Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives

8. Democratizing Learning: University Outreach

• eight • Democratizing Learning University Outreach During the spring of 1925 George Petrie added a new chapter to his illustrious Auburn career. Although he had lectured in the community and state frequently after returning from Johns Hopkins , in the mid-1920s he introduced his current events course to a broader audience. He began writing columns for the Montgomery Advertiser and offering commentary on the state’s first radio station, Auburn’s WAPI. In a sense, none of his endeavors better fit a land grant university. The Morrill Act established land grant colleges in order to take agricultural knowledge to ordinary Americans. In 1887 the Hatch Act mandated agricultural research as a central function of these institutions. Nearly three decades later, the Smith-Lever Act added agricultural extension to their mission. Extension and home demonstration agents created by these laws began to communicate new discoveries directly to farmers and their families. This venture was a phenomenal success. Petrie simply applied the extension idea to the humanities, making discussion of current events in a rich historical context accessible to nonstudents in nonclassroom settings and thereby endearing himself and Auburn to a new urban audience. Petrie’s democratic assumption about learning and his innovative use of new techniques to accomplish it matched my instincts perfectly. Previously democratizing learning 199 engaged in outreach at Samford (which had begun its own groundbreaking ministerial extension program in the 1940s), Auburn offered me a much larger stage on which to develop these ideas. Talking on the Rubber Chicken Circuit My metamorphosis occurred in three stages. The first consisted of an uncoordinated avalanche of speeches. Looking back, I can superimpose thematic order on them, although it hardly occurred to me at the time. Topics that engaged my conscience, teaching, and writing—poverty, race, politics, tax and education reform, Alabama’s 1901 Constitution, the state’s economy, and culture (religion, music, folkways, literature)—dominated my presentations. That motivation partly explained why I so often overextended. I felt passionately about these issues, I loved the state, and I wanted it to change for the better. Belief in so simple a rejuvenation owed much to confidence in my ability to persuade. All those debating victories, all that graduate study of rhetorical theory and persuasion left me with exaggerated confidence in the power of ideas and argument to overcome entrenched political and economic elites. If my ideas were superior to those of my opponents, if I prepared thoroughly for each speech, if I spoke simply, if I carefully organized my arguments so audiences could remember them, if I used emotionally riveting examples, if I rooted my remarks in the familiar parables and ethics found in the Bible, then I would certainly carry the day for my way of thinking, or so I thought. It took a long time for me to realize that all those thousands I addressed were mainly members of the choir. They came to hear largely because they already believed. Nonetheless, for years I traveled the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking to Rotary, Civitan, Exchange, and Kiwanis clubs; to women’s clubs, Junior Leagues, patriotic societies, churches, synagogues; at public schools, private schools, colleges, and universities; to business audiences, school superintendents, teachers ; Planned Parenthood, state agencies, councils, and task forces; to LeadershipBirmingham ,Wiregrass,Montgomery,andAlabama.Intime, these speeches began to cohere, as in a series I did for Vulcan Materials Corporation employees on southern culture or to various leadership seminars about the state’s tortured economic and political past. Public policy disputes often drove my speaking agenda. Between January and April 1992, as the equity funding lawsuit involving education moved through state courts and dominated press coverage, I spoke seventeen times about tax and education reform. During 2000, despite Wickham Henkel’s 200 chapter 8 scowling troll and the large NO! she wrote on the front of my schedule book, I spoke forty-two times, mainly about the dreadful 1901 Constitution that helped impoverish one-fifth of Alabama’s population. When not speaking, I sped across the state to board meetings: as chair of the Alabama Historical Commission; as member of the state Democratic Party ’s Leadership Council; as a founding member of the Alabama Poverty Project and Sowing Seeds of Hope in Perry County; as board member of A+ (the education reform coalition) and Voices for Alabama’s Children. Beyond Alabama , I served for six years on the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation Board (in Winston-Salem, North Carolina...