there isn’t a lot of time to talk about other things.
Q: What advice would you give others who are hoping to study or work in the College of Education?
A: My understanding is that in the early ‘80s there was a concerted effort by the leadership here to revision how the College would function. There was a new research emphasis. My understanding is that the College’s activity and its academic profile nationally were strongly emphasized. I don’t know if that was the case, but that was the impression that I was always given. When I got here, you were expected to teach and to be a good instructor, and that was just a given. And perform service as well. The big emphasis was always on research and writing. My advice to anybody that comes in is that there are three things that you have to do be successful. That’s publish, publish, and publish. That would be my advice. In addition to all the other stuff you have to do.
Q: What about graduate students?
A: It would pretty much would be the same. It really depends on what you want to do once you have the degree. My experience was doing my doctorate part-time for eight years like most of our part-time students here. If you have a good doctoral experience, you change. Yes, you learn new things, but your perspective changes as well. You develop a wider perspective. So I guess part of my advice would be watch for that, see if that happens. We have had students here that have gotten their doctorates and continued what they were doing and they were very happy. Usually, my doctoral students, they have gone on to different positions very often even before they have finished the program. So really then, it will depend on what you go on to. If you go on to additional administrative work, that’s going to be different than if you were to go into higher ed.
I think probably one of the best things you can do, regardless as to what you get into, is to do some writing. I did that before I even finished my doctorate. I started writing shorter pieces. There are a lot of professional, practitioner-oriented journals, and they want articles that are a few pages in length. I started writing those just to see if I could do it. And I got a bunch of stuff published even before I finished my degree. Some of the people that I worked with at Rutgers recommended doing book reviews as a way to start publishing. It was a way to get your foot in the door. You would be surprised as to how many journals out there are looking for people to write book reviews for them. I would contact Educational Leadership or NASSP Bulletin … those were the journals I looked at and say, “I’m happy to review…here’s my areas,” and they would send stuff and I would write reviews for them. Regardless of the path a graduate student takes once they have their degree, they should be writing some things to be making a contribution to the field as well as getting your name out there.
Q: You work with both full-time and part-time graduate students. Are there challenges with either?
A: Well with full-time students like you, we just try to get rid of them because they’re around too much (laughter). And with part-time students…we never see them. My doctoral students who are part-time, their challenge is balancing the demands of having a full-time job, family responsibilities, and writing the dissertation. They get through the course work pretty well because, you know the work is there and there are timelines that result in the end of the course work. Once you’re at the dissertation stage, the time schedule is relatively wide open. Writing the dissertation can take a number of years. And, as I have said, what happens very often is doctorate students are often promoted to the next position before they even finish. That happened to me.
I was a teacher when I began. As I finished my course work for my doctorate, I got a job as a central office supervisor. So I went from a department supervisor, which was a 10-month position, done by 3:30 or 4… I had summers and I had time to work on the program, take courses and so forth… to a central office position where we were reporting to the Board of Education and we were presenting at board meetings and so forth. All of a sudden it was a 12-month position. Got there at 7:30 in the morning and didn’t leave until 6 at night. If there was a board meeting, we were back for a board meeting, and got home at 2 in the morning. All of the sudden, the time that I had available for studying was gone. For part-time students it can be rough. For me, that was probably one of the most organized times of my life. Go to work, do what I had to do, come home. I made time for my family and then found time to study and write. So that’s the challenge I see that part-time doctoral students have, whereas if you’re full-time, instead of having three responsibilities, you reduce it to two.
Dr. William G. Wraga
Ed.D., Social & Philosophical Foundations of Education
Rutgers University
Oral Histories
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