 "Photo: Ivan Chompalov")
Last Sunday, I spent the day at my office sorting through every piece of paper that had accumulated over the past year. When the Liberal Arts staff arrived on Monday, they found a large green recycling bin filled with magazines and journals, plus a stack of memos and reports beside the shredder that reached to the top. I hadn't meant this to be a time to sort through my feelings and memories of Frank. It just turned out that way.
Actually, the sorting had begun earlier that week at home. I had purchased a new digital camera and decided I'd better load all the pictures from my old one onto my computer so I wouldn't lose them. Included in these were pictures taken at the improvised celebration at the end of what we called the "East Erie Cohort." And there was Frank's picture.
The East Erie Cohort was an experiment that succeeded beyond expectations and Frank had been there at the beginning of the experiment and the end. It started in Fall 2005 and ended in Summer 2008.
The idea was to give residents of the impoverished east side of Erie a chance to get an associate degree in liberal studies that wrapped itself around a minor in special education. This would give them a running start on a four-year degree in education, or if not that, at least a credential that could lead to a job as a teacher assistant.
It was Scott Baldwin's idea but he handed it off to Liberal Arts early in the process. I don't know how many times I thanked him in public for this gift, while the little thought bubble over my head contained opinions that I had the good sense to keep inside the bubble.
But once you met these students and heard their stories, your heart melted and you found yourself doing whatever you could to make this experiment succeed.
Frank taught them that first crucial semester. He drove to the old Hammermill site in Erie, where courses were taught at the Benjamin Wiley GECAC Community Charter School. He taught Introduction to Sociology. Denise Finazzo Gaines taught College Reading and Study Skills. The idea was that the two of them would coordinate assignments, so the reading and study skills Denise taught could be applied to the sociology assignments in Frank's class.
This worked so well that three years later, 88 percent of the students who started the cohort had either completed the program or transferred to another major and were still enrolled at the university.
The photograph I took of Frank was not very artful. If he was facing north, I viewed him from a southwest perspective, and the person he was talking with wasn't even in the picture. But I remember what he said at the ceremony. He said it was very fulfilling to teach students who had come to higher education late in life. He himself had done that and having climbed that ladder, he knew they could do it, too. He said they shouldn't stop now, and if they wanted a good major, they should consider sociology.
I remember being touched by the easy way this white man, who had lived most of his life on the great plains of North Dakota and Nebraska, related to a room of inner city adults, mostly black, almost all female, and at the same time being impressed by how he used the occasion to make a pretty good sales pitch for sociology.
Now back to cleaning out my office. One of the reports that did not get thrown into the green recycling bin was the Freshman Achievement Study that Frank had co-authored. The report arrived at numerous conclusions and recommendations about our students, but whenever I asked Frank to summarize the report, he always made the same two points. If students did well academically their first year and kept their finances in good order, they were likely to finish their degree. He saw lots of practical implications of these twin conclusions, one of which was to create a First Year Experience program, which we did.
One other item I ran across in my housecleaning was something Frank did on his own without any request or even knowledge on my part. It was a document entitled: "Liberal Arts B.A. Degrees Median Salaries by Years of Experience and Other Occupational Data and Information. Report to the Dean of Liberal Arts. Prepared by Dr. Frank Taylor and Professor Kimberly Magee."
Like so many things Frank did, it had a practical motive. Frank felt that whereas starting salaries for Liberal Arts disciplines were typically low, they climbed rather rapidly after five or 10 years of experience, and ended up looking really good after 20 years.
The point was, when promoting a Liberal Arts education, look beyond starting salaries and sell the career. Once people who can think, write and speak intelligently get into the workforce, they climb rapidly in their second decade, when adaptability and creativity overtake training and entry-level skills.
As a philosopher, however, I was surprised when I saw that philosophy majors, after 20 years in the workforce, had the highest median salaries of all.
I haven't been able to decide if this is a compelling argument for majoring in philosophy or a reductio ad absurdum of Frank's methodology. When I shared this report with the other chairpersons in Liberal Arts, he took some good natured ribbing about what he was smoking when he compiled the philosophy data.
Frank was unapologetic. His attitude was: The data speak for themselves.
Sometime during the week before his accident, Frank came to my office to talk about some departmental business. I can't even remember what it was, but what I do recall is our conversation about his band.
He normally did not share information about his outside interests with me, but on several occasions I had dropped by his office only to find him guitar-in-hand, listening to music and scribbling down chord changes on a sheet of paper.
So I knew he played guitar, but didn't know about his band until he explained on that last day we talked, about how this band had stayed together for years and one member now lived in-I don't know-Nebraska and another I think in West Virginia.
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