Walton Interviews Haws and Harrington on Origins of Center

Robert J. Haws received his B. A., M. A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Nebraska and joined the University of Mississippi faculty in 1969. Since 1990 he has been chair of the Department of History. Michael L. Harrington took his B.A. degree at Davidson College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Emory University. He joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 1970. He has been chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religions since 1991. Gerald W. Walton, provost emeritus, interviewed them on August 21, 2001, as part of the observation of the 25th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Gerald Walton: I am talking to Mike Harrington and Bob Haws about the origin of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The two of them have told me that the Center came about through conversations during a period of time. They have told me their first conversations took place on the benches at the front of the J. D. Williams Library.

Robert Haws: We discovered in the catalog information about an institute having to do with humanities. We went to Graduate Dean Joe Sam and found that though it existed, it had no money in it. We were trying to figure out how to get some money to figure out what we might do with a new program, what we could do with very limited resources that would be worth doing.

Michael Harrington: Not only that; we were trying to think of what it was that might attract some funding. We knew that Mississippi should be able to develop some expertise in some humanities field. Haws is a historian, and I always had an interest in Southern religion. We were talking along these lines of Mississippi as a state and where it had come from. I had only been here five or six years.

MH: We asked ourselves, “Why don’t we turn what was then our greatest liability into an asset?” Everybody identified Mississippi, for better or worse, as the place, the model, for what not to do in race relations. We could turn this around and say, “Look at the experience we have gotten from this.” We could show that Mississippi’s one big asset is an experience it had with different races and ethnic groups trying to share a common language. We used the phrase “all the triumphs and tragedies” of the whole American experiment are here in Mississippi. It’s that kind of vision we had in thinking about getting the Center together.

GW: Did this come about in just one conversation, or did you talk about it over a period of time?

MH: Over a period of time. Probably in front of the J. D. Williams Library. Certainly Friday nights at Clyde’s [Holiday Inn bar]. I am sure it got discussed a good many times. But once we reached a little consensus on it, that’s when we thought of getting it to Art DeRosier [Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of History].

GW: Back to the Institute for Humanistic Studies.

RH: I am the one who called Joe Sam, and he said, “Yes, it exists, but there is no money in it.” He didn’t think there ever would be any money in it.

GW: So you went to Art DeRosier?

MH: We went straight to him because he always interested in projects that might pay off for the University.

GW: Did you meet with him, or did you write him a memo?

RH: I think I called him, and we met with him in mid-morning one day in Harrington’s office. We both had offices in Bondurant. We put together a plan regarding things like literature, history, and music.

GW: And DeRosier’s reaction?

RH: He looked at it and said complimentary things and left.

MH: And unlike some things, it didn’t get buried. The next thing we knew there was a committee formed. We were both on the committee.

GW: DeRosier thought it was a good idea, huh?

RH: I remember that I went to C &P [the Curriculum and Policy Committee for the College of Liberal Arts], the Academic Council, and the Graduate Council.

MH: And I was sent to Washington to talk to Jamie Whitten. I remember talking to Whitten about it in terms of maybe getting money through the National Endowment for the Humanities. We were borrowing from Tom Flynn’s experience with NEH and the big grant we got for the Mississippi Humanities Council. Basically Whitten said, “Good idea. I will find you some money.” So we went from there.

GW: Did you early on talk about what the Center ought to do, what kind of structure it should have, whether it should be a center with a director?

MH: Yes, it should be independent of any department. We wanted it to report directly to the Vice Chancellor.

RH: Yes, that’s right. We didn’t want it in the College.

GW: Did you think at the time whether there would be major, a minor, a concentration, or was that part of your deliberations?

RH: If you remember, we had started an American Studies Program, and I wanted it to become the academic program of the enterprise. And I lost! But that was a kind of idea we had in mind. We were thinking we might make Southern Studies a part of it.

GW: As I remember it, American Studies was going to have a 42-hour major with no minor.

RH: Yes, the same kind of structure.

GW: Given your thoughts at the time, how has the Center met your expectations? In what ways has it surpassed your expectations? Failed?

RH: Let’s turn the tape off!

MH: It certainly turned out to be a far bigger operation than I expected. Also I had seen it focusing mostly on race relations, and it has grown to encompass all aspects of Southern culture. I remember something I should have said earlier. In our original memo, didn’t we put a sense of urgency in it: how fast the landscape was changing. I remember quoting Hegel about the owl of Minerva flying only at dusk. We said something to the effect that Southern culture is changing, and if we don’t act, we will lose our living memory of that culture.

GW: Did you suggest joint appointments for faculty, or did that come later?

RH: I think that came later, when we got that planning grant. I don’t remember thinking in specific terms like that.

MH: We wanted a center, and we thought that was the kind of detail we would have to work out. Would these people be exclusively in the center? Would they have joint appointments? I think we threshed that out after we got some agreement on having a center.

GW: Did you mention the kind of money you thought you should have for a start-up budget?

RH: I don’t recall anything about money.

MH: I don’t either. I think I remember something about $50,000. That might have been for a planning grant.

GW: I think the first grant was only about $4,000 for bringing Dick Brown to look at the plan.

RH: Yes, as a consultant. Then maybe there was a planning grant and then the big NEH grant. From that implementation grant some of the money went for some of the faculty.

MH: Yes, people got paid for developing courses; I got paid for developing a course on Religion in the South, for example.

RH: And it’s still on the books.

MH: Charles Wilson teaches it now.

RH: It was frustrating to deal with the English Department at that time. If you remember, if you go to Jim Webb’s last year, that’s when they had five department chairs in five years. English went from Webb to Eby to Cannon to Peterson to Evans Harrington. During that period that’s when we were trying to do all that planning.

GW: As it began to develop and you were in the faculty watching this, did you pick up any ideas that people were unhappy about money that would be spent on it because it would be taking money away from other departments, or do you remember that as any controversy?

RH: I think that was always a concern. We were all the time thinking about how departments could benefit.

MH: That was a concern too at the college/school level. People were afraid this would suck money away. I can see some of the concerns people might have had back then.

RH: One of the people, especially at the meetings I went to, who was really helpful on the campus level was Wally Guess [Dean of the School of Pharmacy]. We had no understanding of grant money. I didn’t even know what overhead money was. He bought into it immediately and became a supporter of the whole thing.

MH: Wally gave us a lot of tips. Of course by that time we had a full committee on it. It was at that time I went to see Jamie Whitten. I can remember asking some questions about such things as who the first director might be. That’s when the name of my Davidson’s classmate Bill Ferris first came up. He and I had overlapped by a couple of years. I knew he was up in the Ivy Leagues and was not entirely happy there.

RH: I can remember, maybe before Ferris even got here, back when the whole thing was just getting started, that a whole bunch of us, including Harvey Lewis, went to visit the Center for Southern Folklore at Memphis. That was when Bill was still head of that. Six or eight of us went up there and went through that. I don’t remember at exactly what stage that was. Bill started in 1978, and we had been going with this about three years one way or another.

MH: I can remember that it was about that time. The Philosophy Department had been reduced to two people, Tom Flynn and me. Hall Furr died in 1974. They never replaced him. So we were teaching four or five classes a semester. I can remember going to Art DeRosier. He said, “If you get a center going, I will find a position for you.” And he did. We increased by one- third!

RH: Remember that at the same time this was going on, we got the Faulkner Conference and the History Symposium started.

GW: The first Faulkner Conference was in 1974.

RH: And History was shortly thereafter, first tied to Bicentennial money.

MH: I can remember saying something to Evans Harrington about the Faulkner Conferences lasting three or four years. And now three decades later it is still going strong.

RH: I think our original proposal spoke of literature, history, and music. One thing we did talk about and rejected was trying to settle the Civil War.

MH: Yes, it was too closely tied to segregation and white supremacy. We knew we had to have an African American component in there. My biggest fear was that this was going to be highjacked and become some kind of glorification of the white South, and we knew we had to walk very carefully to avoid that happening. Of course fortunately it never did.

GW: I can remember reading something Dr. Fortune wrote to NEH to the effect that our center would not be one of those Gone with the Wind glorification programs!

MH: We got started at a good time. There was a change in the nature of academia. We got in early on the wave of cultural centers. We had ours going long before interest caught on in other places.

RH: And Bill’s coming, his being where he was in his career at that time, was sort of serendipitous. His connections were tremendously helpful to us.

MH: Yes, and he was a good fund raiser.

RH: Yes, he had that gift of talking to somebody and getting commitments. Also, he brought the music dimension that we needed, the blues. That helped keep it from becoming an all-white kind of thing.

GW: Thank you very much. This has been very helpful.

Above: Michael Harrington (left) and Bob Haws. Photo by Gerald W. Walton