William Allen Schwab

Active DREAMer

SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: Sept. 16, 1947 in Hamilton, Ohio Occupation: Professor at the University of Arkansas Family: Wife Judy, sons Mark and Judd, daughter Jennifer;

fi ve grandchildren My top goal for this summer is lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform.

Something I want to know more about is Alexis De Tocqueville’s insight into the great American experiment.

What was great about my hometown was the sense of community.

My advice for cooks is own expensive, razor-sharp knives.

The hardest part about writing a book is writing the fi rst page.

My family teases me about: Let’s just say they don’t appreciate my sartorial splendor on weekends.

A place I want to visit is the ancient ports of the Aegean Sea.

The best book I’ve read lately is The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.

My favorite movie of all time is Bullitt.

When I retire, I’ll do pretty much what I do now, but without getting paid.

A word to sum me up: curiousFAYETTEVILLE - Bill Schwab might never write that book about gated communities.

He was working on one a few years back, and was closer to its finish than its beginning. Then lives got in the way.

First he was asked to be the dean of the University of Arkansas’ J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. He took it on a temporary basis in the summer of 2008, and then accepted it full time a year later, with the understanding that he would step down by 2011.

So the gated communities book was put on hold during those years.

“Bill was a great dean,” UA Chancellor G. David Gearhart says. “We tried to get him to stay in the deanship, but I think he had this book in mind.”

The book Gearhart refers to is not the one on gated communities;

it’s Right to DREAM: Immigration Reform and America’s Future. By the time Schwab’s tenure as Fulbright dean was winding down, he was deeply immersed in the issue of immigration reform, interviewing mayors, police chiefs, charities, school administrators, and dozens upon dozens of young people.

Schwab, 65, has become a strong advocate for reform and the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, bipartisan congressional legislation that would provide a path to conditional permanent residency for immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children.

Neither comprehensive immigration reform nor the DREAM Act has passed at a federal level, but several states have passed versions of the latter, providing educational benefits for young people.

Arkansas is not one of them, however, which is why Schwab has spoken around the state to urge its passing. He’s made TV appearances, written newspaper editorials, anything he can do to effect change in Arkansas and the U.S.

“He’s dealing with one of the great problems we have to deal with: What are we going to do with immigration?” says former UA Chancellor Dan Ferritor. “He’s committed to finding the DREAMers a way to experience the American Dream just likeBill and I did.”

So now it’s 2013, and the gated-communities book is no closer to completion than it was five years ago. If anything, it’s farther away, as the field work has gone stale.

Schwab may get back to that book, but there are plenty of reasons why it may not happen.

There are his classes in the UA department of sociology, the global destinations he wants to see with his wife, Judy - not to mention the five newspapers he reads every day.

And then there’s dinner.

“Dinner at the Schwab household is a life event,” says friend Paul Prebil of Bentonville. “From the appetizers to the wines that are chosen to the main course, it’s always an evening to remember.”

MEAL THAT MATTERS

Ignore the rumors about breakfast; dinner is the most important meal of the day.

It was a critical part of the day when he and Judy were raising their son Judd. Dinner mattered on the nights when it was thethree of them and they were exhausted after racing home after one of Judd’s soccer matches, and it mattered when they were joined by Bill’s kids from his first marriage, Mark and Jennifer.

It still matters, even though all three kids have long since grown up and left the house.

“Bill has this sociological view of the world and how you grow community, and how families interact,” Judy Schwab says. “He just thought it was really important for once a day that we all get together around the table.

“Even now, people say, ‘Do you want to go out for a drink?’ and we’ll go out, but we still don’t often give up the opportunity to have dinner together.”

Schwab was a teenage line cook on ships, and worked in restaurants throughout college. Long before that, he had learned the value of shareddinner from his parents.

Frank and Jean Schwab were excellent cooks, and dinner was can’t-miss time at the Schwab household - just Bill, his parents, his three siblings, and a lot of conversation.

“The best part of my childhood was dinner,” Schwab says. “We’d sit and talk an hour. When I was in college, my parents would have dinner parties where we’d sit at 7 and they would not end until midnight, and the conversations would go all over the map. It was the informal education that was so much fun.”

Schwab grew up in Hamilton, a southwest Ohio city bisected by the Miami River. He admired his father, a lawyer and judge who seemingly knew every crook and crime going on in Cincinnati.

Like his wife, Frank Schwab was a voracious reader. Bill’s late father was a student of history, and often thrilled his son with his stories of the Cincinnati that had once been.

“He was a fascinating character,” Bill Schwab says. “He would tell me what had been there as a kid, and that’s how I got interested in urban sociology.”

Schwab’s other lifelong interest, after urban sociology, is social justice.

That also emerged early. He clearly remembers being astonished by the segregation he witnessed during a family trip to Georgia in the mid-1950s, and recalls in admiration the way his mother opened the family’s home to black track and field athletes from a visiting high school who could not find accommodations in Hamilton.

“[Social justice] is what keeps him motivated,” says son Judd Schwab of Seattle. “It’s a topic that’s really important to him. You can see it [in his work], on issues that touch us every day - making sure people are treated with respect, and treated fairly.” GETTING IT TOGETHER

When Schwab arrived on the campus of Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), he had a choice to make: He could pull his act together, or he could flunk out.

“I was an average student, part of the unwashed masses,” Schwab says. “I got into Miami because of test scores, not grades.”

Schwab chose to buckle down. Nearly five decades later, with all that he has accomplished, he still isn’t sure he ever worked harder than he did that first year at Miami. But he got through it, and then he made it to the finish line, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1969.

But by that point, he had already determined that chemistry wasn’t for him. Seven years later, he had master’s degrees from the University of Akron (urban studies) and Ohio State University (sociology), and a doctorate from Ohio State in sociology/ urban ecology.

Later in 1976, he arrived at Arkansas, and the kid who hadn’t made much effort in high school was long gone. In his place was a young man who was determined to make every day count.

“It comes easy for him,” Judy Schwab says of her husband’s ability to make good use of his time. “He’s efficient. He can make a decision and then move with it.

“[That’s why] as passionate as he’s been about research or teaching or an administrative role, he’s always made time for the kids. He’s really conscious of that.”

Early in his time at Arkansas, Schwab worked on issues of neonatal and perinatal care in Arkansas. Then he shifted his focus to the Middle Eastern country of Jordan.

Schwab taught at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, starting in 1995. While he was there, he lived with an archaeologist named Jerry Rose - as well as 50 skeletons from a tomb Rose was excavating - and they noticed something that alarmed them: Jordan, in its rush to develop, was destroying its cultural history and architecture. Schwab recalls an incident in a reporter’s office when a call came in that drilling to install a telephone pole was taking place on top of a 2,300-yearold wall.

The UA had previously developed a field called cultural resource management, but in Jordan there was nothing comparable in place to consider the fate of its ancient wonders. So Schwab, Rose and social scientists from Yarmouk and UA applied for grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies, and used the money to create a master’s-level program in cultural resource management at Yarmouk.

“We helped reshaped antiquities laws, and began a training program for civil administrators, people putting in lines,” Schwab says. “We made them sensitive to what they were digging up.

“That project became a model for the Middle East. Jordan has four or five CRM programs today.”

While this was happening, Schwab realized that all the benefits of tourism were going to a small part of Jordanian society, that people who were living on these archaeological sites were getting virtually nothing. So he worked with the country’s minister of tourism and helped the country develop a master plan for tourism.

The best way to maximize tourism revenue is to get visitors to stay the night, Schwab explains, so plans were created to attract and retain travelers who might come to Jordan because of any interest, be it religious, cultural or ecological.

Schwab’s work in Jordan - which he calls “the most rewarding of my career” - spanned 15 years in all, and it included establishing an exchange program. Over the years, some 25 faculty members from UA have gone from Fayetteville to Jordan, and many Jordanian students have come to UA to study. Three UA graduates are on the faculty at Yarmouk.

In May 2011, Schwab escorted Gearhart on his first trip to Jordan. What the chancellor recalls is the vast number of people who were anxious to see “Bill Schwab” - never just “Bill.”

“It was an incredible experience for me, because Bill is sort of a celebrity in Jordan,” Gearhart says. “They rolled out the red carpet for us. ‘Bill Schwab’ is highly respected by Jordanians; everyone we met gave ‘Bill Schwab’ a big hug.” DREAMING BIG

In 2008, the Arkansas Department of Higher Education informed all the state’s public colleges and universities, including UA, that students who are illegal aliens could not receive in-state tuition.

They could still attend college, but they would have to pay the out-of-state rate, which at Arkansas was several thousands of dollars higher. The university identified 19 such students, and Gearhart says the school suspected all 19 would have to drop out if forced to pay the higher rate. It raised the money to cover the difference.

Schwab was part of the fundraising efforts that kept the 19 students at UA, and provided a thorough education to Gearhart on the subject. Schwab had already done a year-long study of the Hispanic population in Northwest Arkansas, and the in-state tuition issue, along with UA’s support, spurredhim to write Right to DREAM.

“Bill’s brilliant, and he catches on very quickly,” says Gearhart, who wrote the book’s introduction. “He’s also a great person who wants to do the right thing, and as a sociologist, he understands the importance of education for everybody.”

Writing the book was difficult. He interviewed more than 50 kids, many of whom cried during their time together, and wasn’t sure how he could possibly turn their stories into a narrative.

Fortunately for Schwab, he’s been married for 27 years to Judy, a former Englishteacher, and has friends like Robert Haslam, the director of the UA Quality Writing Center.

“Writing’s not easy for me; it’s never been,” Bill Schwab says. “I wrote up a couple chapters, 60-70 pages, and sent them to [Haslam].

“[He told me] ‘You’re not going to persuade anybody, Bill. It’s written to an academic audience.’ I had to go back and really soul search about what I wanted to accomplish.”

After a thorough rewrite, Right to DREAM was released, but Schwab views his work as incomplete. The book wasn’t a vanity project; it was done with the intent of changing minds about immigration policy.

Schwab is eager to speak about the subject. He’s discussed it at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, on the state’s public television network, AETN, and even accepted an invitation to speak in Maryland.

And, of course, it’s been a frequent topic of conversation at dinner, and will be in the future. So will virtually any other subject, the nightly “informal education” that Schwab savors so much.

“He’s one of the most interesting people I know, probably because of his curiosity,” Judd Schwab says. “It seems that he can have a conversation about anything, and I think that’s pretty cool. He’s down to earth, not intimidating at all, someone who’s just easy to talk to.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 33 on 05/19/2013

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