This month, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida features excerpts from a 2021 interview with Dr. Paul Ortiz [O], a UF professor and the director of the SPOHP at the time. Currently a professor of labor history at Cornell University, he has a personal and academic background in African American history, Latinx studies, and oral history. He was interviewed by George Topalidis [T]. Excerpt edited by Beth Grobman. For the full interview go to tinyurl.com/Iguana2149
T: What level of support did you find for the Oral History Program when you came to UF?
O: We’re in a world class facility which was built with our needs in mind. We have space for production, recording suites. It’s a really nice piece of real estate for an oral history program to thrive. When I first met Sam Proctor in the mid-nineties, the UF Oral History was in the basement of Anderson Hall and the offices leaked … you could see the rain coming down the side of the walls; we’re in a much better space than we were back then.
Oral history program directors all across the country are a pretty close knit fraternity and we really have to hustle for our resources because when you talk about working with underserved communities, refugee communities, people of color, working class people — a lot of people in higher ed — their eyes start rolling and they really, a lot of administrators, unfortunately, just don’t care. A lot of colleagues don’t care.
With the SPOHP, we’ve gotten a lot of support for African American history initiatives and for other initiatives. But a lot of it is outside of university; we have a robust group of supporters who come through with donations. I’ve always relied upon private donors. If I went to the Dean’s office to ask for those things, I would just be wasting my time and their time, because the answer is going to be no. I hope that will change sometime.
T: Have you experienced any prejudice, discrimination or microaggressions at UF? Do you recall specific episodes?
O: Oh, yeah. I’ve experienced them. I’m currently president of the United Faculty of Florida, and a lot of our faculty experience racism. We’ve had Chinese faculty here who faced anti-Chinese racism. We’ve had to file grievances in support of them. We’ve had Black faculty who faced anti-Black racism. And what pisses me off most is the racism my students face.
I had one of my graduate students about seven or eight years ago who was late for a seminar. A couple days later he told me that he had been stopped by the campus police — they had patted him down and they had accused him of stealing someone’s laptop. It was so absurd. And just really, you know, hurtful to this person because they gave him really harsh treatment. We called the campus police later. They said, “Oh, there had been a misunderstanding.” There was never any apology. That kind of thing happens all the time here.
I have gotten profiled on campus. One time I was walking around campus. I was wearing a hoodie. A cop stopped me and started hassling me. I asked what is this about? And he said, “well, you know, you fit the description of a person who just stole a flat screen TV from a student apartment.” And I said, “Well, you know, I don’t even watch TV that much. I don’t have any reason to steal a flat screen TV,” and so he hassled me more.
Finally I pulled out my professor’s card. I said, “You know, I just had dinner with your chief just last week, Tony Jones, and I can call him right now.” It kind of spooked him and he backed off and drove away. But, you know, it’s just things like that. And again, my African American colleagues have to deal with much worse.
I could give you many examples, but we would be here all day. And this wouldn’t just be UF, it would be other universities, too. Because in spite of what you see on a university’s homepage, you know, Black Studies is still dramatically under resourced and underfunded in the United States.
T: Why have you decided to remain active in your current position at UF?
O: One of the reasons is that people of my generation, progressive and radical scholars, were trained and mentored by people who fought so hard to just secure small intellectual beachheads in higher education. Higher education is very conservative, and it exists to serve the interests primarily of the Monsantos, the Lockheed Martins, the Boeings the phosphate companies, the fertilizer companies.
The last major that we approved in the Academic Senate before I left U.C. Santa Cruz was a major in video gaming, and that was a major designed to serve the interests of Silicon Valley, so that Silicon Valley firms that were involved in gaming wouldn’t have to spend resources to train their new workers, right?
They got workers that were trained by the public on the public dime. And that’s the status quo in higher education. And so that’s kind of what keeps me in the game. I see a lot of students who want to become critical thinkers. They want to become writers, you know, they want to figure out how to make the world a better place. I think oral history is at the intersection. And when you add the intellectual rigor and research and the skills you learn in oral history. I just think it’s a great place to be.
T: As the director, as a professor, what level of mentoring are you expected to provide to UF?
O: Well, a lot. It’s a lifetime commitment. I’m writing letters. I’m now old enough to be writing mid-career letters for my former grad students. The first cohort of them are actually becoming full professors. It’s really kind of cool to watch. And so the mentoring. I just try to pay it forward like what people like Cedric Robinson or Angela Davis or Carlos Muñoz or Dave Roediger did for me, which is to just be there for my students.
I’ve been on 20 or more dissertation committees now for about seven or eight consecutive years. And so I do the faculty of color double duty thing. And I’ve had deans call me on this campus and say, Paul, if we can’t get you on this student’s committee as the race and ethnicity person, they’re not going to be able to matriculate to their exams. So, I mean, wow, what a great choice you’ve just given me. Okay. So yeah, I’ll be on the committee, which means I’ll do more reading, et cetera. So there’s a lot of mentoring.
You mentioned earlier the microaggressions. One of my grad students who just finished got a great tenure track job and was told early on in her tenure here at UF in the history department, “You’re not going to make it as an academic. You don’t have the intellectual capacity.” Well, now she’s a very successful professor at a really good university.
Every once in a while I’ll send messages back to the department. “Oh, this person’s doing really well.” And I’m sure it just irritates them. You know, like I said, the kind of shit I have to put up with here as a Latino faculty member is nothing compared to the kind of stuff my graduate students or undergraduates have to deal with.
Other faculty in African American studies can tell you many of the same types of stories, you know, or the students in the Palestinian student organization. Other people, other students or administrators just make up stories about them and claim they’re anti-Semitic or something. I’m like, well, where’s your evidence? I know these students, they’re kind, they’re gentle. Some of them are Jewish themselves, you know? And so why would you accuse them of being anti Semites? “Well, you know, President Trump is really concerned about this.” I’m like, really? President Trump is concerned about anti Semitism? I don’t think so.
There’s all sorts of things that go on at UF, but it’s like any other walk of life. I mean there’s the good, the bad, the ugly. And I was blessed because when I was in grad school, my dissertation advisor and my professors made it clear to me that academia was no better or no worse than any other kind of firm or enterprise in the United States.
Any good that you did, you had to do it yourself. You had to start programs, you had to keep programs going. You couldn’t take anything for granted. You could lose a lot of ground. You know I’m sure there are people that would love to shut down the Oral History Program. I’m sure there are people that would love to shut down African American Studies. But we’re going to continue to fight to keep our programs open because we’re successful, and our students get so much out of it, and they go on and do great things.
T: What should the administration do to recruit Black faculty and staff?
O: This administration needs to make a recommitment to intellectual freedom, period. A number of faculty have been abused, frankly. And so it’s gonna to be very difficult to recruit or retain colleagues in this environment. The thing that mainly keeps faculty of color here is family. And you know, UF is a really good university. The students are among the best in the country, the faculty are awesome. The staff are incredible but right now, this university is like a rudderless ship in terms of the attention it plays to issues of race and inequality. And it’s gonna be very difficult to recruit and retain faculty.
The faculty that want to come here are people like myself who were raised to be fighters, who come here because it’s almost kind of like a missionary thing — maybe we can do something to turn this thing around. It shouldn’t have to be like that because it means you’re always doing the faculty of color double duty thing here at UF. We need to get a lot of our white colleagues, frankly, just to step up more.
If you’re in a room where someone says, “We just can’t find qualified Black students to apply to our PhD programs,” you need to be the white person that steps up and says, bullshit, that’s fucking ridiculous because a corporation like Brown Foreman, the Jack Daniels folks, Microsoft, they would never say some crap like that. We can’t find enough qualified Black or Latino applicants. They go out and do it. They find a way to do it. They say, “If you don’t have a diverse leadership team, if you don’t have a certain number of people who identify as LGBT, Black, immigrant, et cetera, it’s gonna hurt your bottom line. Because we’re a corporation that has offices all throughout the world. We cannot be seen as lily white. It will be devastating to our bottom line.”
T: What is your view of what it means to be an ally?
O: To me, it’s being there. I’ve got the reputation of speaking up quite a bit on campus. But I need allies. I really could use some of those. Educate yourself on how you benefited from settler colonialism and then work with us to create a more just world, if you are willing to publicly put your name out there. So the allyship test is right there. You can be a wonderful ally today, or you can continue to kind of take a step back and just see how things are going and say, “Oh, the union will take care of that. Well, Paul Ortiz will take care of that.” Well, that’s bullshit unless you’re willing to step up and take care of that.
T: What sort of responsibility do white grad students, white junior faculty, white administrators, white staff members — what role do they play in sort of asserting this sort of allyship?
O: Their role should be, first of all, listening and finding out what’s happening in their bailiwick. How are our faculty being treated? If you find out they’re being abused, then work to change that. But I think the first thing is to listen and to try to learn from people you know.
The big problem in academia right now is people — administration or faculty types. They’ll make all these really complicated plans when all they really had to do is just listen to the people that this stuff is affecting, whether it’s undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff. You know, talk about allyship, if you want to be ally in this campus right now, what are you doing about helping to improve staff salaries, because a lot of staff here are people of color, women, who’ve been working here 20, 30 years and make terrible wages. There’s just so many things we can do.
The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program believes that listening carefully to first-person narratives can change the way we understand history, from scholarly questions to public policy.
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