W E E K D AY E D I T I O N | O C T O B E R 2 3 - 2 5 , 2 0 17 | T W I C E W E E K LY I N P R I N T | O U D A I LY. C O M
OUDAILY
For 100 years, the student voice of the University of Oklahoma
PAXSON HAWS/THE DAILY
50 YEARS OF SERVICE
Alan Velie, the David Ross Boyd professor, sits in his office Oct. 20. Velie has been teaching at OU for 50 years.
OU honors longest-serving faculty member, praises legacy
A
lan Velie was the center of attention and loving it. At 79, he sat surrounded by hundreds of dear friends. Colleagues and students crowded into the Oklahoma Memorial Union’s Beaird Lounge in May to celebrate the career of a man whose influence spans generations. The group gathered was as diverse as it was large — OU’s top administrators, English and Native American studies professors, athletic executives, study abroad faculty, old friends, young students, children and grandchildren — all standing as testament to Velie’s far-reaching influence on the institution he calls home. Many speeches conveyed part praise, part roast — fitting for a man who has been described as “lovable” and “contentious” in the same breath. This fall marks the 50th year of Velie’s notable career at OU — a milestone earning him the distinction of being OU’s longest-serving faculty member still teaching — something he’ll return to doing this spring. “He holds so much institutional memory,” said Amanda CobbGreetham, Velie’s former student and current colleague. “He is like a keeper of OU’s memory. A keeper of our institutional culture and history.” In his second year, Velie witnessed the retirement of OU’s venerated president George Lynn Cross, best known for desegregating the school. Six presidents later, he will witness the end of OU president David Boren’s era. In between, he has seen OU transform from an average university into what it is today — better in every way, he said, in spite of a worsening budget crisis. “It’s a pleasure to work here,” Velie said. “It’s always been very pleasant, but it’s really something to be proud of today.” ‘HEART AND SOUL OF THE PROGRAM’ Kyle Harper would not be the person he is today without Alan Velie. OU’s provost credits Velie, who earned a master’s and a doctoral degree in Shakespeare from Stanford University, for sparking in him a lasting love of literature, beauty and ideas.
ANNA BAUMAN • @ANNABAUMAN2 “I vividly remember being in his class and having my life changed because of the way that he taught great literature,” said Harper, who studied texts like Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” with Velie. “He could make it come to life, he could make it seem important, in a way that was surprising for literature that might be hundreds of years old but could somehow seem to, in his classroom, be the most important thing in the world.” Harper estimates that Velie has impacted thousands of students in a similar way throughout his 50-year tenure — many of whom have gone on to become Velie’s colleagues in the English and Native American studies departments. Velie’s gift in the classroom is something special, Harper said, and he has racked up plenty of awards to prove it. Velie received the Amoco Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1972 and the Baldwin Award for Excellence in Classroom Instruction in 1986, and he was named the Mortarboard Honor Society Outstanding Faculty Member in 1989. In 2014, he was awarded the Otis Sullivant Award for perceptivity — “whatever that means,” Velie said — which counts former football player Eric Striker, honors college dean David Ray and associate dean of students Kristen Partridge among its recipients. In 2015, Velie was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a born teacher. But if I thought there were, Alan would fit that category.” JERRY WEBER, RETIRED EXERCISE PHYSIOLOGY PROFESSOR
of Fame alongside Boren. “I don’t think there is such a thing as a born teacher,” said Jerry Weber, a retired exercise physiology professor who has enjoyed a 50year friendship with Velie. “But if I thought there were, Alan would fit that category.” Velie’s teaching style is traditional and his strategy is simple — to teach students how to read, write and, most importantly, think. Even
through 50 years of change, Velie’s teaching remains timeless. “I try to teach them how to think for themselves,” Velie said. “That’s why I have them read a passage — ‘Well, what do you think it means?’ Tell me not what somebody said it meant, but read it, and try to figure it out — and if a student can get out of college knowing how to read and write, that’s really all you need.” Velie’s dedication to students extended beyond the classroom in a study abroad program to Oxford, England that he chaperoned nearly every year for two decades until 2015 with honors college professor Melanie Wright. “He’s the heart and soul of the program,” Wright said of Velie, who loved taking students to lunch and out to visit the many colorful, tiny bars dotting the area. Velie’s travels also reached across the globe to places like Bolivia, Bulgaria and Ukraine, where he gave academic lectures. He aspired to give students a glimpse of the world outside Norman — a goal shared by OU’s administration under Boren. “There’s a big world out there,” said Velie, whose own worldview has expanded since he first settled in small-town Oklahoma fresh out of graduate school in 1967. “I think it’s healthy for students to realize that and just get a sense of what the rest of the world is like, what they’re doing.” ‘IT MEANT THE WORLD TO ME’ Amanda Cobb-Greetham sat in Velie’s classroom 25 years ago reading books she didn’t previously know existed written by Native American authors. “I don’t even know how to explain what it meant to me the first time I was in a class and I read these texts,” Cobb-Greetham said. “I am Chickasaw, and when I read these books by native authors that I didn’t even know existed — they weren’t anywhere else, and they weren’t being taught anywhere else — it meant the world to me. And I wanted to become a part of that and to share that, as well.” Cobb-Greetham, now the chair of OU’s department of Native American studies, credits Velie with helping shape the academic field she and many others at OU have built careers on. “Alan Velie insisted that the literary works of this renaissance be taken seriously as significant texts
Velie in 1967.
within the academy,” she said. In 1969, two years into a budding teaching career, Velie became the first in the nation to teach American Indian literature in an academic setting, at the request of his department chair. “I didn’t know a thing about it,” said Velie, who had just written his thesis and dissertation on Shakespeare. Looking for texts to teach, he found only nine novels in publication — including N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 “House Made of Dawn” — which he taught alongside the poetry section of a Mohawk newspaper. Cobb-Greetham recalls sitting in Velie’s classroom the first time. “You’re like, ‘Who is this slightly grumpy sounding rugby player who’s in here talking about Native American literature?’” she said. “You’re like, ‘What?’” But his “gruff” personality didn’t translate into arrogance — instead, he acted as a conduit between the academic community and the writers whose works he taught. “He didn’t hold himself out as like, ‘Oh, I’m the expert on this,’” Cobb-Greetham said. “He mostly saw himself as a way to help introduce literature from these
COURTESY OF OU
communities ... He understood that the knowledge and the expertise lives within our tribal nations and communities, and he honored that.” The Native American studies department, which emerged out of an interdisciplinary program, was built on the contributions from the discipline’s first scholars, Velie chief among them. Velie taught the Native American literature course for years until new faculty members rose up to take his place. Still, he continued to pursue work in the field as a scholar, writing three books and over 40 articles and editing several anthologies on the subject. “Indians are such an important part of Oklahoma history, and one of the best ways to understand Indian culture is to read novels about it,” Velie said. AL VELIE RUGBY FIELD Velie’s love of literature is rivaled only by his other main hobby — sports. During his undergraduate days at Harvard, Velie crossed the yard see VELIE Page 3