Another has left our ranks: William Lowe Boyd

Journal of Educational Administration

ISSN: 0957-8234

Article publication date: 22 March 2011

737

Citation

Ross Thomas, A. (2011), "Another has left our ranks: William Lowe Boyd", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 49 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2011.07449baa.002

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Another has left our ranks: William Lowe Boyd

Article Type: Obituary From: Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 49, Issue 2

The death of William Lowe (Bill) Boyd in late September 2008 was indeed a sad moment for countless scholars and practitioners in the field of educational administration and leadership. His contribution to our field was one of such stature and value that words alone cannot convey the fullness of his scholarship and the delight of his personality, companionship and gentlemanliness. Those of us who knew Bill were indeed privileged.

In the two-and-a-half years that have elapsed since his death I have collected many statements and commentaries on Bill as man and Bill as scholar. Just a few of these appear below as I pen this tribute to him. I do so as one who was delighted to be a friend of Bill and Emily and their wonderful family – and also as one who, together with my own family, has on several occasions occupied the Boyd home on West Fairmount Avenue, State College, Pennsylvania. Thus my association with Bill has indeed been most fortunate, an association that allowed me to witness in so many ways the measure of this remarkable person.

Thanks to Emily I have a copy of Bill’s curriculum vitae – a document of extraordinary length, detail and enrichment. The paper copy is made physically manageable, fortunately, by the use of the smallest print to record Bill’s achievements! No summary could adequately convey the extent and value of such but I must, nevertheless, allude to just some of Bill’s accomplishments. He was for five years (2000-2004) a valued member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Educational Administration and thus, as Editor, I delight in describing the qualities of one who contributed so much to sustaining the excellence of this publication.

Bill was a graduate of the University of Tennessee (BS in Music Education, 1957), Northwestern University (MM in Music Education, 1961) and the University of Chicago (PhD in Education, 1973). Prior to and in conjunction with his studies Bill had been an elementary and high school teacher, Assistant to the Principal of the University of Chicago High School (associated with the celebrated Laboratory School that was founded by John Dewey), and Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Liaison to the Chicago Public Schools. Bill was Assistant Professor (1970-1976) and Associate Professor (1976-1980) of Education at the University of Rochester. His move then to the Pennsylvania State University (1980) as Professor led in turn to appointments as Distinguished Professor (1993-2001) and initial incumbent of the Batschelet Chair of Educational Administration (2001-2008).

Bill’s 28 years at Penn State University encapsulated an extraordinarily valuable, productive and influential contribution to scholarship. There is abundant evidence of the nature and extent of all he gave; it is difficult to identify any who have given more than Bill Boyd to the study of educational policy and politics within the field of educational administration. His work is displayed in particular in his publications which include 17 co-edited books, 140 journal articles and book chapters as well as approximately 150 other papers and presentations.

Bill’s legacy to scholarship is also reflected in the extensive time and effort so generously donated to publication in his field of excellence. From the early 1970s until his death Bill had been associated in an editorial and/or advisory capacity with at least a dozen refereed journals. For example, he had been Associate Editor of Educational Administration Abstracts, Educational Administration Quarterly and Leadership and Policy Studies; he had served on Editorial Advisory Boards of American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Studies, Journal of Education Policy and British Journal of Educational Studies. He had also served as sectional head of the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education. I best remember him in this publishing capacity, of course, during his membership of JEA’s Editorial Advisory Board. I greatly appreciated not just his fluent and insightful evaluations of submitted papers but also his wise counsel on matters of journal policy as well as recommendations for appointments to the Editorial Advisory Board. Bill resigned from the Board of JEA when his persuasive advocacy brought American Journal of Education to Penn State University to be published under his lively editorship.

Through the eyes of scholars elsewhere in the world, one of the most endearing characteristics of Bill Boyd was his intense, genuine scholarly and personal interest in other countries, their people and their educational systems. One outcome of such was his almost ambassadorial voyages beyond his home country. Although a possible cause of umbrage among some readers in the USA, it must be said that Bill was seen as one of a very small minority of American professors whose interests extended onto the international stage. Bill’s “internationality” was evinced inter alia through his many visiting appointments – Fulbright Scholar in Australia and the UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, the University of Wales, the universities of Liverpool and Warwick in the UK, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Deakin and Monash Universities in Australia, and the universities of Umea and Gothenberg in Sweden. It is small wonder that news of Bill’s death was distressing for so many beyond the shores of the USA.

Reynold Macpherson so aptly commented on Bill’s international linkages:

Bill reappeared regularly in Australia and New Zealand in the 1990s, almost as often as he crossed the Atlantic. He was central to the surge in scholarship in the politics of education in that era, especially so with Hedley Beare and others in Australia. His capacity to report the latest intricacies of “reforms”, in many different jurisdictions, was truly amazing. His willingness to take up invitations to travel, speak and consult from team to system level around Australasia was legendary. Given his discretion, however, it is not widely known that he became a confidant of many Ministers and system leaders during the late 1990s and the 2000s. He helped them interpret the relativity of policies from a range of perspectives. Conversely, he helped many he met understand the more puzzling aspects of American foreign and educational policies. He was a powerful influence on policy flows, a great internationalist, and one of the first to explore the potential of globalisation.

The international theme was emphasised by Barbara Vann:

Bill was a great supporter of international links. In this respect he contributed hugely to the links between the USA and UK through BELMAS (British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society). He was a regular attender at conferences but particularly loved those held at Oxford. He enjoyed the social life attached to the conferences as well as the intellectual discourse with leading British academics such as Peter Ribbins and Ron Glatter.

Bill was a staunch supporter of and regular presenter to two key research institutions in the USA – the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). His mark is left indelibly on the former through his leading role in 1996 in establishing Division L – Educational Policy and Politics – the same Division that accorded Bill the distinction of a memorial session during the annual meeting of AERA in San Diego in 2009. Another honour is the William L. Boyd National Educational Politics Workshop for emerging scholars, sponsored by the Politics of Education Association and UCEA, and held during the annual meeting of AERA. Perhaps no greater acknowledgement of Bill’s standing and achievements as Professor was that afforded him in 2002 when he received the Roald Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award from UCEA. His name sits with justification and honour among the recipients of this pinnacle of fame.

William Firestone, current Vice-President of Division L at AERA, has admirably elaborated Bill Boyd’s contribution to the study of the politics of education:

As I got to know Bill, I learned how devoted he was to understanding the intersection of politics and ideas. He explored this intersection in his research. His study of the politics of education focused on the changing ideas over which participants fought, and especially the growth of choice as an idea about how to organize schooling. But he also supported this intersection in his practical politics of the professional world. I worked most closely with Bill in his efforts to create Division L of AERA (Policy and Politics) and then when this very same organizational brainchild threatened another of his creations – the Politics of Education Yearbook – in helping him revive the Politics of Education Association. We now have three institutions for cultivating ideas about educational politics – Division L, PEA, and the Yearbook – that owe their foundation or some aspect of their current form to Bill Boyd.

Almost all who come into the professoriate in educational administration have served as teachers and school or system leaders.

Accordingly, among the ranks of such exists an immense range of professional experiences, subject specialisations and personal interests and pastimes. In these respects Bill Boyd was no exception. Bill’s background – indeed his life-long passion – was in music. An accomplished French horn player, Bill devoted much of his life to encouraging and developing the love of music and the skills of performance in American youth. Each summer Bill (and Emily) would participate in the educational programs conducted at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. Starting from his first modest assignment in 1957 as member of the stage crew, Bill filled in turn many roles crucial to the conduct of the music school. During his final decade of service he was Director of Camp Life.

It was the absence of the Boyd family each summer that enabled me to live comfortably in their State College home while teaching summer school in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University. I (and my family) spent four summers in State College (1982, 1996, 2000, 2002) and, at Bill’s invitation, I enjoyed his magnificent classical library – contained at first in shelves of long-playing records which, over subsequent years, made way for row upon row of CDs. How privileged (and spoilt) I was.

I can’t help but reflect on that keystone of musical composition – harmony: the harmony of voices and the harmony of instruments. To be with Bill Boyd was to experience a harmony of company in which were balanced so equitably all that he could give with that which others could provide. Perhaps this is what Charles (Chuck) Kerchner has identified as Bill’s generosity of spirit, that:

[…] gave him the capacity to thrive through the tedious bits – to find a little gem in a manuscript otherwise obscured with layers of pedantry, or a willingness to suffer a tedious lecture. Once at an AERA session we had seated ourselves far too close to the front of the room to make a polite exit, and as my exasperation grew Bill said quietly, “It’s ed school, Chuck; the wheat is amply protected by the chaff”.

Bill’s generosity of spirit was extended far and wide to all who knew him. Barbara Vann, Principal of Penair School in Truro, Cornwall, remarked:

Bill was hugely supportive and encouraging of my efforts as a novice writer and academic. He was thoughtful, enthusiastic and acted as a mentor over the near 20 years of my Principalship in two schools. I know that he did this for many others but particularly women whom he thought lacked the support and confidence they needed to succeed.

Through this generosity of spirit Bill Boyd brought definition and clarity to the professorship. In recounting their quarter-century friendship, Chuck Kerchner commented:

On reflection, I concluded that our colleagueship, indeed what the Australians would call mateship, flourished because of an attribute we shared and another he had in such abundance that it compensated for my poverty. For each of us being a professor was a vocation, not a job or a title or a position. Being a professor was what we did. Only two or three weeks after his surgery I received an email asking me to look at a piece for the American Journal of Education. I called him and gently asked if there might be more important things for him to be doing. He responded, “Chuck, this is what I do”.

Bill Boyd possessed a splendid sense of humour. It was obvious and manifest in numerous ways. Recipients of his e-mails could always scan to the bottom of such to read usually two or three amusing quotations which, within just a few days, would be replaced with other reflections on the peculiarities of human endeavour (as well as providing further insights into Bill’s wit). An admirer of Winston Churchill, Bill often cited the great man’s incisive commentaries on life such as: “If this is a world of vice and woes I’ll take the vice and you can have the woes”. Both political theory and political pragmatism drove Bill to accumulate words of wisdom from a multitude of sources. Important to our field and attributed to Yogi Berra, for example, is a long-needed clarification: “In theory there’s not much difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is” and, again, “Even Napoleon had his Watergate”.

Bill’s own focus of study, politics, about which he had written copiously, was succinctly summarised by Groucho Marx: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies”.

Bill could also be self-deprecating and, with his own enthusiastic political persuasion widely known, Will Rogers provided him with a delightful throwaway line: “I am not a member of any organised party. I am a Democrat”.

Both Barbara Vann and Reynold Macpherson commented on Bill’s pressing need to appreciate the humour of “foreigners”. Vann recalled: “The British sense of humour occasionally defeated him and we had to explain some jokes to him, usually ironic, but nonetheless he would guffaw appreciatively”. Macpherson, in similar vein, observed: “he insisted on understanding the subtleties of some local humour, to the point where his exhaustive exploration into the joke unpacked deep cultural complexities, was finally understood, and then chuckled over for hours”. In an e-mail posted to all his Australian colleagues in early November 2004, Bill remarked: “The analysis here of our Presidential election reminded me of an Australian’s remark, at the height of the furore here over the Monica Lewinsky scandal with Bill Clinton: ‘Thank God we got the convicts and they got the Puritans’”.

Admiration of Bill was not the soul prerogative of his academic colleagues – his students too admired and respected him. As teacher and supervisor Bill displayed all the fine qualities alluded to above. It fell upon me quite by chance during one summer school (during which I occupied Bill’s vacant office) to discover evidence of his excellence. As it was the end of the summer school my two classes had completed evaluations of my teaching. The arrival of both documents occasioned me no small degree of joy (and also considerable relief!) – on seven-point scale measurements of several teaching criteria I had slipped below 6 only once. Represented within the circumference of a circle, one’s scores on each teaching criterion appeared as whole or part of the spoke of a “wagon wheel”. My wheel was thus reasonably round, not “frayed” too severely at the edges. As I was tidying the office prior to departure I unearthed Bill’s classes’ evaluations for his courses taught in the previous semester. I could not resist reading them. Every student had scored him 7 on everything! There before me was the perfect wagon wheel.

Bill’s excellence as teacher elicited a particularly fine tribute by one of his former students. Rick Dale (2009), member of the class of 1999, composed “To a Mentor” in honour of Bill. The poem appears in its entirety below:

CogentI first heard thatword fromyour lips37 years old, educated (?)and never heardthe word cogent beforeor remembered hearing itand of a suddenI wantedto use itto be itYour commanding intelligenceovershadowedany weakness in pedagogyI hung on your wordsSo much so thatthe day you scolded usfor not reading an assignmentcured me of that poor habit – instantlyAsking me towrite my dissertationwith youDid my jaw drop noticeably?Our trip to the Chicago conventionA result of yourwordsmithing my application(and I suspect your connections)exposed me to other giantsin the disciplinemotivated me to perseverewhere others dropped away (as you knew it would)Your elegy for a colleague – a fellow giant –in New Orleans:breathtakingNow I learn you died 9 months agoand I am bereftwith nothing cogent to say about loss.

It was most appropriate that, during the Division L memorial session at the annual meeting of AERA in May, 2009, all speakers acknowledged the place of his family in Bill’s life. Those who knew them expressed admiration for all members. Reynold Macpherson’s remarks most appropriately described these feelings:

Above all, Bill had an unquenchable thirst for inquiry … It is a delight to see this and his many other talents reflected in his family. A musical daughter who wants to help children reconnect with the environment. A son who is able to communicate for a President. A daughter who can reach and teach across generations. And a wife who thrives on being able to follow her own professional interests.

Just four days before his death Bill’s first grandchild, Helen Ila Rabkin, was born to his daughter Anne in California. The cruelty of his illness and the tyranny of distance meant that Bill was denied the opportunity to hold and kiss this sweet little girl. But her appearance at the memorial session reminded all present that Bill’s legacy has been passed on in many, many ways and for that we may all be most comforted.

A. Ross Thomas

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