A public sociologist

Gordon Morgan inspires, pushes bounds beyond University of Arkansas

As a sociology student in the 1950s, Gordon Morgan was troubled by the European-based paradigm that defined the field.

Scholarship was rooted in a study of class systems that dated to feudal times, he said. He didn’t think that was particularly relevant to life in the United States.

“Americans are believers in equality,” he said. That ideal doesn’t always translate into action, but it still fuels our thought, he said.

“In the American system, you were forced into the class system, but you didn’t believe you were supposed to be there.”

The University of Arkansas professor has been forging a uniquely American sociology in the years since. His latest book, “Whiteness in America,” explores the relationship between being of Caucasian descent and the unquestioned advantages that come with it.

The 81-year-old is retiring at the end of the semester, after 43 years at the UA. Hired in 1969, he is likely the first tenured black faculty member at the university, said Dan Ferritor, former UA chancellor and current vice president for student affairs for the University of Arkansas System. The two men worked together in the sociology department from 1973 to 1985 and again after 1998.

“Gordon took on the role of pioneer,” Ferritor said. The affable professor has mentored decades of black students and faculty, he said. “He recognized that he had a special responsibility. He fulfilled it well.”

Much of Morgan’s research has focused on Arkansas and the experience of black Americans in the state. He’s written about such trailblazers as Tilman Cothran, a second-generation sociologist, and Lawrence Davis, former chancellor of UA-Pine Bluff. Other areas of interest include the black hill people of the Ozarks and blackprisons in the state.

A prolific writer, Morgan has produced more than 70 manuscripts, including novels, plays and poetry. He’s published 13 books and numerous articles. He’s also written extensively for local news outlets.

“Gordon saw everybody as a student,” Ferritor said. “He was a real public sociologist. He used letters to the editor, guest columns, any way he could to shine the light of sociology on the world that we live in.”

PATHWAY TO EDUCATION

Morgan was born in Mayflower in 1931, son of a sharecropper and a rural schoolteacher. His family moved to Conway during the Great Depression, where Morganspent the rest of his growing-up years.

He graduated from the Pine Street School in 1949 and enrolled in Arkansas AM&N College, now UA-Pine Bluff. His older brother had studied sociology, and Morgan decided he would do that, too.

Their father was perplexed, he recalled. “He told us he could tell us how people behaved without spending money on college tuition,” Morgan said.

The young man served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army after he graduated from college in 1953. He spent most of his time in Korea, where the war had just ended.

Morgan used the GI Bill to continue his education at UA-Fayetteville when he returned. He was one of a small number of black students on campus. He lived with other veterans in a housing complex called “the barracks,” he said.

He was one of five or six blacks among the many whites. The black students were accepted at campus dining halls, dorms, even dances, he said.

“We didn’t have much trouble.

The UA was not as segregated as one would think.”

It was not so easy for him academically. Morgan was almost forced out of college because of mediocre grades and a refusal tobow to the status quo, he said. His objection to the prevailing concept of classbased sociology set him at odds with his professors.

“I almost flunked out of graduate school by not taking what the professors said as law,” he said. “I questioned it then, and I continued to question it throughout my experience.”

Morgan earned his master’s degree in 1956 and returned to Conway to teach high school math, French and social studies. The Little Rock desegregation crisis started in 1957. Morgan was courting his wife-to-be, Izola Preston, at the time.

She lived just a few blocks from Little Rock Central High School, but the crisis seemed removed from their lives, he said.

“We didn’t see a lot going on. It didn’t seem as severe as the newspapers made out.”

Morgan continued his education at Washington State University in Pullman.

He spent two years in Africa as a post-doctoral student, studying the adjustment of non-African teachers in African schools.

After his return, he taught sociology at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., then moved to Fayetteville in 1969. Martin Luther King Jr.

had died the previous year, and colleges and universities were reaching out to black professors, he said.

Morgan and his wife both downplay the challenges they may have faced. They were busy building careers and raising a family, she said. There wasn’t time to think about what other people thought or said.

CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

Pearl Dowe, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas, said Morgan continues to serve as a role model and mentor.

“To actually be able to reach out and touch someone who was here during that time, who excelled,who dealt with challenges I haven’t had to, is significant,” she said. “He opened the doors” to diversity on campus.

Friendly and supportive, Morgan is always willing to assist newer faculty, she said.

“I see him as an elder, as an academic, as a father figure. He’s earned various levels of respect from me.”

Students like him as well, particularly the athletes who flock to his early morning classes, Dowe said.

Razorback basketball player B.J. Young tweeted this message on Monday: “Dr. Morgan class is super funny I love it one of my favorite teachers ever.”

Morgan has a gift for making the study of sociology accessible to his students, Ferritor said. He uses contemporary events - from football games to the recession - to stimulate discussion.

“He’s not a traditional teacher that stands in front of the class imparting his wisdom. Gordon spent his time getting the students to say important things and think about their world in ways they didn’t often think about it,” Ferritor said.

“In my opinion, he lives to teach. The high point of his day is when he gets to be around students.”

Morgan is not afraid of controversy, sometimes stirring the pot to get people to think, said Steven Worden, a sociology professor at UA since 1986. Morgan has never wavered in his insistence that the emphasis on class that undergirds sociology is exaggerated, for example.

He feels the same way about race, Worden said.

Most sociologists now agree that those are social constructs, but they still constitute the basis of the field, Worden said.

“For an African-American faculty member to insist that perhaps the whole concept of race is a fallacy is enormously controversial,” Worden said. “It’s a courageous stand to take in our day of identity politics and sensitivity issues.

“He’s unfazed by controversy. I always saw him as a fighter pilot, more than willing to get into dogfights with people up there in the sky. ... It’s going to be a blander, more normative bureaucracy around here (after he retires).”

Morgan’s colleagues are hosting a retirement luncheon for him on Monday.

He will be lauded for his accomplishments and years of service to the UA.

AT A GLANCE Career Highlights Gordon Morgan has written about many aspects of the black American experience in Arkansas, as well as the experience of blacks in Africa and the Caribbean.

Research partners include the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation Fellowship.

He is a member of the Black Alumni Society and the Arkansas Alumni Association. He received the Silas Hunt Legacy Award and the J. William Fulbright Distinguished Alumni Award, both in 2006.

He has served as president of the Arkansas Sociological Association and the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists. He received the 1994 W.E.B DuBois Award from that association for his research.

Publications include: “Whiteness in America,” BVT Press, 2012 “Toward an American Sociology: Questioning the European Construct,” Praeger Press, 1997 “Tilman C. Cothran: Second Generation Sociologist,” Windham Hall Press, 1995 “The Edge of Campus: A Journal of the Black Experience at the University of Arkansas” 1990, UA Press, co-authored with Izola Preston “America Without Ethnicity,” Kennikat Press, 1981 Lawrence A. Davis: Arkansas Educator,” Associated Faculty Publishers, 1975 Source: Staff Report

Style, Pages 27 on 12/06/2012

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