After a few months of settling into our new home in Dearborn, we turned our attention to what we had determined would be a priority as we began my working career: we applied to receive an adoptive child.  Having gone through fertility tests back in Pittsburgh, and being told that I had a low probability of fathering a child, we agreed that we did not want to remain childless and would adopt as soon as it was practicable.  We decided to proceed with the Childrens’ Aid Society in Detroit.  In those days a lot of babies were still being given up for adoption, and it was fairly easy to become adoptive parents.  Accordingly, in the spring of 1966 we were called to come see a baby girl, only six weeks old.  We saw her and immediately agreed that this was the one for us, and within a short time the necessary approvals were signed and we brought her home with us.  We of course had much to learn, but an empty place in our lives had been filled, and we rejoiced in nurturing a new life and seeing the rapid development from delicate, completely dependent infant into a little girl with her own personality.  Laquita, especially, threw herself into motherhood, and, as one of the elders at our church commented, she blossomed and glowed.  Little Liann Kathleen was walking by nine months old, and it was startling to see this tiny little girl toddling around like an animated doll.

Meanwhile, back at the campus, I was going through another kind of growth phase, as I plunged into a completely new set of literature and language courses, not only in the medieval era which was my specialty, but in linguistics and comprehensive Surveys of British Literature.   The total student population was only about 600 when I first arrived, so classes were small, ranging from fewer than ten to maybe 15-20.  Since there were so few faculty and the administrative structure was still developing, faculty members were called on to perform duties that later became the responsibility of professional administrative staff, such as advising students and keeping academic records.  We were even called on to go out recruiting with the director of admissions and registration at the campus, so it’s not surprising that I became the advisor and academic record keeper for the English Discipline, a job that quickly grew into my being in charge of academic petitions for the whole of Literature, Science, and the Arts.  This job led to my being recruited later by the Chairman of LS&A to coordinate the building of a curriculum to accommodate freshmen and sophomores when the U. of M. Regents decided to expand UM-Dearborn into a four-year campus.  The first freshmen did not come until the fall of 1971, but the decision was made in 1969, and the campus had two years to prepare for implementing the expansion.

When I first came to the campus, a professor of political science named John Dempsey was Chairman of LS&A.  Sometime toward the end of my first year there, he stepped down to run for a state political office, and a chemistry professor named David Emerson became Acting Division Chairman.  Through some political maneuvering that I later became aware of, an ambitious professor of Russian named Dennis Papazian became Division Chair.  Dennis saw in me some promise of usefulness as an assistant administrator, and he asked me to be his chief assistant in constructing the new freshman-sophomore curriculum in liberal arts.  Of course, the specific content of courses in each discipline was determined by the faculty in each area of study, but an overall structure was needed to define the combination of general education and disciplinary courses required for the bachelor’s degrees (bachelor of arts and bachelor of science).  Dennis set me the task of looking through academic catalogues at other institutions to see what their requirements were.  I supplied him with my research results, and we worked together to formulate academic requirement proposals to the governing faculty of the Division and the Executive Committee of the campus.  In addition to preparing the academic program, the campus also had to provide new laboratory facilities and classroom spaces.

To facilitate the keeping of academic records, we relied increasingly on use of the mainframe computer on the Ann Arbor campus, and I was initiated into this technical world by a chemistry professor who had a special interest in computers, Alan Emery.  He taught me how to use punch cards to enter and maintain academic records, and so early in my academic career I was exposed to the practical basics of computer use, though I was not taught the arcane languages of computer programming.  I remember carrying packs of punch cards over to the card reader managed by Al Emery, and he would try to convince me of the potential of computer usage.  He eventually was recruited to work with the center for computer operations in Ann Arbor, and our campus was deprived of the creator of its computer operations.  UM-Dearborn eventually formed an Office of Computer Operations of its own.

Dennis Papazian took me under his wing as a protégé in administrative operations.  He saw me (accurately) as innocent of the subtleties of academic politics, in which he delighted.  One day, only half-jokingly, he told me that his objective was to “corrupt” me, so that I would be disabused of my naïve view of the world and be able to function realistically in a world defined by the exercise of power.  I resisted this relativistic Machiavellian approach, but I was still useful to him in seeing to details of his office that required accuracy and efficiency.  This was the beginning of a relationship with him that was troublesome for many years to come.  I imagine he regretted training me well enough that I was eventually chosen to replace him.  But more of that later.

I made some decisions during this period that turned out to be more significant than I thought at the time.  One arose from receiving an offer from a Dutch press to publish my doctoral dissertation, but with a sizeable subsidy as a part of the deal.   Moreover, the intent was apparently to publish the dissertation as it was, without editorial review.  It therefore looked to me like merely a solicitation from a vanity press that would not be taken seriously by my colleagues as a peer-reviewed publication, so I turned them down.  However, I learned later that about the same time a dissertation that covered some of the same areas treated by mine was published by this press and that the publication contributed to the author’s professional advancement.

Two other decisions sprang from recruitment offers.  Back when I was about to fly to UM-Dearborn for my on-campus interview, I was approached by my alma mater, Abilene Christian College, to come back there, and I turned them down because I thought going back would cut off my opportunities to test my mettle in a broader professional community.  The second offer was a year or two later and was from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, California, an institution associated with the Church of Christ, the denomination I had grown up in and still adhered to.  At the time Pepperdine was in the process of building a new campus in the suburbs of Los Angeles and moving its home base out of the inner city and into its posh new campus.  I was flattered by their taking the initiative and trying to recruit me, but I was troubled by their move, as it seemed to me, to flee their original neighborhood for a more comfortable setting.  And so, in my idealism, I turned them down.  In the two cases of recruitment, our lives would have been completely different had I accepted either offer.

I spent my first years at UM-Dearborn happily, enjoying my colleagues and the students and the opportunity to get involved in minor administrative duties.  I had come at what turned out to be an ideal time for the exercise of my particular skills.  Since I was not a great research scholar in my academic field, my administrative contributions were my strong suit when I came up for promotion, and though I managed to produce a few published papers in my first five years, that would not have been sufficient to secure my promotion to associate professor with tenure.  At another, more traditional institution, I might not have made the cut.  As it was, I achieved tenure and was able to serve the campus for 36 years, with several kinds of temporary administrative appointments along the way. 

I began my career there when the campus was poised for a crucial development in its history.  During the mid and late 60s, the campus did not fulfill the hopes of its founders, that is, that many students would decide to transfer from area community colleges and that the campus, focused on the internship programs in engineering and business, would capture the attention of industrial metropolitan Detroit and that the campus would enjoy success like that of General Motors Institute.  Unfortunately, the large numbers of students did not come, and UM-Dearborn in 1969 still had an enrollment of only some eight or nine hundred students.  The campus was faced with the alternatives of either folding or expanding.  Happily for me, it expanded, and I was there on the ground floor.

The next installment will deal with the huge effects of the expansion of the campus to four years and my involvement in that process.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)

More from this series: