HOWARD MAHAN REFLECTS
On October 21, 1992, Professor Dan Rogers interviewed Professor Howard Mahan for this newsletter. The longest serving faculty member of the Department, Professor Mahan will be retiring at the end of the 1992-1993 academic year.
Rogers: I'd like to begin by asking where you grew up and where you went to school. 
Mahan: I was born in New York City. At the age of four, my parents decided that I shouldn't grow up in the city, that I should grow up in the country. So they moved to a suburban New Jersey town, which they considered country, but which of course was suburbs. I grew up in a town called Roselle, New Jersey, 18,000 population, and my school class was about 200. So it was a small town in many ways. 
R: How far from New York City was it? 
M: My father would get on the train in the morning and go to New York and it was about a half hour, three quarters of an hour train ride. I guess it was about 18 miles from the city. My family thought it was country because they were New Yorkers, but actually it wasn't country, it was a bunch of apartments put on grass plots. 
R: You went to high school in this same town, and then you went to college at Drew? 
M: Yes. 
R: What was Drew like? 
M: When I went to Drew, the student body at Brothers College was 415. To me that was one of my formative experiences, like my small town and small high school. These elements were important, and they affected the way I conducted myself here at the University of South Alabama. 
R: Would you recommend to students who had the choice that they should seek out that sort of college environment? 
M: It depends on the student. I encouraged all my daughters to go to a small liberal arts college. Two graduated from this university. 
R: I know you served in the Second World War. When did that experience come, before, during, or after college? 
M: I was a sophomore when I enlisted in the Army Air Force. Three years later I went back to resume my work at Drew. 
R: Did you receive the benefits of the GI Bill when you returned? 
M: Yes. It was great. I recommend it for everybody. 
R: How did the war change you? Were you a much different person when you came back? 
M: It was an important experience for me because I was not the same person when I was discharged. I went in a science major, interested in physics and engineering, and I came out very much concerned about questions in the humanities and social sciences. I tried a few subjects out and became a history major. A central concern of mine was why people have wars; could we learn how to prevent war? A little naive, perhaps, but that's what interested me. 
R: You say it's naive; I take it you never discovered the answer. 
M: I've been working all my life on the process by which the United States goes to war, but I don't have any magic answers. 
R: Did the war affect you in any way other than your specific area of study? Did it make you in general a more inquisitive person? Did it make you more cynical about human nature? 
M: The quality of my academic work after the war changed vastly, qualitatively and quantitatively, but especially qualitatively. I formed the opinion that the average college student loses a lot in education by not having work or service experiences. I thought that I had matured greatly by spending three years out of college, not necessarily in the military, but the military was part of it. I formed the opinion that college students could not learn much, qualitatively. The result was that I didn't want to teach at the college level. 
R: Why not? 
M: Because I felt the students were too immature and couldn't benefit sufficiently. I thought that education tended to be wasted on the typical college student. 
R: So you would never teach anywhere? 
M: No, no. While I was in graduate school, I took a job with the Fund for Adult Education in New York City. I became a research assistant to a man name named C. Hartley Grattan, who was writing a history of adult education. He was the one who told me about an interesting opportunity in Alabama, with the University of Alabama Extension Division. They were trying to establish a first-rate educational system for adults, and so I came to Mobile. 
R: Before we come back to Mobile, let me ask you why you chose to go to Columbia for graduate school? 
M: I didn't choose. I took a job with Western Electric as an assistant engineer. I had been a physics minor and I qualified for a job. It drove me crazy. It was not for me; perhaps some people would have enjoyed it. After a year and a half I realized I should have pursued my first objective, and that was to become a professor of history. I had been a history major in college, and several graduate schools accepted me after they saw my GRE scores. I decided that Columbia would be easier because it was closer to my home town. That was my best choice, even though I realized professors didn't make much money. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. 
R: Some people go to graduate school and it's a time of intellectual growth; for others it's primarily a period of professional training. Would you fit primarily into either of these categories? 
M: I had a very sound undergraduate education in history. But I was surprised how the intellectual stimulation of Columbia University preoccupied me more than I should have permitted it to. I read a lot of books that weren't history; I sat in on courses in literature and political science; I was just fascinated by the university as an institution and I lapped it up. I was on the GI Bill and I didn't have to work. I'm really grateful. That was a great intellectual experience. 
R: Allan Nevins was your dissertation director. Was he a great professional and intellectual influence on you? 
M: Nevins was indeed my doctoral dissertation director. And he was very kind to me. For a while, I was his research assistant. I learned a lot, but at the time I was professionally naive. I didn't understand what an important person he was. Richard Hofstadter was on my doctoral board, and I didn't understand what an important person he was in the profession. Dumas Malone was also on my doctoral board, but I did realize that he was the great Jeffersonian scholar. I did understand more about him, and I took a couple of his courses on the Old and New South. 
R: I can't imagine a more distinguished doctoral board. 
M: These three were influential, but there were others. One was Richard Morris, who was in colonial and revolutionary history. Another was Henry Steele Commager, who taught me constitutional history. He was an opinionated, fascinating man. 
R: You mentioned before that you came down to Mobile after finishing graduate school. 
M: When I came down to visit the university, they introduced me to the chairman of the department, Frank Owsley. Owsley asked me if I didn't want to go to the main campus in Tuscaloosa. I didn't realize it, but my Columbia degree was a nice credential. But I said no, I was really interested in adult education. I wanted to work at the University of Alabama Extension division. They had a promising program here in Mobile, and so I joined that in January 1954. 
R: So you've been in Mobile ever since January 1954? 
M: That's right. For ten years for the University of Alabama, and I was on the original faculty of the University of South Alabama in 1964. 
R: Did your beliefs about how adults were more willing and eager learners bear itself out in practice during those first ten years in Mobile? 
M: Yes. I was convinced that older students bring more to a course, and get more out of it, and are more interesting, often, for a faculty member. At the time my teaching experience led me to believe I was right about that. But after about six or seven years I began to realize that there would be a new university here, and I became interested and interested in the possibilities of creating a new institution of higher education. So, I stayed on, and I put aside my notions that only adults can really learn well. I decided I perhaps ought to try with students as callow as I was when I was a freshman. 
Incidentally, I am convinced now that very young students can develop qualitatively, but they have to be in the right kind of atmosphere with the right kind of academic leadership. You can't expect so much of them; they just haven't had the kinds of life experiences as adults. So if you take that into account, you can be very creative as a teacher. I think you can be very creative as a teacher at any level. 
R: What is the right kind of atmosphere, and the right kind of academic leadership? 
M: I've always thought that a university is a community of learning and that a student grows better academically, intellectually, ethically, morally, and philosophically in the context of a community of learning. Universities have to create that kind of stimulating, challenging community, and if you provide that, the students will develop very well. 
The problem is, how do you create that? This was perhaps the major preoccupation that I had. I didn't like big state schools at the time. In a way, I still don't. I did my best to promote this sense of community, and my wider objective was to help this university become one that represented the larger universe of learning and intellectual sophistication, and not just another provincial school. 
R: Dean Acheson called his memoirs Present at the Creation. You were really present before the creation of the University of South Alabama. What was it like building a university among the pine trees? 
M: I must admit that President Whiddon, who was also the product of a small Methodist liberal arts undergraduate college, was sympathetic with many of my views. He had been the director of the University of Alabama center in Mobile while I was teaching here. I think he rather sympathized with some of my views. I believe I was more radical in what I would like to have to have done here, and I was disappointed in not being able to achieve as much as I wanted to. I don't bear anybody any malice for that, but it just wasn't to be that we would have a program, say, like the University of California at Santa Cruz. 
R: What kinds of programs are those? 
M: They divided their universities into small colleges. Yale uses this approach. There's a headmaster for each college, and you go to a college. What they're attempting to instill is a sense of community, and within that context, they're trying to promote the highest quality of learning. I think that's the way to do it. 
R: Why don't some people think that would work at an institution like South Alabama? 
M: At the time, I didn't know enough to propose the way it would work. I made some proposals, but in retrospect I realize now they wouldn't have worked. I also think that not too many people were sympathetic or appreciated what I was trying to do. In fact, I think they probably thought I was a crank and in some cases were trying to avoid me. I just didn't know enough; if I could have gone back and done it again, I think I would have been able to make sounder proposals and we might have done well. Then the university began to explode and got beyond any major influence I could have had. 
R: Would we be far too big now to put on the college system, or is Santa Cruz as big as South Alabama? 
M: They keep the college sizes down to four or five hundred students each. When they grow, they grow the number of colleges. I like a lot of things about that, because a certain number of identifiable faculty are responsible for the intellectual development of a certain number of students. There's a responsibility there that we don't have at a big institution like this. You can't say, "This group of students didn't do so well, and you taught them; therefore you need to revise and think over what you're doing." You can't do that here. 
R: Could you talk about the History Department. I assume it started at some point with one person, and that was you, and how did it grow from there? 
M: We recruited two European historians, one was Taber Green, who had his bachelor's degree from Birmingham- Southern, and the other was Bill Speck, who had his undergraduate degree from Stetson. I find in retrospect that the faculty that have appealed to me most generally are the ones from small liberal arts colleges at the undergraduate level. Not always. It's the individual that counts. I was also involved in appointing other people in other fields, because we didn't really have any "departments" then. I looked particularly for people who had experience in foreign countries and foreign languages. 
R: Why? 
M: Mobile is a port town without a port mentality. I thought that if we were going to work in a port town, it would be important for us to have global perspectives in the faculty. Others went along with me in this, and I think we have a rather sophisticated faculty in many ways. Unlike many other institutions in this state, our faculty tend not to be just from the South, from Southern graduate schools. In the history department we had one faculty member from Canada, and that person is Chinese and teaches Chinese history. And when students take Professor Chuang, they take not only Chinese history, but also a Chinese gentleman. 
We also had a faculty member in this department named E. Lewis B. Curtis, who had a master's degree from the University of London, which I thought was the equivalent of a doctorate. In fact, one of the people who sat on his examining board was Arnold Toynbee. I mention these two individuals to suggest that we were interested in a universal kind of intellectual development, and not just a provincial one. We didn't want this to be a provincial college. I think President Whiddon was very sympathetic to that objective. 
R: To close, what do you see as being some of the major strengths and weaknesses of the University of South Alabama? 
M: I think one of the strengths of the University is that we do have communities of learning. For example, from what I can understand, the school of nursing has a really fine spirit to it, and there's a lot of enthusiasm over there for developing their professional skills. And I suspect that the fact that it's not that big a college helps it to foster the kinds of values that I would think are important. 
The development of our graduate program has created another small-group learning environment, and I think that's been very good. The relationships between the graduate students and the faculty are very good. The development of our Phi Alpha Theta program is very promising, because there's a lot of interchange among faculty and students. I think those are the kinds of things that are very promising about the University. 
I don't know if I should say this, but I'm not sure that our fraternity and sorority system promote the kinds of academic values that have concerned me during my tenure here at the University. I think they could, but I really wish that instead of a fraternity house, we had instead, say, a German house, where people interested in German history, German language, and German studies could live and work and discuss their concerns with each other. The same with French, the same with Spanish. I would like to see our history majors have a particular place, a Phi Alpha Theta house. If we could have done that, it would have been fine, but since we're in Alabama, which places tremendous value on the fraternity and sorority experience, I guess it was just a vain hope to expect anything else could happen. 
Some decisions that were made at the beginning were really good. For example, we opted for small classes and made small classrooms. That promoted a more personal interchange between faculty and students. It promoted the kind of teaching that you can't get when you have 100 or 500 students in the classroom. Because of that, I think that our university is stronger than most of the other institutions in the state. We have people with doctorates teaching freshmen. And we have that happening in small groups. If I had a child and had to recommend that this child go to a public institution in Alabama, I would certainly send him to the University of South Alabama. We have a lot of good things going for us. 
I haven't exhausted the list, but that's an example of the kind of thing that makes us distinctive in the state. Some of the colleges are important. The Medical College is a great advantage to us. One of the strongest things we have going for us is that we're in the top one hundred universities and colleges for endowment. President Whiddon tells me we're going up on the scale; we're increasing our ranking. That's very promising for the future. He's quite pleased at that, and I'm pleased for him. I'm pleased for the University. 
R: That's a nice positive note to end on. Thank you very much.