Oral History Project - Retired Faculty
Dr. Russell A. Yeany
Dean Emeritus
Professor of Science Education
College of Education
(1975-1999)
Interviewer: Jennifer L. Atkinson
Date: 26 October 2007
Q: How did you come to work at the College of Education at UGA?
A: Well, I did my Ph.D. in science education and research design at the University of Colorado, which was one of the hotbeds of science education in the early ’70s. The Biological Science Curriculum Study was there, the Earth Science Curriculum Study was there, and so, I gravitated there because of my interest in science teaching. When I left there, I went to Southern Illinois University. I thought it would be about a five-year job. It was maybe two or three months later when my advisor called me and said the University of Georgia seemed to be staging itself and the College of Education to become a center for science education research and curriculum development. They’d hired Dave Butts that year from the University of Texas. Dave was well-known in science education at that time and my advisor convinced me that I should look into it. I did and they offered me the position and I came here and it really did become a major center of science education. The work in the late ’70s and ’80s and even on into today. That was the attraction and my career settled here.
Q: What year did you start at the University of Georgia?
A: 1975
Q: How long were you in the Science Ed department?
A: Well, let’s see the chronology kind of is… gray in my mind. I was there until I believe, ’88 or ’89. I was department head then. I had been promoted. I came as an assistant professor and eventually was promoted to professor in the department. I was department head when the School of Teacher Education was formed. There were four schools formed in the College that more or less grouped the departments into administrative units. And I was appointed as the Director of the School of Teacher Education. And that’s when I left the department as an administrator.
Q: What did your position involve in science ed? You mentioned earlier curriculum studies. What specifically did you focus on here at the University of Georgia?
A: Well, when I came here I actually had a joint teaching appointment with the College of Education and the Biological Science Division. So, I taught an introductory course in biology, and that was geared primarily for the elementary teachers who weren’t teaching much science in the Georgia schools. We thought if we give them better science backgrounds that would help them in curriculum development and teaching, in the public schools. We had a course in geology, a course in biology and a course in physical science. When I came, I interviewed with the biological science faculty and of course, with the science education faculty. And I had joint teaching responsibilities. So, I taught introductory biology. I taught the courses that revolved around research design. In those years, we called them 899s. I don’t know what they are today. I also worked in the secondary teacher preparation program with the instruction and methods portion.
Q: What are some particular experiences in your work at the College that you really enjoyed?
A: I think the part that I really enjoyed most was working with the graduate students. The program began to expand towards the graduate students who were more national and international then they had been in the past at the University. That was exciting to work with students coming from virtually all over the globe. And very, very good students. And I wasn’t that far off from my own degree so I really identified with those students. That was a pleasure and to help them look at research, research design and data analysis from a perspective that many of them had not thought of before. Computer data analysis was relatively new and it was all mainframe computer data analysis, so there was a lot of excitement.
I liked working with the undergraduates too. The work with undergraduates was totally in secondary teacher preparation. I had a colleague, Professor Jim Okey who came here the same year I did, although he was a little further along in his career, you know five or six years ahead of me. He came here as an associate professor and had a lot of experience. He became my mentor. And we worked with all the secondary education students. We were the secondary teacher prep program, the two of us and of course, with graduate assistants. We designed new courses in curriculum and instruction. Later on, we began to phase in the use of the microcomputer in the schools and so forth. We worked with public schools all over the state. We spent a lot of time out helping public schools with their science curriculum development and with evaluating those programs.
Q: What was one of the biggest challenges you had to overcome during your position as either professor or department head in science education?
A: Well, I think as a young professor, the challenge was developing a focus. There were things going on in a lot of areas, but I think particularly in your research, you had to settle on a focus. And in my case that became looking at teacher preparation, the line of work I did on model analysis. Analyzing feedback to teachers, etc., to try to influence their behaviors actually grew out of the work that I did at Colorado and the work of Ron Anderson, my major professor. So focusing was a challenge.
Another focus was diagnostic prescriptive learning – diagnosing students, giving them feedback in relation to the status of their learning and then helping them with remedial strategies: self remediation, prescribed remediation. So, I had two avenues of research I carried along and lots of time to think about it, even to this day, where I should have gone with that? I ended up going into administration and that kind of research goes by the wayside. There’s still a lot of work to do in those areas and a lot of work is being done. That was a challenge.
In administration, the challenge was providing resources for the faculty and the programs. Almost anything you do nowadays has tremendous resource requirement. Now that resource might be time, it might be support, but that all translates into dollars. And so that was a challenge, acquiring those resources through two main avenues of revenue strains. One would be grants—we tried to support people to get as many grants funded as we could and the other is through state resources. I had to compete with arguments from other colleges to make sure that the president and vice presidents were channeling funds our way.
I always got along well with faculty in the department, in the school and eventually in my role as Dean of the College because I had a lot of respect for faculty. I understood the College enough because I more or less grew up in the College. My career didn’t go from university to university to university. I went from position to position to position in the same university, which is somewhat unique. That’s usually not the way people develop a career in higher education. I think that helped me because I really understood the college culture of the University, and ultimately, the culture of the state even though I’m not a native Georgian. I began to understand the politics of the state: who the major players were and what the goals were of various players.
Q: Tell us about how you became Dean.
A: I came into the dean’s office for a one year appointment I believe, in 1991 when Dean (Alphonse) Buccino took a leave of absence to go to Washington. I was appointed as interim dean and he come back for a year or so, then decided to retire and I was appointed to the position in ’94 as a regular appointment and served for five more years. I was in the dean’s office for a total of six years.
Q: What events stand out to you as being critical in the development of the College of Education during those years??
A: That’s interesting. The College is one of the largest colleges of education in the nation and is so diverse… to pick one particular thing is difficult. I think that, from my perspective, one of the most successful aspects over the six years I was Dean was our ability to recruit outstanding faculty members.
When we would compete for faculty members with other major universities around the United States, when we were doing a search, we were getting our top pick time after time. People wanted to come to the University of Georgia. I think that it was because we were providing an environment of support and trust and high expectation in which people wanted to work. That’s the kind of culture that we were providing in the College. And that was not just limited to my years in the dean’s office. Prior to that, during Buccino’s time in the dean’s office, I think was a good recruiting period of time, too. So, the College of Ed for more than a dozen years, recruited excellent faculty. And I suspect it’s doing the same today. I’m just a little bit out of touch with that.
So I think that was one of the things, if you ask what was pivotal, you began to get people with a very, very broad experience in terms of the kinds of institutions they were coming from, the kinds of major professors they had worked with and how they had set themselves up to pursue a career in higher education. I think that impact is there today and will last for many years.
Faculty became much more diverse, both in terms of gender and race, and of course, that was one of our goals was to develop a diverse faculty. And we expected then that the student body would become more diverse as a result of that. We wanted to keep the faculty diversity out ahead of the student diversity because we thought one would influence the other in a very positive way.
We worked a lot on faculty salaries in those years and put a lot of resources in the faculty. I thought about how we could have some very creative ways of… sort of capturing resources from positions, from overhead funds, etc., and working them into faculty salaries so that our faculty felt like that they were rewarded and appreciated in the jobs that they did.
I think, although it’s not in place now and for whatever reason when Louis came in as dean, he decided that he didn’t want to have the school structure in place, we had the four schools and every department was in a school. From my perspective, over those years, that worked very well and it allowed the departments to function as academic units. They become the functioning unit of the college. If you use a biological model, they’re like the cells. That’s where everything happened. Everything else was a combination of those functioning units. We had them organized into administrative units purely for budgeting purposes and the other administrative things that go along with that and really tried to enhance the academic nature of the departments.
A lot of it was… what you might call, discipline-oriented units… science education, math education, and so forth with the focus on content learning. There weren’t very many institutions then and probably fewer now that had a content-learning focus. And that served us very well. We were in a university that had content departments in arts and sciences for example and other places were that was held up as the identity of the unit. And so, our unit shared that identity, we shared it with biological sciences, chemistry, mathematics, history, languages and so forth. I think that was a major strength of the College of Education through the years that I was there. And still is.
In your own area, you’re not doing a degree in curriculum or instruction, you’re doing a degree in science… that’s the content learning and everything else kind of packs underneath that.
There were a lot of pivotal things that… the influence on diversity—gender and racial, and cultural diversity… broadening out the…I don’t mean this in a real negative way, but I think the College had grown up from its origins a hundred years ago and was more or less or somewhat, I would say, parochial…you know or regional. Regional maybe is a better word. That’s not quite as negative. And I think that that the College grew into something that became much more than this… became very international. It attracted students, faculty members, recognition internationally.
Q: You’ve mentioned the faculty members during that time a lot and their qualifications and being tops in their field. Are there any that stand out as being really influential to the College or to their field during your time there?
A: Yeah, I don’t want to slight anybody, but there were people that in that time I looked to for input, guidance and had a deep respect for. Carl Glickman would be one. Carl is retired now… I don’t know if you know Carl…
Q: I’ve heard the name.
A: Carl’s area is supervision. It’s kind of interesting after I talked about our strength in content area. Carl was much more of a generalist. We had that balance between the specialists… content specific individuals and the generalists. But Carl Glickman was certainly a person that I relied on heavily for deep insights into the issues in the College and particularly how those issues intersected politically and culturally with other issues in Georgia.
Don Schneider was another person in the College who is 100 percent committed to the College. So, if you needed somebody to really work on something and see it through, Don would be the person that I would rely on. He thought about things differently than a person like Carl Glickman. Don was much more nuts and bolts. ‘How do we put it together and get it done and win,’ was Don’s approach, where Carl was more the philosophical person.
I mentioned Jim Okey. Jim had a tremendous impact on me. Jim was my mentor and also I think he had a broad influence in the College. He came here in science education and ultimately went into instructional technology or what became the instructional technology department and worked with the implementation of the microcomputer when people weren’t even aware that they had come into existence. He pushed the students and pushed the faculty to do that.
There were people who I liked to just sit and talk to sometimes… just in a closed office about teacher education. Joel Taxel was one of those individuals. George Stanic was another one of those. And it isn’t because they were any better thinkers than somebody else… but it’s just that you could sit down and you know, one of them might be sitting on the floor and the other one sitting in a chair and pretty soon it was, you know seven o’clock and we should’ve gone home. It’s those kinds of conversations that I recall.
Al Buccino, the dean that preceded me, had a tremendous impact on the College and on me. Al did not get along well with a lot of the faculty members. He was very demanding… thought sometimes in different veins than most faculty members. He really held out for excellence. He had no tolerance for anything other than excellence. And even though he would not do it in a way that would make other people comfortable, he moved the College along in the right direction. I worked under him for a number of years as a school director and when I was department head. We reported directly to the Dean then. He had a lot of influence on me. He thought about things differently than what the College had for a number of years. So his tenure… he was in there 10 years, which was quite a long time for a dean to be in a position… was not always smooth, but it was always in a positive direction.
And there are other people… I don’t want to slight anybody. I worked a lot with Sylvia Hutchinson when I came into the dean’s office as interim dean because our associate dean was on another assignment off campus. I had to appoint an acting associate dean. I went to Sylvia right away and asked her if she would do it. Sylvia had a way of working with people across campus and also within the College that made a lot of things work that up until that time hadn’t been working. It wasn’t so much that we changed the goals, we just changed the way we interacted with the people. She was very, very helpful in the College.
Q: What advice would you give to the people who are studying or working at the College today.
A: Well, I think I would say… first of all, be committed. Be absolutely committed to the profession. It’s not a job. It’s not a paycheck. It really becomes your whole existence as a teacher or as a professor. And start that right way. As soon as you decide to become a teacher, it has to be total commitment to that and you do that in your studies. Take advantage of the College of Education at the University of Georgia, which is an excellent place for a teacher to prepare for a career. Take advantage of the people here. Take advantage of the curriculum here. Take advantage of the experiences that can be provided by the University, so that you can become a teacher that really does represent excellence in the field.
I don’t know how you get a 19-year old to listen to that because there are so many other things competing for their energies and their time, but in the long run, if I could, you know, from the perspective of an uncle… I’d say commit yourself to it right now. Commit yourself to your studies. I think your chances of personal success and certainly your chances of having an impact on schools and your future students can be greater if you do that.
Q: And still in the advice mode, what about for new graduate students entering the College in research or other areas?
A: Well, you know, first of all, I’d give the same talk to them about commitment. I think graduate students are… just by their very nature…committed. There’s been kind of a winnowing out if you will of the people who don’t have that much commitment, who don’t want to spend as much time and energy on their studies. So the commitment would still be there. Graduate students need to think about several things. One, who are you going to work with? It has such an influence on you. You know, here I am…66 years old, into retirement and I still think about my major professor and the impact he had on me, in my studies, in my career, and even on the way I think about life today. So be pretty selective about the individuals with whom you decide to study. A graduate student should be selective, particularly at the doctoral level of study because that collection of individuals, headed by your major professor but your other professors and your committee also, will really shape who you become as a professional. And somewhat, who you become as a person.
Of course, select good schools. That would come first. I’d recommend the University of Georgia and the College of Education to any student. There aren’t places that are really that much better. There are places that are different… and if you say you can’t start at the University of Georgia because I want to be this kind of person, I can understand that. But somebody else might not want to study at Stanford because they want to be this… maybe here at the University of Georgia.
I come back to the notion of focusing again. Don’t spread yourself too thin across all the opportunities that you have. I don’t believe in too narrow of a specialization. I do believe in really focusing on some things, but if you spread yourself too thin, you don’t have much impact anywhere. If you focus on some particular areas and put your energy, your time and your resources into that, then you can have an impact and I think… in some ways… it’s maybe more productive in terms of advancement.
Also, if you have a focus… something that is recognizable… I don’t know the provost at Georgia now. He was a dean when I was there. Arnett Mace. I never worked under him but the former vice president that I worked under, Bill Prokasy, when we were trying to recognize, promote faculty members, he looked for what he called impact. What kind of an impact has this individual had? Tell me what the impact is. Show me what the impact of that individual is. I don’t care if they’ve done it over one year or 10 years, what’s the major impact. And I don’t think that you can have impact unless you focus. So that would be something I’d say to graduate students.
Q: How about for new faculty members.
A: I used to have some interesting conversations with incoming faculty. I interviewed every faculty member that we hired for the six years I was in the dean’s office, and then before that as school director and department head, so I’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of faculty members. And some of the conversations were interesting, but one of the things, and this might not even relate much to the College, but one of the things I told them was that you need to be thinking about retirement. I was a pretty long ways away from retirement even in those years. But our world is such today that if you don’t begin to plan that in the first job you get, then things don’t work out too well.
But that’s kind of an aside. You know, as I think about it, it might not be too much different than the advice I’d give to a graduate student. Select the people you’re going to work with. You’re new coming in here there are people who can serve you well as a mentor. See if you can align with those individuals. You can do that in formal ways. We help people develop mentor/mentee relationships and those are powerful relationships, connecting with faculty members. You’re coming here for a reason and that reason is we think you’re the best of 60 or 80 people who’ve applied for this job from literally all over the world and you need to have some sense of that. So do it. Get with it! Find your niche here… it’s a big place. Find a place you can work.
Again, you’re not going to be able to know everything that’s going on in the College, probably even in a whole career that you spend here, but there is a place for everybody to work. And apply yourself. Research is a form of scholarship and we expect scholarship from everybody. In the main, that’s published research. You know, you already have an area. We’ve looked at your dissertation, we’ve talked to your major professor, so we know what you’re interested in. We think that can be supported here, we think that can fit here. So you need to start immediately.
Instruction is another form of scholarship. Think of it as scholarship and do it in a way that demonstrates the scholarship of that. Find a way to combine the two. Find a way to combine your teaching and your research, the two forms of scholarship. Many times you can leverage one against the other. You can apply your research in your classroom. You can conduct your research in your classroom. Then, yell if you need help. There are lots of people here to help! Don’t be embarrassed! The College is, in some sense, a kind of family structure… extended family. There are people who are close to you that really want you to succeed. They are willing to help you. So, reach out to them.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t talked about during the interview?
A: Yeah, I think that…I don’t know… maybe this is advice to the College, advice to the faculty, or advice to new faculty. Often we would do things for a reason, but many times, we would do things as a means to another end. And sometimes we never get beyond the means. And I think there were times that we might have spent all of our time, all of our energies, on the means and never really leveraged that into the next step.
Let’s take the diversity issue as one. We spent a tremendous amount of time trying to accomplish more diversity in the College. As I think back over that, we were very successful in some areas, unsuccessful in others, but across the board, a fair amount of success there. And as I think about that, I could say well, that really was a means to something greater. You can’t just say, “Okay, we have accomplished a more diverse faculty.’ But for what reason?
And you might argue, ‘Well, because it’s good, because it’s right…’ and I say ‘yes, but it has to be to some end.’ And I’m not sure if at this point, from my perspective now and I sit way back from the College at this point in my life, not that I’m disinterested in it, but I just don’t engage heavily in it, I’m not sure that the ends… the ultimate purpose for focusing so much on developing a broader base faculty has ever been identified or accomplished.
Again, that’s one example … you could look at other examples. You could say, “Well… we want to recruit eminent scholars into the College of Education or have more research professors’ or whatever. That is a lofty goal, but it is also a means to something else. What should come out of this? It can’t just be, ‘Well, we’re going to reward the faculty for things they’ve already done…’ Of course, that’s part of it and somebody selected as a research professor, they are certainly rewarded for that, but once you have a collection of you know, 10 or 15 research professors in the College, now what? Something should come out of that. That’s probably a level of maturation that the College hasn’t reached yet…maybe that’s in the next 100 years. How do we take the successes that we’ve had in putting together this outstanding faculty, this outstanding student body… which has been our goal for several decades now and say, ‘Okay now what are we going to do with this?’ That’s what I’m saying. That’s the challenge for the next century.
Q: Thank you so much. It has been really interesting. I feel like I’ve learned a lot more about the College of Education in the last decade.
A: The College is a great place. People used to ask me what my goals were for the College and I would say, ‘I only have two goals: one is excellence and the other is recognition.’ Those were my goals. Everything else in the College has to be the goals of the functioning units of the faculty. But they can very easily fit under the goals of excellence and recognition. I can hold out for excellence as a general goal, but it can be within your domain that we won’t settle for anything less than excellence in what you want to do.
And then we need to work together for the recognition that should come and I think during my time in there and during Buccino’s time in there… that recognition did come to the College of Education. I don’t know if that’s been sustained. I mean, I don’t interact on the national level. But the College became much better known nationally and internationally through that period of the ’80s and ’90s than they ever had before because we worked at it. The grant money, the awards, the national recognition that faculty received, the number of individuals who were presenting papers at national meetings and having papers in the most reputable journals in each of their fields increased tremendously over that period of time.
Dr. Russell A. Yeany
Ph.D., Science Education
University of Colorado
Oral Histories
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