Oral History Project - Retired Faculty
Dr. Curtis Ulmer
Professor Emeritus
Adult Education
Department of Adult Education
(1967-86)
Ulmer, who helped found UGA's department of adult education, was among the initial inductees of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame in 1996.
Interviewer: (C) Chrisie Hamilton
Date: 18 October, 2007
Q: Tell me how you came to work at the College of Education at the University of Georgia?
A: In 1966 I was State Director of Literacy for the state of Florida and setting up programs all over the state. I had a near accident because I had to drive much of the time and then I thought gee, I don’t wish to be driving for the rest of my life. About the same time the state of Georgia needed someone at the University to write a book about materials on Literacy Ed, so I accepted the job, in a new department of Adult Education. A man named Bill Bowden, from Chicago with a doctorate from Chicago, was the first chair and I came in as his associate professor. Bill only stayed nine months and then I became chair of a one-person department.
Q: Wow that’s a lot of responsibility. So what did your work involve?
A: My first year was spent almost entirely writing a book called: Teaching the Disadvantaged Adult. At the same time, we made a series of about 15 films that covered each chapter in the book. We put those on educational TV and did a teacher training project in Georgia. Teachers would come to the campus once a month or every two months to refresh themselves and get together and maybe even take a test on the materials.
Q: So in thinking back to that time what stands out for you about the work you did?
A: There were few, if any, materials in literacy education. There’s been a good bit of progress but it is a very slow process to work with adults who don’t have a basic education. I consider a basic education, an education where you are able to read and improve your education by reading on your own.
Let me just say one other thing though. That was my job as a researcher. Actually, the department has never been a literacy department. We were a regular Adult Education department, doing our best to qualify people to become college professors, military leaders, agricultural leaders, community leaders – very few teachers, mostly outside the teaching profession and we were a 90 percent doctoral degree granting program.
Q: Was there anything you disliked about your work?
A: I didn’t particularly like the travel. It involved going all over the state, working with workshops. But I loved that work. I went back all the way to the 1950s to the Laubachand the Baylor literacy programs so I was really in a topic that I loved and knew.
Q: What did like the most about your work at UGA?
A: I liked most of the dealings with people, and seeing people achieve and enjoy achieving where they had not achieved before… particularly learning.
Q: What were your plans when you first started working here?
A: Gee that’s a toughy! Probably my plan number one, at least this was what I would put on my memorandum in the morning was number one: Survive! Also, to build a department that garnered the respect of the university community and that provided a service for doctoral students in Adult Ed. In the Sixties, there were only about five or six good Adult Ed departments in the United States.
Q: That’s changed.
A: That has changed, but I think Georgia may be number one still.
Q: So originally, you wanted to survive. Did your plans change?
A: No, my plans generally stayed the same. You see, I had worked 17 years in public schools, I had taken time off and gotten a doctorate in Adult Ed under Coolie Verner, one of the early leaders (in Adult Ed). I had worked in the state of Florida in Literacy Ed and when I came to work for the University, I had almost no knowledge about graduate studies.
One of the first classes I taught was a doctoral class and other than a class once or twice at FSU as a visiting teacher, I knew nothing about university protocol. I knew nothing about the arrogance and infallibility of the professorial faculty. I had to learn all of that. One of the hallmarks of the Adult Ed department was changing some of that because we always considered students our peers and we never treated them as anything but professional colleagues.
Q: Tell me about some of the people that were influential in the College when you began; you mentioned one colleague who left soon after you came.
A: The person who influenced me into Adult Education was my mentor back in Mississippi, Dr. Joseph O’Hara Carson. He urged me to fill out a Ford Foundation grant to go to Florida State University, as an adult. I was 33 years old, and did not have a bachelor’s degree. I went to Florida State and they allowed me to pursue a master’s program without a bachelor’s degree, for which I’ve always been grateful.
Joe Carson was probably my first great influence. Then I came in touch with all the old master, Coolie Verner, who was probably the most prolific writer ever in Adult Ed. He was my major professor. There was Malcolm Knowles, who was deeply involved in Bethel Maine… in their program of group dynamics. Then I had all the oldies in that area. I can’t call all of their names, probably Paul Sheets in California and Cy Houle at Chicago and Howard McClusky in Michigan. He was the first president of the AEA (Adult Education Association). They were all great influences.
Q: Who was most influential on you here at UGA?
A: Three people. The responsibility for having an Adult Ed. department was the result of the work of the vice president Dr. J.W. Fanning or Mr. Fanning, as I fondly knew him. Jack Lancaster in cooperative education and Joe Williams, the dean of the College of Education were the leaders in developing the Department of Adult Education.
J.W. Fanning and I remained friends until he died and he remained my spiritual leader. The Fanning Institute is named for him. After he retired, Irene and I took him to lunch every Friday for three or four years and he would teach us more in that hour or two than I ever knew about the community. Another great influence was Dr Louise McBee, who retired as Vice President for Instruction. Louise was my soul mate in the sense that if I was about to lose a worthy doctoral student, I would send them up to Louise and ask her if she would find them a job. She never once failed. We’ve remained lifelong friends.
Q: Tell me a little bit more about Malcolm Knowles and Dr. Houle.
A: Malcolm and I worked together in Florida on workshops and in the military for a couple of weeks at the marine camp in South Carolina near Jackson. We became friends. He would visit the University of Georgia from time to time. Malcolm was a professor of Adult Education in New England at Boston College. He was paid a very low salary so he made his living consulting. He consulted on a weekly basis because he was quite famous over the country as a person training people in group dynamics. When they closed his department, he went to Arkansas in Fayetteville and worked out his career there.
Cy Houle was in two mentors programs that we had at the University of Georgia. Cy was more of the academician than he was social. He was the researcher. He held people’s feet to the fire, not terribly popular with the other professors of adult education but a very fine researcher and writer.
Q: Thinking back over your career at the University, what are the critical events that occurred?
A: Probably the most notable social event was the suing of the University by a faculty member named Jan Kemp, a name everybody at Georgia knows. She was the director of remedial education and worked in the same building my wife worked in as an assistant professor. She sued the University for firing her because she did not conform to some of the things that the football program or others wanted. It was quite a landmark case and caused an upheaval at the University.
She was absolutely correct in her allegations about the University and about the mistreatment of the program and she won, of course, which brought about the eventual resignation of Fred Davidson as president after 20 years and the resignation of the dean of the law school, who had advised him. And probably of more lasting value, a subtle change in the atmosphere of the University, about it’s seriousness of purpose. I doubt that we could have become a great University, known for its scholarship without that kind of change.
Prior to that, a great change in the University came about the by the addition of a provost whose job was to strengthen the academic nature of the University. Those events probably worked hand in hand. Prior to that, the University pretty much operated on the good old boy (system), for instance the dean could appoint you in the College of Ed to the graduate faculty if he wished to but the provost established peer review committees for promotion, for graduate faculty for different aspects and it slowly began to change things.
For instance, when I came to the College of Education the associate dean for administration, the associate dean for instruction, and the dean of the College were all graduates of the University of Georgia. There is nothing wrong with that unless it creates a lot of inbreeding and bad habits.
Q: When was this?
A: The provost came probably about 1971 or ‘72.
Q: So how did you feel about these two events?
A: I probably disliked the provost heartily for his arrogance, even though he was completely correct about his decisions. The Jan Kemp thing, since I had been involved in adult literacy most of my life, it gave me a deep feeling for the need of good instruction in that area so I was probably on the side of, “Don’t make the lady do things that’s not correct.”
Q: Looking back over your career, what advice do you have for others studying and working at UGA?
A: In my lifetime, perhaps the greatest change in teacher education has been the need to go ahead and get a master’s degree relatively early in your career. When I first started, all the advice was: teach 10 years and then get a master’s degree. That takes too much out of your career so I would urge people to go ahead and get a master’s.
I also think that there is a fundamental flaw, and I can speak like I know what I am talking about after I’ve retired. I don’t think people who come into teaching as a career know enough about what they are getting into early on. I think when people commit to teaching in their freshman or sophomore year, they need to get a pretty healthy dose of what it’s like to be in teaching so that they’ll know if it’s for them or not. It is a magnificent career. I can think of no better career for people who really want it or are able to handle it.
Q: How would they get a dose of reality?
A: Uh, by visiting inner city schools, by visiting ethnic schools, by visiting regular schools, by just having a good orientation into the whole, and it would also give them an idea of where they may fit best.
Q: What advice would you have for new faculty?
A: My first advice to new faculty coming to UGA would be to wait at least one year before they begin to save the world and the second is to get acquainted with the resources of the university.
One of the tremendous aspects of the Department of Adult Education is that it tends to open up the entire university to a doctoral student. For instance, we have students who take courses and get in law, in business, who find great teachers and get acquainted with them. So I would advise the new teachers to do the same thing; learn a great deal about the entire University.
Q: What advice do you have graduate students?
A: My first advice would be not to enroll in a doctoral program unless there is nothing else in the world you can do. You really have to want it bad enough to sacrifice a great deal to do it. So don’t just jump into it because it’s there. Spend a lot of time thinking about it, visiting the department, because you are going to spend three or four years of your life in, and literally $200,000 or $300,000 in lost wages or expenses, so you damned sure better know what you want out of it.
Q: So go in with a strategy?
A: Forget about getting a broad, general education. You best concentrate on getting the degree first and then get an education.
Q: What stands out in your mind during your doctoral journey?
A: I enjoyed it, I got my bachelor’s degree with funds from a grant (Ford Foundation), I got my doctorate with the Kellogg Leadership program. The thing that stands out most for me was the tremendous joy that I felt in being a full-time student as opposed to working and going to school. I had done that with my master’s. I feel that learning should be a lot of fun and if you miss the fun part of it you’re missing a great part of your life.
Q: What was the most difficult thing about being a doctoral student?
A: You are going to laugh at this one, and it’s probably one that every doctoral student has had one too many dreams about. It’s learning to control my temper when I had professors who didn’t know their “butt from a hole in the ground.”
Q: That is funny! I haven’t encountered any of those just yet.
A: You will probably never encounter that, and when I encountered it the chances are that I was wrong. Ninety percent of the time I would be wrong…
Q: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about?
A: I think that the most meaningful experience to me in of all my education is the fact that in 1941 or 1942, which is a heck of a long time ago, I registered as a freshman in a community college and I had two Cs, a D and an F in my first four classes. Then I went in the military during World War II and came out and everything that I’ve done since then has been as an adult student.
I think the most meaningful things were the Kellogg Leadership grants and the fund for Adult Education grants. There is a book for the fund on Adult Education grants that would be good for any adult student to look at. It’s a story of the recipients and their grants and 90 percent of the professors at one time were all recipients of those grants.
Q: Anything else that you want to add about your experience at the University of Georgia? Anything that’s outside of the questions I’ve asked you?
ULMER: I had one relatively traumatic experience, in the early 1980s, I became associate dean of the College of Education for about 18 months and that was an unfortunate time in my professional life because the College was in transition and it was “standing on its ear.” We had budget cuts. We had programs taken away from us. The College did all teacher certification for the state of Georgia and had some 30 or 40 faculty employed to teach these classes. So we ended up with surplus faculty in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
So after, I went back to the department and spent another couple of years until I retired.
Dr. Curtis Ulmer
Ed.D., Adult Education
Florida State University
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