The object of liberal training is not learning, but

discipline and the enlightenment of the mind.

 

- Woodrow Wilson

 

 

Chapter 7

COLLEGE & GRADUATE SCHOOL

            

My goal in college was to major in sociology to pre­pare for a career in so­cial work.  I wanted to "help people" de­spite a limited understanding of what that meant. My motivation to become a social worker stemmed from the turmoil of the 1960s, a re­ligious belief in Jesus' exhortation to serve the poor and a concern over the lack of justice for racial mi­norities in the United States.

 

College

 

I enrolled at a local community college in June fol­lowing high school gradua­tion.  This was a good choice.  Classes were small and students received indi­vidualized attention.  Some of my former high school classmates entered large state uni­versities with lecture classes of several hun­dred students.  Conse­quently, a few floundered in college.

In English 101, during my first quarter, I had diffi­culty constructing and parsing sentences.  After that, writing mysteriously became an intuitive skill and I received "A's" in later courses.  The most diffi­cult college subject for me was al­gebra.  I enrolled in a "bone head" class, next took a course equivalent to high school algebra and then com­pleted College Al­gebra.  I barely earned a "C " in the latter, the only college-level math course I completed.

My study habits were problematic.  I continued to procrasti­nate in completing homework and wrote term pa­pers without out­lines while composing at the type­writer, resulting in piles of crum­pled paper.  My anxiety steadily rose as the dead­lines for papers neared.  I took frequent breaks from homework to get snacks or watch TV.  Breaks, however, were not wasted;  I churned the material over in my mind, re-organizing and reworking the con­tent.  I persevered despite poor study habits. Phi Theta Kappa, the na­tional commu­nity college honor soci­ety, inducted me as a member in 1968.  A letter from the dean of stu­dents con­gratulated me on my academic achieve­ment:

 

You were one of thirty students from among a stu­dent body of over four thousand, who were able to perform at . . . a superior level [D. McCourt, letter, January 15, 1968].

 

I transferred in my junior year to Seattle Pacific University (SPU), a small Christian liberal arts col­lege.[1]   My reasons for picking SPU had less to do with its academic excellence or reli­gious emphasis, than the fact that class sizes were small and SPU did not require a speech class for graduation.  I still suf­fered from shyness and was petrified of speaking in public.

Academically, I did well at SPU, but felt that I did not measure up to the reli­gious expectations of the uni­versity.  Because I questioned religious orthodoxy and hypocritical attitudes, my most troublesome course was a re­ligion class.  The professor, who in­tended to give me a "D", changed my grade to a "C+" after I met with him.  He ex­plained, "You would re­ceive an “A” if this was a philosophy course at the University of Washington [a secular univer­sity]."  He felt that my term paper was not grounded enough in scripture.  My anger welled up at what I perceived to be his patronizing attitude.  Instead of expressing my feelings di­rectly, I provoked him into ex­plaining why Christians were justified in partici­pating in the Viet­nam War, forcing them to break the command­ment, "Thou shalt not kill."  The professor took my bait, and, from his funda­mentalist per­spective, defended the Christian's duty to fight in the war.  I felt I had exposed his hypocrisy.  This incident reveals my con­crete thinking style, over-sensitivity to criti­cism and critical nature as a person with ADD.

One day in a sociology class, the professor passed a "be­havior control" pill (Ritalin) around room for us to exam­ine.  He was alarmed when I pretended to swallow it.  Ironically, little did I know that it might have improved my concen­tration.

I graduated cum laude in March 1970 with a bache­lor of arts in sociology.[2]   Af­ter graduation, my part-time case­work job with the Salvation Army in­creased to a full-time position.  The director encour­aged me to apply to the graduate so­cial work pro­gram at the University of Chi­cago's School of Social Service Ad­mini­stration (SSA).  I did, and received an admission letter from SSA that awarded me a full scholarship from the U.S. Children's Bureau in ex­change for agreeing to work in the field of child mental health upon graduation. I was ec­static but had self-doubts about my academic ability and intellectual capacity, though I had just gradu­ated from SPU with honors.

 

Graduate School

 

I entered the University of Chicago’s social work pro­gram in the fall of 1970, moving from Jackson Park in Seattle to Jackson Park in Chicago.  Thus began the defining ex­perience of my life—for me, the beginning of what Joseph Camp­bell calls the “hero adventure.”[3]  

Located on the south side of Chicago, the univer­sity bordered the Wood­lawn ghetto. Then, Chicago was “the most residen­tially seg­re­gated large city in the na­tion.”[4]  James Bevel, an as­sociate of Dr. Martin Lu­ther King, Jr., said that Chicago “is not that different from the South.”  “Black Chi­cago,” he added, “is Mis­sissippi moved north a few hundred miles.”[5]

Chicago’s School of Social Service Ad­ministra­tion (SSA) is the oldest school of social work in the na­tion.  When I enrolled in 1970, its Master of Arts social work program, rated the best in the nation, was steeped in ego psychol­ogy. I could not understand the rele­vance of psycho­dynamic theory, however, for the African American clients dealing with survival needs in the Wood­lawn com­munity where I com­pleted my field­work.  (Later, I questioned its relevance for any client.) 

Because of my in­tui­tive, concrete style of think­ing, I grappled with the appli­cation of what I found to be vague, impractical theory.  More tangible theories, like William Glasser's Reality Ther­apy (Glasser, 1965)—described as "radi­cally non-Freu­dian"—and B. F. Skinner's behavior­ism, seemed more practical to me.[6]

It was apparent that psychodynamic theory did not offer the clear, measurable therapeutic results I sought.  It did not work with my behaviorally disor­dered child clients. However, I wondered if it did not work because I was "too stupid" to understand it.  Faculty and students at the University of Chicago touted its suc­cess.  For exam­ple, Bruno Bettleheim, the celebrated child psycho­analyst who directed the University's Orthogenic School, claimed in his book, The Empty Fortress (1967), that his methods resulted in an 85% cure rate for autistic children seen before seven to eight years of age.[7]   Bettle­heim, at the ze­nith of his career when I arrived in Chicago, how­ever, admitted after he left the university, "nobody knows how to treat these children [Sutton, 1996, p. 374]." (Autism, like ADD, later proved to be biologi­cally based.)

Several childhood problems continued to nettle me in graduate school:  slow reading speed and poor com­pre­hension, low self-esteem, short attention span, the lack of organization, high anxiety[8] and an inabil­ity to cope effec­tively with stress.  My tendency to annoy peers endured.  I began to realize the cause-and-effect conse­quences of in­terrupting and needling others, but could not seem to stop myself or under­stand why I behaved that way.

My class participation in graduate school was poor, as it had been throughout my early school years; I had trouble sometimes organizing and ar­ticulating my thoughts.  To protect my self-esteem, I often sat in the back row of the classroom and hid behind silver-tinted sunglasses.  The instructors of my social work methods class required me to submit an extra writ­ten assignment one quarter when they were not sure if I had absorbed the material.  "I be­lieve the reason that they didn't give me an 'A' is be­cause I don't par­tici­pate much," I wrote my parents.

In the same letter, I proudly announced that Helen Harris Perlman, the Sam­uel Deutsch Distin­guished Service Pro­fessor, and author of the ac­claimed social work text, So­cial Casework: A Problem-solving Proc­ess (1957), had written, "competent pa­per," on my term assignment.  Pro­fessor Perlman's comment lifted my spirits.  The only in­sight I can remember from her class, Minority Children through Contemporary Writings, was her urging that we try to comprehend the fear that toddlers experi­ence during toilet training by visualizing ourselves sitting on a ten-foot-high flush toilet proportioned to adult size.  Perhaps I re­member this ludicrous image of myself on a gigantic toilet because I thought that the im­portance of toilet training was highly overrated by tradi­tional psychothera­pists.

A personally challenging course, Enduring Issues in Poor Relief, was taught by another outstanding SSA professor and dean-to-be, Margaret Rosenheim.  As a policy class it held less interest for me—in a word, it was "boring."

Rosenheim, an attorney, taught the class in a style remi­niscent of the televi­sion drama, The Paper Chase, a series about students in a contract law class.  To me, in retrospect, she seemed like a younger, less-crusty female incarnation of law pro­fessor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr. (John Houseman).  Rosenheim in­variably called upon students when she sensed that they were not paying atten­tion, or were unprepared.  I was a bit of a smart aleck in her class when I be­came bored.  Rosenheim trapped me with the query, "Mr. Miller, can you tell us about . . . ?"

Elizabeth Butler, my fieldwork instructor, recog­nized my difficulty in struc­turing written reports and case summa­ries.  She taught me to organize my pa­per­work with out­lines and subheadings, but I some­times followed her sugges­tions too literally.  At the bottom of a sample letter, she added "RSM:bb."  For years afterwards I placed "bb" after my ini­tials on documents, until I realized that the letters stood for "Betty Butler."  Ms. Butler had designated the initials of the letter's author (me), followed by her ini­tials as the fictitious secretary who typed it.

I graduated from SSA in March 1972.  Many gradu­ating students, myself in­cluded, felt cheated.  A rather typical response was:  “Is this all there is?”  In re­ality, the “mystical” quest for professional knowl­edge was just beginning.

 

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