A Dream of My Dissertation Chair
I think the last I've heard from Dr. Scamell was around 1999, 5 years after my last job offer from academia. I remember Richard was referencing the use of Google in his communication. I've written to him on and off for years since. I have a recurring segment on dreams in my journal posts. This most recent dream I was trying to convince him to do joint research, and he turned me down, basically accusing me of trying to change him. It didn't sound like Richard, but in fact I had offered to put his name on papers stemming from my dissertation research, and he turned me down, pointing out that it was my work. In fact, he served primarily as my general editor and cheerleader of sorts.I'm not saying being my dissertation chair was easy. One of my members of my committee, an org behavior professor (DS), almost resigned. I was doing data collection, and he had given me one of his local contacts, a small business executive. So the contact agreed to help with certain stipulations like a self-addressed, stamped envelope for individual questionnaires. Keep in mind the committee for protection of human subjects already had stipulated written notice (lead sheet of the questionnaire) that participation was voluntary. Since the questionnaire was bulky, postage was nontrivial for the 20-odd questionnaires in question. So I made an in-person visit to distribute the questionnaires. What pissed me off was how he went out of his way to say how he didn't care one way or the other whether employees participated, the proverbial kiss of death. It's not what he said but how he said it. I would have appreciated it if he had been supportive of the research but added participation was voluntary. I think I ended up getting only 1 or 2 questionnaires back, and that one was delivered well after my cutoff date. One of the perks I had offered for company participation was a custom write-up of results. I don't recall what I did or said in the aftermath but DS was pissed off by my reaction and threatened to resign from the committee. Richard didn't apologize for me; I had to personally beg for forgiveness, But it wouldn't surprise me if Richard helped smooth things over behind the scenes.
He was still an associate professor when I graduated in 1986. He has since been promoted to full professor, has been involved in athletic affairs (e.g., the hiring of sports coaches) and apparently has more recently has served as an associate dean for student affairs. (I may have to take back my recent tweet that every Dean of Students I've met is a son of a bitch, because that's not Scamell.
Scamell had not started off as an MIS professor; he had gotten his statistics/operations research PhD from the University of Texas and joined the UH faculty when I was starting college. He told us if he had not become a professor, he may have become a minister. I think he was also in the Big Brothers program. He used to say his nephew would help him pick out the more elaborate diagrams appearing in assignments or tests, and we would beg him to leave his nephew out of it.
Why did I pick Scamell? I was probably closer to Michael Parks. Parks is one of the most gifted professors I've ever met, certainly one of the coolest. He was a huge admirer of Alan Turing, one of the most brilliant mathematicians and an early computer scientist. I recall he initially tried to convince me to apply for an alternative program at UH; at the time they were glutted with ABD's (I would become ABD #16 and PhD #4, one week behind #3). At the time, they were teaching COBOL in the undergraduate service course, and Parks was teaching most of the business majors in one of those huge auditoriums. I audited one of his classes before I started as a teaching fellow. He was freaking brilliant; he even invented a skit with students playing parts involving the operating system, job queues, etc. I don't know how his teaching ratings went; ironically, he never taught one of my graduate classes, but I spent hours talking to him. I remember emailing him in the late 90's, and he said (sour grapes?) "Why aren't you writing to Richard? He was your chair."
Richard taught my graduate database seminars; I've often mentioned I started with Oracle 2.0 when documentation came in 3-ring binders and sqlplus was called "ufi" (user-friendly interface). UH was running Oracle on Amdahl (an IBM mainframe compatible) , and quire frankly the computing center DBA sucked. The database we used was almost always down, and I recall the entire class finished with us all filing incompletes. It'd no mere coincidence when forced out of academics in a recession, I tried to reinvent myself as an Oracle DBA.
Richard also taught our MIS research seminars. MIS, which arguably started at the University of Minnesota, included applied behavioral research in its roots. I became obsessed with methodological issues in assessing information systems. Whereas one might argue that could fit with Parks' interests in cybernetics, John Ricketts had a working paper with his mentor Milt Jenkins on an MIS satisfaction measure. I wasn't aware of any behavioral research Parks had done.
Richard also excelled where I had notably not--in the classroom. He was much more personable. I don't deny his competence and due diligence, but to a certain extent, I didn't want to be perceived as the student's friend but as his mentor, and that role sometimes required telling students what they didn't want to hear. I remember Richard once came to class and admitted to being unprepared and said something to the effect "We are all in this together. I'm learning as well as you guys." While some might find that as refreshingly honest and charming, it bothered the hell out of me. I was convinced that I outworked everyone, even all my former professors, in the classroom, but my student ratings (based on unreliable, invalid single items) ranged from low to average. It had nothing to do with learning performance, the nature and extent of what I taught. I never spent a day as a professional COBOL programmer, but I've debugged hundreds of COBOL program bugs that student IT assistants couldn't handle. Maybe Richard picked up on my attitude and resented it.
I was not Richard's favorite, That was probably Umanath, with whom he later wrote a data modeling text. There was some honorary society (not Beta Gamma Sigma, which I've belonged to for ages) that our department had promoted. I wanted it but was nor awarded, but Umanath's nomination was heavily promoted. I think I probably most resented Scamell's seeming lack of support during my first job search. Our first 2 graduates went to Arizona State and Iowa State. The best school I got a campus visit from was the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, not even in the same class as the land grant school (UW Madison) Scamell told me I wouldn't have a problem finding a job; that was true with almost 12 openings for every new PhD--but the better schools were more competitive. And despite being in two doctoral consortia, I had only 2 campus visits and 2 offers. When one of the senior faculty my first semester threatened my tenure, I resented Scamell's seeming indifference. And then I learned Umanath got a job offer from Penn State. (I think he's now at the University of Cincinnati.)
No, I don't blame Scamell for the failure of my academic career. I think I resent a number of things, including the fact I wasn't able to interest fellow faculty interested in doing joint research. Maybe they thought I had too dominant a personality. A few students appreciated my hard work in the classroom, but I had students who admitted learning more in my classes but didn't want my contract renewed at the university.
I think it's a shame I and my good friend Bruce Breeding (Scamell was also his chair) left academia in less than a decade. I think I would have done better in a higher quality college, but I think I just wasn't warned about the nature of academic politics. I was not living a death wish in academics, but I certainly wasn't aware of the politics.
BEB Update
I've been updating UH office mate Bruce Breeding's status since early June's major stroke; these updates are summarized by wife Susan's daily blog updatesBruce continues to make progress after returning to the hospital to have some restitching of a back skull patch area. Susan also reports that Bruce has been fighting off a staph infection related to one of his IV's. She says that Bruce's new nutrition feed is being better tolerated and Bruce is more intensely engaged with visitors, including lingering handshakes, even at one point making au audible sigh for the first time in weeks. He's struggling to find ways to communicate given post-stroke complications, mouthing prayers and hymns.
