Note: This is Part II of my series on my time at Northern Arizona University between 1999-2001. This post takes up the other graduate students in the History Department. Part I: Decision and Arrival, can be found here, and Part II: The Other Graduate Students can be found here.

The Professors: Eight Points on a Compass

Graduate school I feel is often remembered less for the curriculum than for the people who taught it, and Northern Arizona University was no exception. The department wasn’t Ivy, wasn’t elite, wasn’t powered by grants or theory-cliques — but it had shape, it had character, and it had real smarts. Here is a quick portrait of the eight teachers that I remember. Some I took their class, some I tutored for, some both, and some I just got to know in the halls. Here they are.

Sanjay

My advisor by inevitability: the only tenured professor in the department who worked on Asia at all. Indian, Penn PhD, postcolonial thinker with a full loyalty to subaltern studies; ambivalent on Gandhi in that very specific way that people trained in the 90s often were. He let me study Japan inside his Indian frame, as long as I stayed inside the lines. It was generous, in one sense, and constricting in another. He wanted me to be Spivak or something adjacent — not who I was, not what I was built for.

We got along well for a while. I respected him, and he liked that I was a serious person. But eventually I started to lose respect for him, not dramatically, just gradually, because he wouldn’t quite let me go my own way. He believed in his model; he couldn’t imagine someone wanting another.

I tutored for him a few times. Early 1999, first term, he told me I was a tough grader — “especially on grammar,” he said, with a small smile. It was his way of telling me to ease up. I took the note and loosened up, but only slightly.

I’ll write more about Sanjay, and about the slow evolution of that relationship, in later pieces — there’s more there, and it shadows the next set of decisions I made

Sanjam

Sanjam was Sanjay’s wife — close to his age, maybe a little younger. She wasn’t tenured yet when I arrived, and they wanted that badly. Sanjay, in my opinion, crossed a line a bit with his advocacy for her, but I’ll get to that in a later piece.

She was brilliant where he was structured, but brittle where he was steady. I tutored for her a little later in my time there, and I once watched a lecture dissolve into chaos so completely that afterward I told the students I’d “take their temperature” after class. Several of them, half-joking, but actually not, called out, “Take my temperature, take my temperature.”

She stormed off to complain to Sanjay. He called me in and said, flatly, “I heard about it. Solve it with her — I’m not taking sides.”

I liked her, despite the fact that she couldn’t control a lecture room. I still remember her saying Gandhi “messed with her,” which she meant in a semi-endearing way, I suppose.

She eventually got tenure, and last I checked, she and Sanjay were still at NAU.

Karen Powers

As I mentioned in Part I, Karen was the first person I met at NAU. I walked in cold off the road — black turtleneck, black blazer, no housing, no plan. Karen shrugged like this happened every Tuesday and found me a room one minute from campus. That was her superpower: frictionless authority, no drama.

She was chair of the department for a while before John Leung took over, and she was a much better chair than Leung. That said, Mandiola knew her far better than I ever did; I never took her class and I didn’t tutor for her either.

Susan Deeds

Susan was older than Karen — early sixties, I think, though I never knew for sure. She was beloved by students and professors alike: warm, intellectually generous, and possessed of a kind of quiet emotional intelligence that set her apart. She carried herself with ease, without self-importance, and people naturally gravitated toward her. She wasn’t chair during my time there, but she functioned as the department’s emotional center of gravity anyway.

I never took her class and didn’t tutor for her, but she was unfailingly kind whenever our paths crossed. She gave good, grounded advice and I benefitted from that. Even with no formal tie between us, I always felt better knowing that she was around.

John Leung

John Leung was a Mao specialist, a gout sufferer, and later chair of the department. He was an odd fit among the mostly Southwest historians — solitary, limping, sometimes using a cane, half-in the building, half-out. During my first year, when I was tutoring for Sanjay, he came in to give a guest lecture at the end of the term. He delivered one kick-ass lecture — the best of the year.

But when I later tutored for him and had to sit in his class every day, it was pretty poor, to be honest. Everyone has one great lecture in them, I guess.

In my final term I took an independent study with him and wrote a long, decent paper on Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles. He never read it and didn’t pass me. So from my point of view he was lazy, and I don’t have a great deal of respect for him, though he was always polite and warm in person.

Dave Kitterman

Kitterman was the Germanist and European historian in the department. He was writing a book on ordinary Germans and complicity when Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men landed first and ended the race before he reached the track. It didn’t break him — it just redirected him into steady teaching. I would go to his office hours and he would talk about losing the race to Browning. It was a career disappointment.

When I was tutoring for his post-WWII Germany class, he eventually allowed me — after a bit of pushing on my end — to lecture on the Baader-Meinhof group in the 1970s, the left-wing (sort of) terror group in Germany with links to Palestinian organizations. The lecture came just before exams, and not only did he trust me with the room, he let me put a Baader-Meinhof question on the final. I felt like I earned the chance, and I’ve always been grateful for the opportunity. I’d give the lecture a B+ — I was a little too into Luke Haines, the singer and songwriter for The Auteurs, who made an eponymously titled concept record about Baader-Meinhof that genuinely rocks. Haines sings:

“Some of the dumb ones just don’t understand
there’s no manifesto
there’s no formal plan
it’s just burn warehouse burn
burn warehouse burn”

Kitterman also let me give student essays back one by one over the course of weeks, which was a real bonus for my schedule. Overall, he was an important and respected professor, and I learned a great deal from him.

Bob Baron

Bob Barron was in his late fifties or early sixties. I believe he taught general U.S. history, and he also offered a Marx seminar, which I took in my second year. It was the only class at NAU that actually challenged me, other than Linguistic Anthropology, which I’ll get to later. Barron had a favorite line; he dropped it often:

“My goal isn’t to teach you everything — just enough to be dangerous.”

He meant it — knowledge as edge, not encyclopedia. And then the twist: he ran a side business as a grant doctor. Five hundred dollars an hour, guaranteed success. A Marx scholar monetizing academia better than the capitalists he assigned.

Barron was a funny guy, and I worked my ass off in his seminar.

Mike Adamson

Finally, Mike Adamson. 6’7”, basketball-big, American Southwest scholar. Mandiola tutored for him I believe and talked about him, but he was pretty peripheral to my path through the school.

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Eight professors, little hierarchy, some ego. NAU wasn’t a prestigious place to teach, but I think it was a decent one. The professors could be themselves with almost no pushback, and each of them was their own little world — their own graduate tutors, their own quirks, their own ways of working.

And Kitterman let me talk Baader-Meinhof, which was a big moment for me, actually.