By Gary Topping–
The writer Wallace Stegner founded a famous creative writing program at Stanford University. Some of its alumni were illustrious: Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Tom McGuane and Ken Kesey. But Stegner became increasingly frustrated with his students during the Youth Rebellion of the 1960s: “They came to me with answers, not questions,” he complained, “and you simply can’t teach people like that.” Eventually he resigned in futility and poured some of his frustration into his later novels. One gets some of that in the character of the hippie girl Shelley in Angle of Repose, but he gave it both barrels in All the Little Live Things, a really bitter novel.
I often think about Stegner when musing about my own career teaching history at Salt Lake Community College. During the early 1990s the college mounted an ambitious program of expansion and professionalization of its faculty, requiring that all professors have at least a master’s degree and revamping its liberal arts curriculum to articulate fully with the University of Utah. My friend John McCormick, with whom I had worked at the Utah State Historical Society, was the first professional historian to be hired, and he engineered my own hiring the following year, 1991. Together, we set out to try to make SLCC “a real place,” as John liked to put it. (Incidentally, another of the hotshot professionals they hired that year—in the writing program—was Marianna Hopkins, who eventually became my wife.)
Our bread and butter in the history department was the American Institutions requirement in the Utah Higher Education system, a group of three courses, one of which has to be on the transcript of every aspirant for a degree in all public colleges and universities. One is a political science course, American National Government, the second is an economic history course, and the third—and by far the most popular–is History 1700, a one-semester survey of United States history. At the beginning I taught several different courses, but after a year or two John McCormick became our Dean and I became the senior member of the history faculty; thereafter I taught nothing but History 1700. It became my bread and butter, but more accurately it became my Mission.
Every semester when I stood in front of my classes for the first time, I looked out over a sea of blank stares. Tabula rasa. Like Stegner’s students, they had no questions. Unlike Stegner’s students, they had no answers either. The only thing they saw in History 1700 was another hurdle to be crossed on their way to a degree. My task, as I saw it, was to elevate their thinking to see history as an avenue to meaning and understanding, rather than just an obstacle to be overcome. I would assure them that they did not have to follow me in that way of thinking if they chose not to—and many indeed did not—and that if they just did the reading and writing assignments and passed the exams, I would see that they got their History 1700 ticket punched so they could move on to their degree. But wouldn’t it be so much better, I would challenge them, if they let me show them how to get something larger and more enduring out of the experience?
It was, in retrospect, a herculean task I had set for myself. I couldn’t give them the answers because they weren’t even asking the questions. So I first had to suggest questions that they might find intriguing, then help them find their way to answers to those questions.
Let’s look at history, I would suggest, as the study of an evolutionary process that can show us how the world we are living in today came to be what it is. I promise you, I would say, that every day before I begin my lecture I will explain to you how the material I’m going to cover is a part of that process, so that I’m not asking you just to memorize a bunch of isolated facts; those facts are part of a pattern. Of course, many did not rise to the challenge and opted for a semester of boredom rather than intellectual engagement, and true to my promise, I punched their History 1700 ticket.
How successful was that approach? Well, it certainly wasn’t a universal success. And even some of what I thought were my successes may not have been that successful. After I had retired, my wife had a shoulder replacement, and one of her nurses turned out to be one of my former students. I didn’t remember her, but she started gushing about what a great teacher I had been. “He just stood up there and told stories,” she emoted. I winced. Was that what I was doing, I asked myself.
You can lead a horse to water. . . .
(The accompanying photograph depicts the menagerie that was the SLCC Social Sciences department in about 1993. John McCormick is at the far-right end of the back row, looking very professorial; I am at the opposite end of the same row, with shades and headband, looking as unprofessorial as possible.)
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
