Connecting the Dots recounts several pivotal moments, or forks in the road, that could have easily altered intellectual and career paths. Leaving New York to attend Iowa State University in 1972 was transformative – I came to realize how provincial growing up in Brooklyn, in the Big Apple, could be despite its size and diversity. Brooklyn and New York City receded from their centrality to my life, while subsequently Ames, IA, Phoenix, AZ, Chicago, IL, Philadelphia, PA, and Miami, FL opened new vistas that in effect provided alternatives to the hustle and bustle of NYC that upon my return in 1999 made for some readjustments. Had I gone away to college rather than attending Brooklyn College I might have realized the joys of a slower paced life sooner than I did.
Another pivotal moment was taking my first formal break from school, going to Phoenix, AZ and working at the Arizona State Hospital, my first sustained exposure to the adult work world beyond the walls of academia. Here is where I decided to pursue social work as a career. At the time, the profession appeared to give roughly equal emphasis to direct practice or casework, whether with individuals, families, or groups, to administration and planning, whether with community organizations or with private or public sector social service agencies, and to advocacy whether for clients, social change or social justice. What I could not foresee then was the decided shift in emphasis to clinical or direct practice work, in part a function of state licensing which the profession supported and promoted from about the mid-1980s onwards. I enjoyed clinical work and might have stayed with it had I remained in Arizona. Instead, motivated by a renewed desire to teach at the college level and influenced by one of my mentors, I decided to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration.
Leaving Arizona was also pivotal. Although doctoral study was encouraged, I was conflicted between Sociology and Social Work. I had applied to programs in both, initially accepting an offer from Rutgers University in Sociology without benefit of any scholarship or stipend, only to have that subsequently pre-empted by an offer for a full scholarship and stipend from SSA at the University of Chicago where I abandoned clinical practice and my interests in policy and research came to fruition. Given what know now, I might have payed attention to more methods and theory courses, falling back as I did on my historical training at Iowa State University, though with no regrets as Connecting the Dots makes clear. I thought an academic career was on the immediate horizon, though that was not to be, prompted in part by the less than desirable faculty positions for which I successfully competed and by a vacancy for a Director of Research position in a large family service agency in Chicago, for which several SSA faculty encouraged me to apply.
Taking my second formal break from academic life, I accepted the Executive Level position at United Charities of Chicago and re-entered the adult work world. There is something about academia that, as a student, I found infantilizing – perhaps because it seems they treat you as if you know nothing, or must start from scratch, regardless of your life’s experiences or educational achievement to date. In any event, it was great to be back in the adult world, at least for a while. Here I came into my own more as an administrator than as a researcher per se, though I balanced both with some difficulty. What I gleaned from this experience was that I could not do equally well in both roles, even as I carved out time for scholarship. I realized more of my limitations and knew I had to commit myself to agency life or to make one more attempt to pursue an academic life.
Choosing an academic career was pivotal, as was the decision to accept a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work, where I witnessed ideological and professional struggles for the soul social work as a profession: from cause vs. function, from institutional oppression to multicultural sensitivity, from the experiential basis of practice to evidence-based or research-informed practice, from quantitative vs. qualitative research methods, and the like. Academic life affords may looney-tune like moments, given the cast of characters that make up any given composition of faculty, who pride themselves on their autonomy, have great difficulty coming to a decision, and in my opinion are basically ungovernable, for the better. Given what I know now, I would have appreciated then a greater understanding of what criteria were used for tenure decisions, whether at Research I universities like the U of Pennsylvania or at teaching universities like Barry University. Perhaps I should have had this awareness while pursuing doctoral studies while I had more of a penchant for teaching than for conducting research per se. I never found the right balance for me at the University of Pennsylvania, though I did find a better balance at Barry University, another pivotal moment in time. Life’s events have a way of interjecting themselves, presenting more folks in the road with uncertainties, as I would finally marry and return to New York, stories told in Connecting the Dots.
