Today’s Project 100 memory comes from David Applebaum.  He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.  His father was a patent attorney. His mother was a homemaker for David and his two sisters, but she became a librarian after David’s younger sister went to school full-time.  In the Spring of 1963, he graduated from Midwood High School at age 16.  That Fall, David enrolled in Brooklyn College as a history major, and he graduated in 1967. He immediately began graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.  He earned in Master’s in 1969, and he then entered the doctoral program.  He heard that he would be likely offered the position at Glassboro State in December of 1972, but he received the official offer after he defended his dissertation in the Spring of 1973.  He began teaching at Glassboro State College in the Fall of 1973. 

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Before I even stepped foot on campus, I had some gleanings that there were problems in the Department.  One of the key folks in my hiring was the Latin American historian Van Hastings Garner.  I anticipated having a like-minded colleague who would share in my desire to challenge traditional approaches to the study of history, but he resigned before I began over a dispute about a requested leave of absence to write a book, which he later completed called Oral History: A New Experience in Learning (1975).  Marie Wanek was the chair at this time, and she would not approve this request.  I later became friendly with Marie who had many good qualities. She commuted from Washington, D.C., staying in an apartment in the Crossings when necessary.

About this same time, Marie got involved in a conflict with a group of faculty over the status of Ed Misczak.  Ed had suffered a nervous breakdown, and several faculty wanted to organize an informal arrangement to cover his classes while allowing him to retain full pay.  Marie was worried about this plan, and she was not cooperative.  This led to a movement to oust her as chair, and she was “convinced” to resign.  Although I felt bad for Marie and the way that this was handled, I will say that it led to a democratization of the Department in terms of much decision making. 

Marius Livingston was the new chair after Marie.  Despite assuming this role as chair, he was not as active within the Department as others.  This was in part because he was often organizing some very large events on campus.  For example, not long after he was installed as the new chair, he was spending a massive amount of time on what became the 1976 International Symposium on Terrorism.  A decade before I arrived, he had organized Operation Uganda, which I think might have created some dislike of him and the History Department.  During my time, one of the leaders of the Faculty Senate was a man named John Schaub from Education.  Schaub did not like Marius Livingston at all, for reasons that were not entirely clear but perhaps related to all the attention Marius got for his big projects. 

I replaced Anne Edwards, but we got to know each other after she retired.  She was from Alabama, and she got her doctorate from Cornell in French history.  I took over the teaching of her classes.  I had a wide training at Wisconsin and was able to teach a variety of subjects.  The last time I saw Anne was in the Spring of 1974 at a banquet for all the majors that were part of the old Social Studies Department.

In part due to my leftist politics, I had a long battle to retain my position at Glassboro State College.  The atmosphere at this time was quite different than it would be years later.  For example, when I was hired, the State of New Jersey required faculty to sign a Loyalty Oath.  In any event, I faced attempts to oust me in my first several years, and my tenure vote was 10-2 against me.  They did not cite my politics for their decision but rather “lack of collegiality.”  Robert Hewsen and Robert Harper voted to keep me, and they told President Mark Chamberlain about my mistreatment over the previous three years.  The College did not follow through on firing me, in part due to the support that I got from the Philosophy Department faculty.  The most important factor, however, was concern that the College would be sanctioned by the American Association of University Professors if I was terminated.

One of the faculty who led the campaign to oust me was Aaron Bender.  His specialty was European intellectual history.  He also taught Historical Methods.  After retiring, he became a full-time psychoanalyst.  In any event, one low moment among the many low moments in the battle over my future was Aaron telling my colleagues that I had probably given Marius cancer.  Marius ended up passing away of cancer in late 1977.  Despite all of this, a decade later, Aaron and I mostly put this behind us and were friendly to one another in the Department and when our paths crossed after he retired.

Sidney Kessler was a serious scholar of Jewish history by the time I joined the Department.  He and I had some disagreements on Israel and Zionism.  He became chair after Marius passed away.  Richard Porterfield was a specialist in British Empire.  He became the chair after Sidney Kessler stepped down.  He had run Study Abroad, and I took over when he became chair.  The program changed dramatically when I became Coordinator.  I worked out an actual exchange program in which students from GSC went abroad to a particular college and students from that college attended GSC.  I later passed the program on to Cory Blake.

Robert Hewsen was a specialist in Armenian history who taught Russian history and one of the true early scholars of the Department.  He was the head of the history graduate program for many years.  At this time, Glassboro State could only offer Master’s degrees in Education, but under this umbrella, GSC actually offered diverse graduate programs.  Essentially, students could get a Master’s degree in history, but the degree would say Master of Arts in Education.  Led by Hewsen, history faculty offered history graduate classes and oversaw history-focused master theses for many years.  This arrangement eventually ended when Rowan began to offer more actual graduate degrees.  This led, for a period, to the end of history graduate students. However, when the program came back under Edward Wang, it was now an official Master of Arts in history.

One of the key moments in the history of the Department was the reforming the major project in the early 1990s.  We got funding for this from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.  They funded ten colleges around the country to reform academic majors.  I got tapped to be the point person in the History Department for this project.  I made sure to involve the new hires in this process, including Joy Wiltenburg, Edward Wang, and Cory Blake.  We had a goal of making the major less Euro-centric and less white. We wanted to expand African and African American history.  We wanted to do the history of the entire Middle East, as we had been teaching mostly Jewish history.  We changed the requirements so that students had to take courses outside of Europe and the United States.  I believe that this was when we added a world history course separate from the Western Civilization courses.

All of the experiments that I implemented in the classroom during my time at Glassboro State College and Rowan came out of the work that I did at the University of Wisconsin.  There, I was involved in negotiating a union contract that included key elements related to the teaching of students.  The section that empowered students was called the Educational Planning clause, and the ideas embodied there were ones I sought to implement once I began teaching at GSC.  One example was that I surveyed the students as soon as they registered to gain their input on the direction of the course, offering for them to choose between possible readings, etc.  Another example was the creation of course feedback committees.  I began to implement this seriously in 1980.  At the very beginning of the semester, we would break into groups, which would each formulate lists of problems, issues, and questions.  I required students to submit their notes for the class so that all students could read them and discover that the experience of what took place in the classroom, what was heard, what was said, varied tremendously.  One goal of this was to convey how important it was to be a good listener and for those who were not as good at listening to value those in the group who were good listeners.  This often had a gendered component.  About a month or so into the semester, we would move to the next phase that involved lots of writing and reflection on earlier work done.  It was designed to create a safe space for students to critique each other, to improve, and to learn.  It was designed to create a small group of three to five that would provide to those students not comfortable speaking before 25 peers a place to begin to raise their voice.  The collective reflections of the students from this phase of the class sometimes led me to alter the syllabus, to the frustration of the administration.  This whole process would culminate in the last month with my asking those small groups of students to work together to create a report about how the class might be improved in the next iteration.  The ultimate goal was cooperative problem solving.

Another one of my experiments involved collaborative class historical simulations.  I favored breaking the boundaries of the classroom, not only taking the class outside to interact with sculptures or other structures, but also having students leave the classroom in the middle of the class.  I found that breaking up the expected delivery methods not only made the content resonate better with the students but also often introduced humor and laughter into teaching, which I have often found to be critical.

I believed in team-teaching both inside and outside of the Department.  I began by teaching a course on the United States and France with Susan Heberer.  I later helped put together a multi-department initiative on labor studies.  Susan Gotsch-Thompson from Sociology and I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to put together a related program called Workplace Democracy. This program had over 50 individuals involved.  We brought in speakers and ran workshops.  For Rowan’s 75^th Anniversary, I team-taught with Carolyn O’Donnell.  She taught a theater course, and I taught Senior Seminar in History.  Our students worked together.

For two years, I chaired the University committee on the “Use and Abuse of Student Perceptions in Making Personnel Decisions.”  What we found that the evaluations being collected had no impact on the improvement of instruction.  We came up with a new form of assessment that devalued perception and pushed students to focus on the substance of what was happening in class.  For example, it stressed evaluating how much time the students had put in to their work for the class.  It was a complex assessment that included things like the quality of listening in the class and the quality of instructor feedback in class and in writing.

One of my fellow historians who was willing to experiment with some of my new ideas about peer evaluations was Marie Wanek.  I believe that she had trained as a United States labor historian at Georgetown.  She had taken a job at Hood College before coming to Glassboro State.  After she started at GSC, she went back to school and did postgraduate training in the history of the Indian sub-continent.  After this, she began to teach classes on India and Asian history.  In any event, in my early years, she was one of the faculty who was most open to experimenting.  She was good friends with Mary Taney, a Medievalist and a former nun and on the opposite end of the spectrum with regards to such things.  She was a fascinating person who had little interest in social or cultural history.  She was, however, an excellent example of the traditional approach.

I had great students at Glassboro State and Rowan University.  I loved teaching.  The College was a place that allowed me to experiment with both pedagogy and content.  I have many great memories of particular classes and particular students.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff.  One memory will be released per day in the 100 days leading up to October 20, 2023, the date of a reunion celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  The reunion will take place at 7pm at the Summit City Farm and Winery in Glassboro, New Jersey.  Registration for the reunion will be open from July 11^th and will remain open until the venue reaches its 100-person capacity (or October 13^th if capacity never reached).  We do anticipate that the reunion will sell out, so please register as soon as possible by visiting the Alumni Office’s registration page here:  alumni.rowan.edu/historyreunion2023.

You can also find the up-to-date set of Project 100 memories on the Department of History’s webpage.  William Carrigan arranged, interviewed, transcribed and/or edited these memories.  Laurie Lahey proofread and helped edit the final versions.  If you wish to share your own memories, please email Dr. Carrigan at carrigan@rowan.edu.  Alumni with Facebook accounts are encouraged to join the RU/GSC History Alumni group here:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/251485937221524.