Dean’s message
In the spring of 1984, I was a senior at Calallen High School, on the edge of Corpus Christi, looking ahead eagerly to college. UT was in my sights, acceptance secured, when I visited for a weekend recruitment event and stayed in Jester Hall. I associated Austin and UT with the best of times: visiting for state music or academic UIL competitions, basking in competitive glory (and sometimes victory), and enjoying the mandatory dinner with friends at the Magic Time Machine. (Yes, I’m cringing with you — the world of food options in Austin has been seriously upgraded in the past 40 years.)
I didn’t end up at UT. At the last minute, I decided to explore further afield, and my love of politics and policy, combined with a generous scholarship, led me to American University in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, UT and Austin in the 1980s left an impression on me. Reading through these pages reminds me of that time in my life — a taste of what could have been. It reminds me of the complex state politics of that era, when Texas was a Democratic, conservative state. It reminds of the music of the time, blasting from speakers (not the little kind that sit in your ear) and stages in Austin, Corpus Christi, and throughout the state. It makes me recall all there was to do on a lively campus in a great city before cell phones and streaming and personal computers.
This issue is a nostalgia trip for me, but also an opportunity to better understand the place I work and live now and to think about how it has been shaped by the past decades. I didn’t know about Hank the Hallucination and his legendary run for student body president. I didn’t know about the political organizing that Néstor Rodriguez, now a sociology professor on our faculty, did as a graduate student here. I didn’t know about philosophy professor Kathleen Higgins’ early struggles to be taken seriously as a thinker in a department that skewed very male. I know more about Austin’s music landscape now, but it’s exciting to read about what I might have experienced in the 1980s with a different college choice. Having found my way back to Texas, my affection for Austin and UT run deep, and moving through these pages enriches my understanding of this remarkable place. I hope it does the same for you.
Ann Huff Stevens Dean, College of Liberal Arts
David Bruton Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts
Photo by Wyatt McSpadden
Daniel Oppenheimer
College of Liberal Arts Dean: Ann Huff Stevens Editor in Chief: Daniel Oppenheimer
Managing Editor: Leora Visotzky
Art Direction and Design: Arielle Winchester
Assistant Editors: Lauren Macknight, Alex Reshanov, Kaulie Watson Contributing Writers: Maureen Turner, Juliana Smith-Etienne, Dominic Beck, Néstor Rodriguez, Eddie Watson
Contributing Photographers: Bill Leissner
Back to the Future
BY DANIEL OPPENHEIMER
In the standard histories of the last few decades of American politics, it is Ronald Reagan’s first election, in the fall of 1980, that marks the decisive break between the old Democratic dispensation, which began back in 1932 with FDR’s election, and the ascendance of modern conservatism, which would set the terms for political life in America for the subsequent few decades. But history arrives in different places at different times.
When the 68th Texas Legislature met for a second special session in June of 1984, not long after UT's class of ‘84 had its commencement ceremonies, the important decisions were all made by Democrats. The Senate was composed of 26 Democrats and five Republicans. The House tilted 113-37 for the Dems. Democrat Mark White was the governor, and the lieutenant governor was legendary Democratic power player William P. Hobby Jr. It wasn’t even close, in other words.
You know the rest of the story — how Texas, first gradually and then rapidly, became a thoroughly Republican state. George W. Bush’s victory over incumbent Democrat Ann Richards in the 1994 gubernatorial election, a mere decade later, marked the almost total takeover of the state by the Republican Party. Only one Democrat, lieutenant governor Bob Bullock, won statewide office that year, and none have done so since. Here in 2024, we know this blue-to-red story so well that it can come to seem that it must have been obvious which way things were trending from the start. But it wasn’t.
What’s striking, traveling imaginatively back in time to the UT campus in 1984, is how different the relationship was then between politics on campus, politics at the Capitol, and the broader politics of the state. Texas was a conservative state, then as now, and Austin and UT Austin were liberal, then as now. But the liberalism of UT Austin, and of the city of Austin, were much closer to the politics at the Capitol than they are now. Left-leaning students weren’t usually protesting the governor; they were interning for him, or for his allies in the Legislature.
There had already been big signs of impending political change by 1984 — the Democratic edifice had started to show serious cracks — but if you were a young Democrat that year, you simply didn’t imagine that your party would soon be so thorougly supplanted. Right-wing students, meanwhile, could only dream of the control over the power structure their movement would attain. The future was not at all clear.
The political transformation in Texas over the last four decades, depending on your perspective, is for good or ill. For me, writing as a guy who markets the liberal arts to the world, it is first and foremost fascinating. What a surprising world we live in. Things can change so quickly in some realms while staying so similar in others. 1984 is so long ago, and so close too. And thank God for the liberal arts.
No offense to the many other disciplines that are taught here at UT Austin, but it is our disciplines that provide the most insight into how Texas has changed over the past 40 years. I’m not just talking about our Department of Government faculty, with their insight into macro-political transitions, transformative figures like Karl Rove and George W. Bush, and the complex dynamics of public opinion in Texas. I’m talking about economists exploring the rise of the technology sector in
Texas and the diversification of the energy sector. I’m talking about sociologists parsing major demographic shifts in our population, cultural historians looking at the evolving scenes not just in Austin but in all the disparate regions of this vast state, and linguists studying the slow death of Texas German. Across the College of Liberal Arts, we are tracking how the world — and Texas as a particularly fascinating microcosm of the world — has changed and is changing.
This is the college where you can most deliberately and intensively figure that all out, then as now. We put together this special Class of 1984 issue primarily because we thought it would be interesting for you to read (and, if we’re being honest, because it was fun for us to create). But we also wanted to remind you why the liberal arts are
so essential. Because we’re a time machine. And a now machine. And a why machine. And a so what machine.
As a marketer of liberal arts, I am acutely conscious of all the things that marketing can’t do. Even the most brilliant marketing campaign can’t make kids with visions of smartphone fairies dancing in their eyes decide to major in history or anthropology or government. What I want to believe in, however, is the possibility that good communications can nudge things in the right direction. They can influence the kids on the margin, who love history but are anxious about their resumés. They can push an alumnus over the edge to give a gift to support the college. They can make you, the reader, just a little bit happier about, and more proud of, the education you got here.
President Reagan giving his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, August 23, 1984, contributed to Wikimedia Commons by Ronald Reagan Library Museum Collection (NAID 6816361)
“Bands On The Block” album cover—fire breather. (c) Bill Leissner
That Was Then, THIS IS NOW
By Alex Reshanov and Juliana Smith-Etienne
STUDENT DEMOGRAPHICS: RESIDENCY
UT, Austin, and the world have changed significantly since 1984, and we’ve got the stats to prove it.
Sources: UT 1983-84 statistical handbook and Facts & Figures page Then: International: 6.8%
STUDENT ENROLLMENT
Then: Now:
47,631
51,913
Sources: UT catalog and Facts & Figures page
STUDENT DEMOGRAPHICS: GENDER
Then:
Sources: UT 1983-84 statistical handbook and Facts & Figures page
COLA UNDERGRADUATE TUITION FOR TEXAS RESIDENTS
Sources: UT catalogs, archived and current per semester for up to 12 credits per semester flat rate for 12+ credits $ 72 for 18 credits ($154 and $222 when adjusted for inflation) Now:
Then: Now:
$ 50 $ 5,429
POPULATION OF AUSTIN
Number of residents: 1984 Now
Sources: City of Austin, Macrotrends, US Census estimates, Wikipedia
TEXAS GOVERNMENT: THEN
Governor: Dem U.S. Senators:
U.S. House:
Rep, 22 Dem (28 total)
TEXAS GOVERNMENT: NOW
Governor: Rep U.S. Senators:
Rep U.S. House:
Rep,
Dem (38 total)
Sources: U.S House, U.S. Senate
AUSTIN’S RANKING IN U.S. CITY POPULATIONS
Then: Now:
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
LEGAL DRINKING AGE IN TEXAS Then: Now:
18
Sources: NIAAA/NIH for 1984 law, Wikipedia for 1981 19 until 1981 until 1984 (raised to 21 federally)
Then: Now:
Source: Whole Foods website (and over 500 in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.)
1 7 NUMBER OF WHOLE FOODS STORES IN AUSTIN
DUNE ADAPTATIONS:
Then:
Now:
The David Lynch version made a paltry $ 30.9 million $ 282.1 ($95.2 million adjusted for inflation) in the U.S. and Canada, not even breaking even.
Source: IMDB
Dune: Part Two has already raked in
million ($711.8 million worldwide), making it the highest grossing film of 2024 thus far.
NUMBER OF SKYSCRAPERS
(defined as 100m & over)
2
Then: Now:
38
Source: Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (with four more still under construction)
TALLEST BUILDINGS
Meters
Future:
The Waterline, currently under construction and set to be completed in 2026, will be the tallest building in Austin and Texas at 311m.
Now: Sixth and Guadalupe, 267m
Then: One American Center, 122m
Source: Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat
THE YEAR THAT WAS
Sept. 15: UT commemorates the 100th anniversary of its first day of classes with a centennial convocation at the Frank Erwin Center, attended by a crowd of UT officials, students, and alumni. During his address to the crowd, University President Peter Flawn discusses the effects of (and unease around) an emerging learning tool: the computer. Afterwards, students gather at the Texas Union patio for barbecue, beer, and cake before closing the day with yet another birthday party, this time at Scholz Garten.
Oct. 20: Students hold a rally on the West Mall to protest nuclear proliferation.
Sept. 1: After straying into Soviet air space north of Japan, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet fighter plane, killing 269 people, including 61 Americans.
Sept. 16: President Ronald Reagan announces that GPS — originally intended for military use only — will be made available to the public.
Oct. 23: 241 Marines in Lebanon are killed when a terrorist drives a truck loaded with explosives into U.S. barracks in Beirut. The attack marks the heaviest U.S. military loss of life in a single incident since the Vietnam War.
Oct. 25: American troops take control of Grenada in the largest U.S. military operation since Vietnam.
The word-processing software Multi-Tool Word — soon to become Microsoft Word — is released in the United States.
Nov. 23: Campus celebrates another landmark birthday as the Texas Union turns 50.
Nov.-Dec.: Within a two-month period, three major fires devastate fraternity houses in West Campus. The first, at Tau Kappa Epsilon, breaks out on November 20. On December 12, a fire at the Lambda Chi Alpha house kills one student and badly injures another. The last fire occurs one week later, on December 19, at Alpha Tau Omega. Two of the fires are declared arson, while the fire at Tau Kappa Epsilon is ruled an accident.
Photo of nuclear protest by Jim Sigmon, Daily Texan staff, courtesy of the Daily Texan
GRAD SCHOOL DAYS
By Néstor Rodriguez
When I arrived in graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s, Austin felt like a foreign land to me. I was coming from South Texas, where I’d grown up and also gone to college. As it is today, UT was linked through faculty and students to major social issues and developments across the country and the world. National and worldwide movements had a presence on campus through members and allies of the women’s movement, the Black movement,
the Chicano movement, the American Indian movement, and others.
There was an optimistic sense among many students on campus that we had broken with the old tenets of class, race, and gender and entered a new social age. The bookstores on the Drag helped nourish this sense of liberation, with books on critical philosophy and radical political economy by theorists like Hegel, Foucault, Marx, and Luxemburg. The Co-op had shelves of new
Néstor Rodriguez, professor of sociology at UT Austin, at his Ph.D. graduation in 1984. Photo courtesy of Rodriguez.
books filling two floors. Sociology, anthropology, economics, and philosophy were popular majors to understand the social change of the day.
Part of the student experience is common to all students, but each student also intersects with the zeitgeist on their own terms. One unique project I became involved with as a graduate student in sociology was organizing a school in East Austin for undocumented Mexican children. At the time, public school districts in Texas did not accept undocumented students, so on school days one could see Hispanic immigrant children playing in the streets on the east side when they should have been in school. I thought it was a social injustice not to provide an education for small children in their prime learning years. I believed education to be a human right. I wrote a short op-ed on the topic in the Austin-American Statesman, for which I received hate mail in response: “Go back to Mexico with your illegal alien friends,” one letter said.
With a couple of other UT students and volunteer bilingual teachers, we organized a school for about 60 undocumented children. We borrowed an unused building at an east side church and in halfday classes taught the children English, geography, and history, among other topics. In the evenings we used the school to teach the children’s parents how to read and write in English.
The school project opened an avenue for me and other graduate students to do research in the Mexican immigrant community. This was a major resource for our research on immigrant integration that we were conducting with a professor at the Population Research Center (PRC) at UT (it was PRC faculty who had recruited me to the sociology department in the first place).
It was an incredibly stimulating intellectual environment for me. I remember one professor at the PRC, Harley Brown, who was working on
building a library of censuses from countries across the world. This may sound unnecessary now, in the age of the internet, but in the 1980s the digital world of easy access did not yet exist. All data existed in physical form, and there were very few libraries in the country where researchers could review the censuses of the world in one place.
I still remember the day the first desktop computer arrived at the PRC. Faculty and students gathered around the white box and monitor to marvel at its functions. Only the head PRC administrator was allowed to touch the computer, but the days of the IBM Selectric II typewriters on campus were clearly numbered.
I developed a habit of visiting the PRC census library every Friday afternoon, and it was there, one Friday, that I found my dissertation topic. I took a book off a shelf about labor-force data in Europe, and I noticed that several European countries had similar percentages (8 to 12%) of foreign workers in their labor forces. The figures revealed a pattern: advanced capitalist societies of the West used foreign labor from less-developed countries as a secondary segment of their economies. This fact may sound like common knowledge now, but in the social sciences of the ‘80s we still did not have good theories to fully explain its significance. The relationship between capitalism and migrant labor became my dissertation project. In the spring of 1984, some 499 pages later, I graduated with my Ph.D. I left for the University of Houston to begin an academic career focusing on international migration that eventually brought me back to my home department at UT in 2008.
Nestor P. Rodriguez is a professor in the Department of Sociology at UT. His research focuses on Guatemalan migration, U.S. deportations to Mexico and Central America, the unauthorized migration of unaccompanied minors, evolving relations between Latinos and African Americans/Asian Americans, and ethical and human rights issues of border enforcement.
t’s Friday night. You put down your textbook, pack your notes into your backpack, and head out to meet up with your friends. Perhaps you’ll suggest seeing Willie Nelson at his Opry House, The Talking Heads at the Armadillo, Run-DMC at the Liberty Lunch, R.E.M. at Club Foot, or maybe you’ll stay close to campus and catch a local punk band at Raul’s. Or, if you’re in the mood for something quieter, you might want to browse for a new record — there’s always Inner Sanctum Records or Waterloo Records. And as you walk down the Drag, maybe you’ll run into Daniel Johnston trying to sell you one of his homemade tapes.
If you were a student at UT Austin between 1980 and 1985, chances are you spent your time soaking up the city's vibrant music scene. Austin always had a strong connection to music, but when it was officially named the “live music capital of the world” in 1991, it wasn't just a marketing gimmick – the city had a genuine claim to the title, thanks in part to its often-overlooked music scene in the 1980s.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Austin musicians became national superstars, and with their rising popularity came plenty of attention and secondhand glamour for the capital city. “Austin’s reputation in the early to mid-'80s was premised on the international stardom of Willie Nelson and the ascent of Stevie Ray Vaughn,” says Jason Mellard, assistant director for the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University. But the bright spotlight was also becoming more of a ubiquitous glow as most of Austin’s musicians flourished off-radar across the city. The 1960s and ‘70s may have laid claim to Austin’s golden era in terms of its nationally recognized artists, but
it was during this transitional period in the 1980s that different musical styles increasingly branched out across the city, with live music on seemingly every street.
At the turn of the decade, popular and alternative music was heading in new and exciting directions. Hip-hop was in its infancy. Punk had arrived, supposedly died, and inspired a plethora of DIYinfused styles of rock music, including the hard-to-define “new wave.” Disco and funk-filled dance floors proliferated, and mainstream rock bands were beginning to fill ever-larger stadiums. Meanwhile college towns, with their affiliated radio stations and student populations eager to see the freshest new bands, fed a growing demand for American alternative music.
Austin in the early 1980s was exceptional even among college towns, even with the loss of the Armadillo World Headquarters, an incubator for Austin’s renowned country and rock scene in the 1970s that closed its doors in 1980. Want new wave? You could head to the corner of Brazos and 4th to the two-story, partially underground warehouse named Club Foot. If you were a punk? Raul’s at the top of the Drag was everything you could hope for in a dark, grungy dive bar. Or, for a bit of everything, there was the packed dance floor at Liberty Lunch, the former lumber yard on West 2nd which, in 1981, used the steel beams of the Armadillo World Headquarters for its newly built roof.
Alternatively, if you didn’t want to stray away from campus, you could catch a more intimate show at the Cactus Cafe or at the Union ballroom. Opened in the Union in 1979 and a consistent student favorite ever since, the Cactus Cafe hosted touring
Left: Joe "King" Carrasco. (c) Bill Leissner. Edited by Arielle Winchester.
bands and university-affiliated musicians alike. Together with Raul’s and Hole in the Wall on the Drag, the Cactus Cafe and the Union ballroom were fundamental to the university’s influence on Austin’s music scene in the early ‘80s. Some of that influence could be seen in the bands students formed on and off campus. “We’re very UT-oriented,” Brown Cathell, lead vocalist of The Argyles, told the Cactus yearbook in 1984. “The very first thing we ever did together was a talent show in the Union.” The Argyles placed second in the talent show at the Union, as did rock band The Wait the year prior. In addition to the talent shows, both bands gained further exposure by playing at fraternity parties across campus.
“UT’s student body was seen for most of this period as foundational for live music audiences,” Mellard says. “The draw Austin held for Texas’s wayward youth had everything to do with UT as a critical mass of young folks.” For many students, Austin’s venues formed a fundamental and formative part of their college years, whether they were dancing at their fraternity houses, in dark campus dive bars, or wearing shorts and casual shoes in open-air arenas. When asked what they remember most about their time at UT in the early ‘80s, alumni mention the music again and again.
“It was just easy,” says alumna Linda Neavel Dickens (see page 56). “Imagine being in your 20s and maybe it costs $3 to go hear somebody, maybe $5. It made it a lot easier just to go out and have fun. A lot of the music was outside also, which was wonderful. You’d show up in tennis shoes and shorts and t-shirts because you knew you were going to be just dancing like crazy.”
Zelda Shute, another 1984 graduate, recalls how affordable it was to go to a show in the early 1980s, meaning “live music was available to anyone.” “Everything was much more relaxed,” agrees alumna Maureen Taft. “1984 in Austin was a blast — going to so many concerts.”
The bands coming out of the local scene were as dynamic as the venues themselves. Central to Austin’s emerging claim to be the live music capital was the variety and experimentation of its musicians. It didn’t go unnoticed. “The Austin music scene is incredibly rich and varied,” The Daily Texan wrote in January 1981. Students could experience one of the most trailblazing hardcore scenes in the country, with Big Boys’ often anthemic and funk-infused singalongs and Dicks’s sharp polemics, which could comfortably belong in the 2020s as much as they did in the early ‘80s. Joe “King” Carrasco similarly wowed Austin crowds with his brand of “TexMex Rock ‘n’ Roll,” finding inspiration in Mexican music as well as the eccentric experimentation of new wave. Even in alternative country, a genre that Austin was famed for in the 1960s and ‘70s, bands like Asleep at the Wheel, Joe Ely, Timbuk3, and Two Nice Girls were all experimenting with the conventions of the genre in unique ways.
Alongside these up-and-comers, established acts were also a common feature in ‘80s Austin — often taking the stage at the Frank Erwin Center, the imperious “superdrum” that could hold up to 18,000 rapturous fans on any given night. In 1984 alone the Erwin Center saw Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, The Bangles, Cyndi Lauper, The Beach Boys, Chicago, Van Halen, Kool & the Gang, Duran Duran, and Genesis, with Madonna, U2, Toto, Beastie Boys, Diana
Ross, Bon Jovi, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Kenny Rogers, AC/DC, Dolly Parton, Prince, and Kiss following up in 1985. When the Talking Heads played in Austin in November 1980, the Austin American-Statesman published a glowing review, calling it “a grand evening,” even if, “it was all too short...and for ten dollars.” When asked what one thing about living in Austin in the early 1980s he could bring back, UT alumnus John Adamo (see page 66) replied, “I would like to see the Talking Heads get back together for one more tour.” If they could somehow keep the tickets at early ‘80s prices, Adamo would hardly be alone.
In the emerging age of the music video, Austin also featured in one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. You can see remnants of local landmarks present and past in the music video for The Clash’s song “Rock the Casbah,” filmed in Austin, featuring the band riding in a Cadillac down I-35 facing the Austin skyline and performing in front of an oil rig in Bastrop as well as shots of a jet flyover near Bergstrom Airforce Base and an armadillo running through every scene.
It is no coincidence that the “live music capital of the world” tag emerged during this period, first in the Austin Convention Center and Visitors Council’s 1985 ad in Billboard and then officially adopted by the City Council as a tourist slogan in 1991. Local political bodies realized that the city’s rich cultural heritage was its defining feature. While music had always been a key feature of the city, the title would not have held the same weight without the immediate impact of Austin's ‘80s music scene.
Austin’s growing underground scene also caught the attention of one of the most notable arbiters of cultural taste of the era: MTV. In an edition of the network's The Cutting Edge in July 1985, the show spotlighted Austin’s music scene, featuring brief (and often awkward) interviews with musicians, live performances, and interludes of poetry. It was a snapshot of an eclectic and vibrant music scene amid the city’s transition from a relatively quiet university town in the heart of Texas to a bustling city. “Through it all,” The Cutting Edge concluded, “the bands survive. Playing parties, outdoors, and sometimes in real garages.” ♬
Hubert Sumlin and Angeli Strehli at Antone’s.
(c) Bill Leissner
Eddie Watson is a graduate of UT Austin's history doctoral program. His research focuses on youth culture, DIY music, and working-class communities.
IT’S ALWAYS OUR DECISION WHO WE ARE
Bob Solomon and Kathleen Higgins’ ‘80s Love Story
by Leora Visotzky
Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins have a more-or-less typical love story — it’s just that Nietzsche was their matchmaker. Solomon joined the faculty of UT Austin’s Department of Philosophy in 1972 and Higgins joined a decade later. Over the course of a few years in the early ‘80s, their academic collaboration grew into the love of a lifetime, one that animated both their scholarship and their writing. And while Solomon passed away in 2007, for Higgins, it still does.
Solomon originally planned to become a doctor, enrolling in medical school at the University of Michigan. But when he audited a philosophy course taught by Frithjof Bergmann, Solomon’s plans changed.
“The story he always told about leaving medical school was that he was skipping anatomy class to attend existentialism lectures,” recalls Higgins.
“He had an idealistic vision of helping people, but medical school was mainly nuts-and-bolts and he
Higgins and Solomon in India. Photo courtesy of Higgins.
found his classmates’ attitudes uninspiring. One day, Bergmann talked about Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ — the idea that time repeats itself in an infinite loop — and the prospect of living the same life over and over again exactly as it is. Bob thought ‘I have to get out of medical school!’”
That wasn’t Solomon’s only motivation to change course. He lived, as he put it, “under a medical death sentence,” diagnosed as a baby with a genetic heart defect that doctors estimated would give him, at most, 10 years to live. The 10-year prognosis rolled over throughout his 64-year life.
“The idea that he could be gone at any moment was always with him, and I can’t imagine that didn’t impact why he thought about these matters. It may also have been why he considered going to medical school in the first place,” Higgins says.
Her path to philosophy was straighter. She went to a Catholic school taught by Dominican nuns who “marched to the tune of Thomas Aquinas,” as she says. Whenever Aquinas or his hero Aristotle were mentioned, Higgins was fascinated. In hindsight, she says, the things she thought about when she was young were often philosophical; she just didn’t realize it at the time.
“I used to think, ‘Considering how vast time is, how did I happen to be lucky enough to be alive now?’ Problems like this didn’t seem to bother other people, but they preoccupied me.”
When Higgins joined UT in 1982, the philosophy department was quite diverse in thought. Both she and Solomon were interested in “continental” figures — non-British, non-analytic European philosophers — and Higgins had written her dissertation on Nietzsche. She already knew of Solomon through his writings, and Solomon likewise took an interest in Higgins’ work. Then Solomon organized a Nietzsche conference and asked Higgins to help. The rest, as they say, is history.
“To be honest,” says Higgins, “when I first laid eyes on him, I thought, ‘Wow!’ I assumed he’d be elderly because he’d published so much, and I was shocked to see a person who was young and vital.”
And Higgins wasn’t the only person taken by Solomon’s zeal for life. “His vitality impressed everybody,” Higgins says. “His passion for life and his conviction that thought added to life’s splendor and mystery made him a model for a lot of people and captivated many, many students.”
As a teacher, Solomon was legendary. So much so that filmmaker Richard Linklater cast Solomon in the 2001 film Waking Life. He played himself, discussing existentialism, lauding the value of “living passionately, of taking responsibility for who you are.” He argued that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of despair, is in fact an acceptance of the idea that life is one’s own to determine, an idea full of hopeful promise. “What you do makes a difference,” he says in the film. “It’s always our decision who we are.”
"His passion for life and his conviction that thought added to life’s splendor and mystery made him a model for a lot of people and captivated many, many students."
Solomon’s decades of thought and writing focused on such themes, asking questions about personal agency, the purpose and meaning of life, and the role of emotions in demonstrating that meaning — how one can take responsibility for one’s own life and make it something of wonder and joy.
Solomon also wrote on business ethics, which, to him, probed questions about one’s values and how they might be applied to practical life. Higgins recalls that he was concerned about the “greed is good” view in business. “So many students used to say they aspired to make a lot of money but had no answer when asked what for,” says Higgins.
the fact that people can respectfully disagree with each other and that having a particular starting point doesn’t mean that you should be closed to any other viewpoint,” she says. “There are lots of ways of looking at the world, and recognizing that can be enriching.”
Solomon’s ideas enriched Higgins’ thought, and vice versa. He respected her own philosophical voice, one that at UT in the ‘80s, in a field still today dominated by male thinkers, wasn’t always readily heard. In 1988, Higgins became the first woman to ever earn tenure in the department.
“My colleagues weren’t used to having women around. The way some of them talked in meetings seemed like they considered it a gathering of good old boys,” she remembers. “That has improved a lot. The department now more closely reflects the proportions in the field, though the field remains heavily male-dominated.”
Solomon was an ally and a support for Higgins as she navigated her way to and beyond tenure. They talked about the differences in style of teaching between women and men and how these differences were perceived by students, often to women’s disadvantage. Higgins recalls that Solomon helped draw his colleagues’ attention to the gender disparity and worked to figure out how to improve the situation.
“Bob found this worrisome. Playing a role in the life of the community wasn’t enough on people’s minds.”
But Solomon taught and listened without judgment and made room in the classroom for everyone’s style and sense of priorities. He relished the idea that people could have a discussion without assuming there would be a resolution. Higgins took this lesson from Solomon and applied it in her own teaching. “I try to make philosophy classes reflect
Many things have changed since the ‘80s. As Solomon and Higgins’ love deepened and evolved, so did the department and the field. Philosophy in the United States had long been understood as a kind of two-party system, Higgins explains. Back then, the division was so distinct that the department had requirements for graduate students to take an intro course to the analytic tradition and an intro course to the continental tradition. That didn’t last very long, though.
This division in the field is now being increasingly superseded, in a good way, she says, by the sensible
Solomon in Los Angeles in 1986 with their dog Beefeater, who Higgins described as "a great dog — a real sage who was completely comfortable using elevators."
Photo courtesy of Higgins.
perspective that it’s worthwhile to read interesting thinkers’ writing — regardless of where they’re from. And fewer people subscribe to the idea that there are only two buckets of thought: analytic and continental. Many topics that are now of interest to the field parallel public interests outside of it, such as questions surrounding artificial intelligence. “Developments in this area have led to further thought in philosophy about what it is to have a mind and the nature of consciousness,” Higgins says. Animal rights, gender, and social justice have also become less marginalized concerns in philosophical discussion. The interfaces between
philosophy and psychology have also become more pronounced, she says, notably in philosophy of mind and philosophy of emotion. And Western philosophers are showing greater interest in other philosophical traditions.
For more than 20 years, Solomon and Higgins explored such topics together in collaboration and in their individual scholarship. They wrote together, edited for one another, and traveled around the world attending conferences, delivering lectures, and connecting with students. One can’t help but wonder if both scholars’ focus on emotions
Solomon, Higgins, and Beefeater at the Grand Canyon, 1986. Photo courtesy of Higgins.
and passion had to do with their scholarship and thought being so tied into their romantic love — one deepening the other in turn.
Then, in 2007, at age 64, Solomon’s “sentence” caught up with him. He died, suddenly, of a heart attack in the Zurich airport while in transit to Rome with Higgins.
“Philosopher Arthur Danto had spoken at UT about beauty as something people seek out in connection to death or loss, which primed me to think about it.”
This year, her 42nd year teaching, Higgins published Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning: Philosophical Reflections on Coping with Loss with University of Chicago Press. While she was already interested in grief as a research topic before Solomon’s death, the book was also inspired by it. In it, she describes her experience in the moments of his death, how she coped with her grief, and how a piece of art, a scene from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, helped her make sense of some of it.
In the scene, the computer HAL has gone rogue, takes control of the spaceship, and shuts down the life-support functions of the pods holding several unconscious crew members. Slowly, the viewer understands that the crew members are dying, but only by watching the lines on the pod monitors’ screens go flat. Similarly, Higgins only grasped what was happening when seeing the same kind of display on a monitor in Zurich as Swiss medics tried to revive her partner after he collapsed.
“I had difficulty explaining to other people why I kept obsessing about how he must have felt abandoned,” she writes. “Even though I had been there, I was so disconnected from what was happening to Bob that mentally I was hopelessly far away, not appropriately supportive. Making this comparison [to the film scene] enabled me to convey to friends how I was led to feel at fault, despite my powerlessness.”
Solomon also wrote about grief during his career, focusing on the memorialization or dedicatory aspects of grief and the way grief involves continuing a relationship with a loved one who has passed. He had just begun work on a book about death a couple of days before he died. Higgins recalls that Solomon’s editor said he felt superstitiously responsible.
That kind of response, along with Higgins’ own feelings of guilt, were reactions she saw frequently in her research. So she explored them further, looking to her long-studied field of aesthetics and how it ties into grief. “Philosopher Arthur Danto had spoken at UT about beauty as something people seek out in connection to death or loss, which primed me to think about it,” she says. “I was also finding that the way people related to me in my own grief seemed gestural. Because you don’t know what frame of mind a grieving person is in, it’s helpful that there are conventional gestures for conveying sympathy and concern. But it struck me that such gestures have an aesthetic character, involving presentation, some gesture, or some object that is resonant with meaning.”
When Higgins reflects on who Solomon was, she notes that his sense that he never knew how much longer he had made him unusually present, and that that intense presence was likely one of the characteristics that made him so charismatic to his students. “One of the things that drew me and others to him was that he was really there,” she says. “Although his diagnosis could be seen as anything but an asset, his response to his situation emerged as a gift.”
Solomon made Higgins more present, too, as did the narrowing of their future due to his diagnosis. They wanted to immerse themselves fully in the time they had, and they did. They both loved travelling, giving talks, writing, teaching, art, dinner with friends, talking with students, human relationships. Higgins still finds meaning and joy in these activities.
It is ironic, perhaps, that Solomon, born with a heart condition, spent his career writing about emotions, love, joy, and beauty — his heart full of passion and enthusiasm, and big enough for all his family, friends, students, colleagues, and especially his beloved wife. A layperson does not necessarily expect an existentialist to write a book called The Joy of Philosophy. But those who loved Solomon knew well the code he lived by: to find joy, passion, and great love by ignoring his heart (condition) to follow his heart.
“I will always miss Bob,” says Higgins. “I remember talking to another professor of philos -
ophy whose wife died, and he told me, ‘Her shadow is always with me.’ I understood exactly what that meant. There is a kind of presence that I still feel. In one sense, the ongoing response to the death of a loved one appropriately goes on for the rest of your life. The person remains a part of you, and gratitude for that can help as you go forward.”
“Although his diagnosis could be seen as anything but an asset, his response to his situation emerged as a gift.”
Higgins and Solomon in India. Photo courtesy of Higgins.
Hank the Hallucination Runs for President
By Maureen Turner
Comic strips by Sam Hurt. Images courtesy of Hurt.
Hank was, admittedly, not a perfect political candidate. But he just may have been perfect for his time and place — namely, early 1980s Austin.
Hank was already popular around The University of Texas at Austin campus before he entered the race for president of the Students’ Association in the fall of 1982. On a campus where many were skeptical about whether it was even worth having a student government, Hank’s laid-back, irreverent campaign — his slogan was, simply, “Get Real” — resonated with ambivalent voters. Pro-Hank flyers popped up around campus. Campaign buttons and T-shirts quickly became hot commodities.
Supporters put on a concert/ political rally, “Hankstock,” on the East Mall and bought political ads in the Daily Texan
Because Hank hadn’t managed to get on the ballot, his backers called for voters to write in his name. And the voters responded: On Nov. 10, 1982,
Hank pulled off a decisive victory, with 3,013 votes — more than the combined total earned by the second- and third-place finishers in the race.
There was just one problem: Hank couldn’t take office.
Because Hank not only wasn’t a UT student — he wasn’t even a person, but a character in a comic strip.
More than four decades later, piecing together the precise details of the rise and fall of Hank is a bit tricky; the key players, who’ve gone on to distinguished careers in politics and law, journalism and the arts, education and business, all remember things a little bit differently.
That might be a function of the fact that, even at the time, Hank’s campaign meant different things to different people. Was it a trenchant commentary on the absurdity of the political system? A fun goof cooked up by a bunch of third-year law students with too
much free time on their hands? Or maybe some combination of the two?
Certainly, the campaign cannot be uncoupled from the political mood in Austin at the time. In the post-Watergate, postVietnam climate of skepticism about political institutions, many students questioned the usefulness of government in general and campus government in particular. To critics, the Students’ Association was a charade, an opportunity for politically ambitious students to boost their CVs without exercising any real power or making any real change.
That sentiment had been manifest in the 1976 election, when Jay Adkins ‘78 won the presidency on the “Arts and Sausages” ticket. Adkins (in a campaign-trail uniform of mirrored sunglasses and a top hat covering his long curls) and running mate Frederick “Skip” Slyfield ‘77 (long hair, bushy beard, shmatte) ran on a selfdeclared absurdist platform that
had distinctly Merry Prankster vibes; one of their promises was to change the motto engraved on the Main Building from “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” to “Money talks.” (Adkins went on to get a law degree from The University of Texas at Austin School of Law and served as a judge before his death in 2019. Slyfield is a retired airline pilot.)
UT student government (and the original Main Building motto) survived the reign of the Arts and Sausages party. But by 1978, anti-government sentiment had built to a point that the majority of students voted to do away with the institution entirely, and the Board of Regents formally abolished the Students’ Association.
Not everyone was happy with that decision, of course, and in October of 1982, another vote took place, this one to restore student government. The motion passed, by a vote of 1,701 to 1,178, and a new field of candidates emerged for the election, to take place the following month.
Among the contenders was Paul Begala ‘83, a government major who at the time was interning at the Texas State
Capitol with then-state Sen. (now-U.S. Rep.) Lloyd Doggett. To say that Begala believes in the value of government is an understatement; for evidence, see his subsequent decades-long career in politics, including as an advisor to President Bill Clinton and, more recently, as a national political commentator. The students who voted to abolish the government, Begala recently recalled, “decided that student government was useless. And, worse than that, it was just a resume-padding device for future politicos and had no connection to their lives.” But doing away with the government, he said, was shortsighted. “Power is like matter in the universe: It doesn’t go away, it can’t be created, it can’t be destroyed. It just moves.”
In this case, the students’ power, including the power to decide how revenue from student fees would be spent, moved to then-UT
President Peter Flawn. “There was this giant pot of money, student money, that the president was spending without any student input,” Begala said. “It was $7 million a year. And he just spent it as he saw fit.” To address that, Doggett shepherded through the state Legislature a bill forbidding
the president from spending that money without student input. A student fees committee, on which Begala served, was created.
“We now had input into how that money was spent, but that wasn't good enough. We wanted to control it,” Begala said. So, he and like-minded students began agitating for the reestablishment of the Students’ Association. “This became a debate between the nihilists and the sort of ‘government types.’” After the October vote to reinstate student government, he jumped into the race for president, along with two other students — and one comic-strip character, named Hank the Hallucination.
Hank was the brainchild of Sam Hurt ‘80, the creator of the popular comic strip “Eyebeam.” Hurt began writing the strip, which focused on the semi-autobiographical title character and his quirky cast of friends, during his undergrad days. By the time he enrolled at the UT School of Law in 1980, the comic was running every day in the Daily Texan. (Hurt still writes “Eyebeam,” now for the weekly Austin Chronicle.)
Hank the Hallucination, a cheery, monster-like character whom only Eyebeam could see, was a favorite of readers. “I’ve always been attracted to kind of weird, out-there stuff,” Hurt said. “The earliest incarnation of Hank was on a Father’s Day card I drew from my dad. … I thought: Well, he’s fun to draw. So I put him in [the comic] and just had a lot of fun with the concept of a character who’s nonexistent, who’s imaginary.”
One day in the fall of 1982, Hurt and a few friends were relaxing in the lobby of Tarlton Law Library when the conversation turned to complaints about the revival of the Students’ Association. “And someone said, ‘Sam, you should run to be the president of the student body,’” Hurt recalled. “I had absolutely no interest in that. Then somebody said, ‘Oh, you should run Eyebeam.’ And that was kind of fun to think about. But then I hit on that if any of my cartoon characters were to run, it would be Hank the Hallucination.”
What made Hank the ideal candidate? “Within the imaginary world of the strip, he was an imaginary character,” Hurt said. “And there was just a lot of material to play with. It
was just a fertile source of material for me.”
Hank also proved a fertile source of campaign material. Steve Patterson, a law school classmate of Hurt’s, stepped up to serve as Hank’s campaign manager. Patterson was in the camp that opposed reviving student government, which he saw as a meaningless, powerless institution. Hank, he said, was a perfect candidate for the job: Who better to run for an illusionary government than an illusory character?
“We’re a bunch of thirdyear law students, and we're obviously convinced we're the smartest people on the planet,
right?” Patterson recalled with a laugh. “We know more about governance and the law and how to run a bureaucracy than anybody else on the planet. … And every time somebody would say, ‘But you can’t get on the ballot,’ or ‘You can’t win; you can’t take office,’ well, god-damn right we will! No matter how delusional we might have been, we were convinced that the other side was far more delusional.”
The meteoric political career of Hank the Hallucination made sense in the groovy, whimsical Austin of his student days, said John Schwartz, a law school classmate of Hurt’s and his editor at the Daily Texan. (After
“Hank” pranksters. (c) Bill Leissner
a career writing for Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, Schwartz returned to UT to teach at the School of Journalism and Media, now known as the Moody College of Communication.)
“It’s why people remember the ‘70s and ‘80s in Austin with such terms of affection: Anything could happen. Everything was funny,” Schwartz said. “It was a great time to be in Austin. It was a great time to be a student.”
In particular, it was an environment ripe for a mock political campaign. “Politics was fun and making fun of politics was
fun. That’s much grimmer now,” Schwartz said. “Once something like that started rolling, it was just unstoppable. All of a sudden people had a reason to vote.”
Of course, not everyone was charmed by the Hank campaign. “People were mad about it,” Hurt said. “There were very, very angry letters to the editor, that we were making a joke out of this serious thing. It just stirred up a lot of passion.”
The campaign played out in the comic strip as well, mirroring Hurt’s real-life experience as Hank’s creator. “It became overwhelming, with all the
press and my phone ringing all the time,” he said. “I had my character Eyebeam dealing with a similar situation and, true to the cartoon medium, I could exaggerate it. That’s one of the fun things about cartoons, you can just kind of go over the top.”
Looking back, Hurt speaks about the campaign with some ambivalence. “It started off as a gag and really took on a life of its own,” he said. “I was surprised, I was delighted, and I had misgivings about it. I loved the attention to the strip, so I wanted to believe that it was a worthy cause. I wanted to buy into that, but I always felt a little conflicted about it. … There were some people that were really against the whole idea of student government, which is kind of confusing to me, looking back on it now. Why was that such a bad idea?”
All these years later, Patterson (who went on to a career in sports, including as athletic director at UT and as general manager of the Houston Rockets and Portland Trail Blazers) can’t quite remember the specifics of Hank’s platform.
“I mean, whatever platform it was, it was totally fake and
Hank the Hallucination in the Littlefield Fountain with the photographer wearing a “Vote Your Mind” t-shirt and campaign button. (c) Bill Leissner
bogus. But it worked,” said Patterson. In an election that saw what the Daily Texan reported the next day as an “unusually high voter turnout,” Hank secured 47% of the vote, with more than twice the number of votes of the secondplace finisher, business major Pat Duval. “And amongst the hallucinatory vote, it was a landslide,” Patterson said. “I mean, the pixies and the fairies came in overwhelmingly for us.”
Were Hank’s supporters surprised by his victory? “No, we were not,” Patterson said. “We fully expected it. It was just a mix of anti-establishment, silliness, fun, and attention-grabbing. We’d have tables on the West Mall and just get swamped and sell out of T-shirts and sell out of bumper stickers. Everybody wanted to be at the events, like Hankstock.”
“I think people just like the surreal,” Hurt added. “And college students are facing this pressure: the academic pressure, the impending adulthood hanging over their heads. ‘I’ve got to get this schooling done and go out there in the real world and get a job.’ There was just a big appeal to this crazy party.”
But even the best parties come to an end. While Hank’s supporters were celebrating their victory, the university’s election commissioners announced that there would be a runoff between the secondand third-place finishers, Duval and Begala. Hank, being a fictional character, would not be included.
While the Hank camp put up a bit of a protest, they were ready to let their campaign wind down, Patterson said. “We were all graduating and leaving and we couldn’t keep this farce going any longer. …. We had made the point. And we weren't misguided enough to think that we would actually go try to [take over].”
The runoff went ahead. “Now the thing became: Who’s gonna get the Hank vote?” Begala said. “So I promised to build a statue of Hank on the West Mall. I just basically went out one day and waved a sheet and said, ‘There he is, everybody.’ … And I maintain if you go there today, with proper inspiration from 11 herbs and spices, you can still see Hank. He’s right there; you could still feel his spirit and see him if you're properly inspired.”
Whether due to his Hank tribute or to other factors, Begala went on to win the runoff and become president. “It was fun watching Paul Begala get involved,” Hurt said. “He was very astute, the way he got in on the joke. He ran against Hank with a wink. … I was like: This guy’s smart. Strategically, he made a good choice by seeing the fun in it.”
But Hank’s supporters still needed closure. “We were playing off of all the different things that happened to politicians,” Hurt said. “Somebody had written some fanfiction about an assassination attempt. And it got me thinking: Since Hank was imaginary, what would happen if someone tried to assassinate him?”
The answer: It depends. First, Hurt drew a strip in which Hank and Eyebeam were walking across campus when they were confronted by a man with a gun. “Eat lead, pinko fascist hallucination,” the gunman said as he opened fire — but to no effect. “Because he’s imaginary, a real bullet can’t touch him,” Hurt explained.
Alas, Hank’s luck soon ran out. In the next day’s strip, as
“Hank” prankster. (c) Bill Leissner
he was celebrating his escape (“Pretty good deal! That assassin’s bullets went right through me! He couldn’t even see me!”) Hank happened upon a little girl, who pointed her finger at him and said, “Bang, bang!” As it turns out, imaginary bullets can kill an imaginary creature, and Hank promptly vanished. Around the same time, Hank was also assassinated in real (or, rather, “real”) life at an inaugural ball thrown by supporters, when crashers stormed the party and killed an oversized paper-mache Hank.
While Hank’s political career ended with the double assassination, the laws of the comic-strip universe turned out to be more forgiving. “In the strip narrative, he came back, and I had a lot more fun with him as a character,” Hurt said. “He was only briefly assassinated.”
Losing an election to an imaginary character, as it turned out, did not turn Begala off politics. In fact, Begala said, that long-ago student government campaign taught him lessons
that he still carries with him. “I'm not kidding. It’s guided my whole political career. Those two words ‘get real’ taught me a lot.” It taught him not to take himself too seriously, but to take the work of government — to create real things for the benefit of real people — very seriously.
That became Begala’s focus during his term as Students’ Association president, he said. “When we came in, we were really determined not to do anything self-serving and not to do anything simply symbolic. There’s a lot of symbolic politics in this world, and I hate it. So we didn’t declare the campus a nuclear-free zone. We didn’t declare our solidarity with the people of El Salvador.”
Instead, Begala’s administration — which included his now-wife, Diane Friday — used the student-fee funds to create a campus recycling program, a childcare center for student parents, and a security program that provided escorts for students walking on campus late at night. He also used his
time in office to help defeat proposals to increase tuition and to raise the drinking age. (“That made me very popular.”)
“The most important thing [was] to make a difference in people’s lives, to show them that this was not just about padding your resume,” Begala said. “That was always our North Star.” While he might have developed that philosophy anyway, he said, the 1982 election crystallized it. “Hank got more votes than I did. And he was just saying: ‘Get real. Don't be awful.’ That's how I interpreted it, anyway.
“That really did guide me,” he continued. “I had the pleasure and honor of working in the Congress and in the White House. And there was always that question: What are we actually doing to make a difference in people's lives?”
Hank’s campaign, Begala said, “was fun and funny and creative.” Indeed, he added, “I might have voted for Hank, if I hadn’t run.”
Maureen Turner is a writer, editor, and journalism instructor who lives in western Massachusetts.
CLASS EVALUATIONS
FIVE PROFESSORS LOOK BACK AT 1984
by Lauren Macknight
From the halls of Batts to the Parlin seminar rooms, the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts has guided young minds and produced world-changing research for almost 150 years. Whether it’s 1984 or 2024, the professors are the ones who give the liberal arts its rich texture.
We caught up with several educators who taught in 1984 and either still teach today or are recently
retired about how their curricula have transformed over four decades and about the ways things have changed or stayed the same. Whether it’s the rise of party polarization and its consequences or shifts in the global literary canon, the unimaginable expansion of computational linguistics, or the reframing of core questions in the field of psychology, each professor shares a chronicle of how knowledge of ourselves and the world around us has evolved.
Students listen to John H. Zammito’s “curtain call” lecture, sponsored by the Liberal Arts Council, on Dec. 9, 1984. Photo courtesy of 1984 Cactus yearbook.
Michael Domjan, professor of psychology, has taught at UT Austin since 1973. He served as the psychology department’s chair from 1999–2005 and was the founding director of the Imaging Research Center from 2005–2008. His teaching and research focus on a functional approach to classical conditioning, which he has pursued in studies of sexual conditioning and taste aversion learning.
William Doolittle, professor of geography and the environment, joined UT Austin in 1981 and has served as undergraduate advisor, graduate advisor, and department chair. Now retired, he regularly taught a course in field techniques, and he’s taught courses on the landscapes of Mexico and the Caribbean, the historical geography of the American Southwest, and ecologically sustainable and indigenously developed agricultural strategies.
Naomi Lindstrom — professor in Jewish arts and culture, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and director of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies — has taught at UT Austin since 1975. She researches 19th- and 20th-century Latin American literature.
David Prindle, professor of government, has taught and published research in the areas of voting and parties, energy policy, the presidency, and entertainment media at UT Austin since 1976. He received the Harry Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence in 1994 and the Eyes of Texas Teaching Award in 1998.
Anthony C. Woodbury, professor of linguistics, has taught in the UT linguistics department since 1980 and served as its chair from 1998-2006 and 2014-2015. His research focuses on the Indigenous languages of the Americas and how they reveal contemporary as well as historic linguistic diversity and creativity on the parts of their speakers.
ON WHAT REMAINS
Woodbury: The course in field methods in linguistic description is a classic course taught in most every linguistics department year after year. It’s a staple of my teaching. It’s a course where students get together with a person who is a speaker of a language that they have never heard before. By asking questions of the speaker, they figure out enough to understand the language’s sound system, grammar, vocabulary, and so on. Over the years, it came to be realized that language description underlies a lot of theoretical work in linguistics. So it’s incredibly beneficial for students to have a background in doing just that.
In the 1984 iteration of his field methods course, Woodbury welcomed a graduate student and native speaker of Javanese, spoken natively on the Indonesian island of Java. In 2024, students are hearing firsthand from a native speaker of Tagalog, the most widespread language of the Philippines.
Prindle: The basic constitutional structure of separate institutions sharing power (note that it is NOT “separation of powers”) has not changed. Neither has the basic electoral fact that the U.S. has a first-past-the-post, single-member-district system, which, in presidential elections, interacts with the Electoral College system to produce some mighty interesting outcomes. In the 1984 election, this interaction did not mean much, because the popular vote winner, Ronald Reagan, was also the Electoral College winner. In 2000 and 2016, however, the system produced an Electoral College winner who lost the popular vote — in 2016 by 2.8 million. Such an outcome is entirely possible this year also. Therefore, the anxiety about who might lose, but win, in 2024 is much greater than it was in 1984.
Domjan: Psychology has always been a highly popular subject among undergraduates. I think that stems from students’ interest in learning more about themselves, or about their family and friends. The idea of social phobia, navigating this social world we live in, was an issue in 1984 as much as it is for students today.
ON WHAT HAS CHANGED IN THE CLASSROOM
Lindstrom: Our literature core courses were literary history courses, meaning they proceeded in chronological order. And then there was a movement, which was ultimately successful, to get rid of these historically based courses, which were a mix of history and literature, and instead to have courses that did not have any particular chronological order. Instead of “Introduction to Spanish American Literature” with an associated date range, they are now called “Introduction to Literature and Cultures” in Spanish. They’re not either specifically Spanish or specifically Spanish American. They’re transatlantic readings from both Spain and Spanish America, without any chronological order, which changes the way they’re taught. Before we would talk a lot about movements — literary movements and social movements — and now it’s more looking at each individual work by itself along with other cultural forms that connect to it. Part of that change is due to technology, which makes it easier to include song, film, and so forth. In those days, of course, it was hard to get hold of film, so they were typically shown in an auditorium.
A film that graduates from 1984 might remember watching in Lindstrom’s class is El Santo Oficio, a 1973 Mexican film directed by Arturo Ripstein chronicling the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico.
Doolittle: In 1984, it was the Department of Geography. Then it became the Department of Geography and the Environment. So we integrated a very strong environmental component. In terms of courses, we used to offer a cartography course that taught students how to draw maps. Everything was done by hand on sheets of paper or Mylar with drawing pens. It was very hands-on and very mechanical and that’s all changed because of new technologies. Now it’s all essentially based on Geographic Information Science (GIS). The accumulation of geographic information via imagery and aggregated data also changed. Back in the ‘80s, remote sensing — taking aerial photographs or satellite images — was largely done by hand, often with hard copies. Now everything can be gathered digitally and there are huge amounts of geographical information in many different formats. So we’re not just drawing maps; we’re using software and data sources to both map and analyze information spatially, looking at conditions anywhere in the world. It helped revolutionize everything in terms of teaching, geography, and understanding environmental issues.
Prindle: The most fundamental subject matter of democracy — the people’s voting choices — is now startlingly different than it was in 1984. When I first began to teach “Congress and the Presidency” in the late 1970s, and for at least a decade afterward, the first thing I would do in the semester is show the students a large map of the country — a real, physical map. Then, I would describe three Republican districts of the U.S. House of Representatives, one each of a representative who generally voted conservative, one who generally voted centrist, and one who generally voted liberal. Proceeding, I would point out on the map three Democratic districts, one that produced liberal representatives, one that produced centrists, and
one that produced conservatives. Then, I would explain the historical forces that had fashioned two dominant parties that were, literally, “all over the map” in regard to party ideologies.
Teaching that same class in 2024, I would no longer emphasize the ideological heterogeny of the parties in the House of Representatives. Now, the lecture would emphasize party polarization, the fact that almost every Republican representative scored as extremely conservative on the various measures political scientists had invented to track such things, and almost every Democrat, by the same measuring scales, scored as extremely liberal (or you can use the term “progressive”). For the rest of the section on Congress, I would explore the historical causes of that party polarization and its political consequences.
1980s map of Sonora state, Mexico, 1980. Image courtesy of William Doolittle.
ON WHAT WE HAVE LOST
Doolittle (regarding the lost art of hand-drawing a map): One of my colleagues pointed out a long time ago that the problem with computer maps is that they’re sterile. When you look at a handdrawn map, it’s got some flair to it. It’s got a character that cannot be produced with the digital or electronically drawn maps.
Lindstrom (regarding a move away from pre-20th century texts): An example of an author would be Mexican author and journalist José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi. He would have been considered fundamental in 1984. Or Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentinian writer and statesman. They would both have been foundational then but are rarely looked at today (unless a student is pursuing a specific track).
Domjan (regarding the infrequent use of rats as test subjects): When I taught “Experimental Psychology” in 1984, each student in the course got a rat. They had to train the rat through a series of exercises, make observations, and collect data and lab reports on what the rat was doing. That simply wouldn’t be done today because the cost of housing a laboratory animal has exploded. Now we substitute with computer simulations, but those are too much like videos. There’s a lack of reality to it. It’s not tangible. Students watch their animals carefully and come to recognize quirks and unusual habits. There is an emotional connection. A student is much more involved with a live animal than if they are looking at something on a screen.
ON THE CHANGES TO THEIR RESPECTIVE FIELDS
Domjan: Psychology has become a branch of brain science and neuroscience. Forty years ago, it would have been considered a specialty within psychology to look at brain mechanisms and physiological mechanisms that affect behavior. That question has exploded, and now, instead of being 5% of the field, it’s more like 85% of the field. Today, every area of psychology addresses the question of physiological mechanisms, brain mechanisms, genetic mechanisms, and so on.
Woodbury: The method that we use to understand what the mental system is that people use for the sounds of their language has persisted since the 1920s or ‘30s. If you think about it, if something is just fundamentally correct it makes sense to use. I mean, doctors have been dealing with the fact that humans have noses for a pretty long time and that hasn’t changed. It’s kind of on that order.
Prindle: Coming out of the 1930s, when most political scientists wanted to study public opinion, or voting behavior, or the outcome of government policy, they generally divided political actors — whether mass or elite — into economic categories and studied how those categories seemed to influence behavior. In 2024, things have changed radically. Economics, while it is no longer ignored, is not considered a primary "independent variable." Now, race, sex, and the LGBTQ+ continuum are usually considered the ur-subjects of modern politics.
The workday ends as the Tower chimes five, while a passing plane signifies UT's continuing quest for excellence. Photo by
courtesy of 1984 Cactus yearbook.
Bob Malish,
Halloween on 6th St. (c) Bill Leissner
1984In Their Words In Their Words
As told to Kaulie Watson and Daniel Oppenheimer
Just under 2,000 students graduated from UT Austin’s College of Liberal Arts in May 1984. Students came from across Texas and around the globe; they studied economics and literature, languages and philosophy; they went to UT football games, Liberty Lunch, Raul’s, and Eeyore’s Birthday Party; they worked odd summer jobs and lived in dorms and co-ops and West Campus houses. Many went on to have incredible careers, and some even stayed in Austin and at UT.
Over the past months we’ve heard from dozens of those alumni about their time on the Forty Acres some forty years ago. Many are highlighted below and throughout this issue of Life & Letters, and more can be found on our college’s alumni page at https://lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/cola-alumni-updates/.
Linda Neavel Dickens
BA, English, 1984
Linda Neavel Dickens was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Baytown, just outside of Houston. After her two older siblings began attending UT, she was determined to follow them — it was the only school she applied to. After finishing her BA in English, Dickens traveled across Europe — even working for a few months at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England — before returning to Texas and taking a job as a mental health worker and activity specialist at a residential treatment center. Her experiences at the center led her back to UT Austin for a master’s and then a Ph.D. in adult and organizational learning. “It occurred to me that there had to be a better way to run an organization,” she says. Now, as the university’s associate vice provost for strategic academic initiatives, she’s committed to helping UT Austin work more effectively and with greater support for faculty, staff, and students.
On learning the importance of support: I started out in Plan II and was summarily dismissed after the first year because of my low GPA. I had been a great student in high school, but I was completely
overwhelmed at UT and didn’t know how to navigate it. I was anxious, I got depressed. I was obviously struggling with grades, and no one from the program reached out to me that entire first year. There’s so much more support for students now compared to the early ‘80s.
After I left Plan II, I went into English and loved it. I’ve always been a strong writer, and I was in the English honors program despite my first two years of not-great grades. I had tremendous experiences in the English department, but I share that story about Plan II because it was a formative experience for me. My career since then has focused on improving support for people in organizations, including at UT Austin, and it’s incredibly important to me to do everything I can so that people have the tools to succeed.
On working her way up:
I like to say I started as a water polo referee at UT and worked my way up to associate vice provost. In the early ‘80s, I was a lifeguard and an intramural water polo referee; I’ve been a swimmer my whole life. Then I became an academic coach for women’s athletics for about two years. Now I’ve worked at UT for 38 of the past 44 years in one way or another.
When I began full-time work at UT in 2007, I facilitated program evaluations, coordinated assessments of student learning, and worked with faculty on educational research. Then I started specializing more on assessment. Basically, I was consulting with faculty about what was important to them about their programs. What did they see as the key knowledge of their field? What did they want their students to be able to do by the time they graduated? How did they want to measure learning?
I loved it. And then I got like five promotions in five years. I found my spot at the university, and I just went up and up.
Around 2016 I became the accreditation liaison, which means I’m responsible for the accreditation of the entire university with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. There are about 95 standards of quality covering everything you can imagine about our operations — from the way we hire our faculty to the way we offer student services to the way we
conduct performance appraisals — and I’m in charge of ensuring we maintain and document our compliance with the university’s policies related to those standards. When I took over as liaison, my biggest goal was to change the culture of accreditation on campus, because people found it frustrating. I saw it as an amazing opportunity to do what I could to make accreditation easier and improve the system, and people were very responsive and helpful. Plus, I work with fantastic teammates. Now I think the university’s accreditation practices are solid, and I try to use my position as leverage to create organizational change. I’m trying to make work better for people. I’m trying to contribute to an organizational dynamic that helps people thrive.
On watching Austin change: Austin in the ‘80s was pretty awesome. On Lamar between 6th and 10th, on the east side of the street, it was all used car lots. Now that’s dense, prime real estate. To me, that’s a great visual for what things used to look like and the pace of Austin in the ‘80s, when it was cheap and easy to live here.
Living with a wide variety of people at the 21st Street College House co-op was one of my favorite college experiences, as was going out to hear live music. There was a place called Club Foot that was downtown in what had been a bus terminal. They brought in a lot of new wave, punk-ish bands, like Echo and the Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, that kind of music. I was there a lot and also went to Liberty Lunch a lot, dancing to reggae or Joe Ely. I loved Joe Ely — I saw him over and over and over again, and he always put on a great show.
The city started really growing in the late ‘80s. One big difference is that there used to not be as much wealth in Austin. UT and the state government were the largest employers. Then when the tech started coming in… wow. There’s such wealth in this city now compared to 40 years ago. It is shocking to me how much things have changed, and I think that the wealth is even more shocking than the growth. And now that we’re a large city, we have friction everywhere. I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily, I just mean that you have to do a lot more planning. Things just aren’t as easy to access as they once were.
1984 IN THEIR WORDS
Barbara Ganson
MA, Latin American Studies, 1984
Barbara Ganson grew up in San Jose, California, but joined UT Austin as a graduate student after one of her professors recommended the university’s Latin American studies program — then, as now, considered the best in the country. She specialized in Latin American history and graduated with her master’s in 1984 and with her Ph.D. a decade later. Her first book, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata , was based on her dissertation and published in 2003. She has continued to publish on the history of Paraguay while teaching history at Florida Atlantic University for 30 years. Along the way, she’s added another specialty to her roster — aviation history — while becoming an aviator herself.
On life abroad:
I spent my junior year studying abroad in Argentina. I should have gone to Spain, but my undergraduate Spanish professor was Argentine and so I had the opportunity to go to Buenos Aires. I lived with a family that didn’t speak any English and attended classes at a time when there were no exchange programs for foreign students. It was a chaotic time, too, with transportation strikes, car bombings, and hyperinflation following the death of Juan Domingo Perón, the long-time, controversial president of Argentina.
Then I had a chance to move up-river, to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, and continue studying. That was during the dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner, and I learned how terrible it was to live under authoritarian rule with so much corruption and concerns about human rights.
During my time abroad I experienced two different countries and cultures, and I took a lot of interest in that.
Later, as a doctoral student, I developed an interest in ethnohistory, and I eventually wrote my dissertation on the Guaraní Indigenous people of Paraguay.
On watching — and studying — history unfold: At UT I took classes with a specialist on Argentina, Dr. Thomas McGann. I was in his “Inter-American Affairs since 1890” class when the Malvinas Falklands War broke out in 1982. McGann had been a military attaché to Argentina at one time, so he had a really informative perspective. He thought the war would be over very quickly because the Argentine military wasn’t well organized strategically. The young, recruited soldiers were also unprepared and many of them died in the war, which was very devastating.
After Dr. McGann passed away, Dr. Nettie Lee Benson took over the direction of my MA thesis. She was a real institution herself — she built the Benson library at UT and was quite a personality. One day she asked me to do for Paraguay what she had done for Mexico. In a way I’ve fulfilled her request by publishing books and articles on the history of Paraguay, but I am certainly not a librarian.
On flying:
When I graduated from UT with my Ph.D., I was fortunate to get a tenure track job at Florida Atlantic University. Then I brought my mother to come live with me, and since I couldn’t travel abroad due to her declining health, I started conducting research on the history of women and early flight rather than return to the archives in Latin America. For several years I would travel to the Library of Congress and the archives of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, do research for a couple days, and then fly back to Florida. Now I’m finishing up a manuscript based on that research called Lady Daredevils: American Women and Early Flight
While I was researching women in early flight, I decided I better learn how to fly, because I wanted to understand some of the difficulties that early aviators experienced. I started taking flying lessons, both in Florida and then in Maryland, and I finished up in Ohio. I got my license in 2008, and I acquired an airplane too. I didn’t expect to become an aircraft owner, but I bought a small fourseater aircraft, a 1965 Cessna 1-72, which I’ve restored over the years.
My big claim to fame — I only have like two minutes of it — is that in 2012 I flew across the English Channel to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first female
flight across the Channel by Harriet Quimby, America’s first licensed woman pilot. I was asked by an organization to portray Quimby on this flight, so I worked with a seamstress to recreate her flying costume — a plumcolored satin flight suit — using historic photographs and Quimby’s writings, and I got to portray her. I went over to England and a small group of women pilots joined me from France, Ireland, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. to celebrate this historic event organized by Women of Aviation Worldwide Week. We flew across the channel together and placed a plaque in the airport at Le Touquet in France celebrating Quimby’s achievement. The BBC covered it, and there are two videos still online. It was a fun, exciting day.
When I started working on the history of aviation, there were several members in my department who frowned upon the idea. Later, however, I had the opportunity to do an exhibit for the Texas Centennial Flight at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in 2010, which was well-received. I worked on that project for about two years, flying back and forth between Florida, Texas, and Washington, D.C. I even flew over to Paris to do some archival work. Then I turned the exhibit’s content into my second book, Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State, which was published by UT Press in 2014.
Photo courtesy of Barbara Ganson
Duff Stewart
BA, Economics, 1984
In 1971, five UT graduates — Roy Spence, Judy Trabulsi, Steve Gurasich, Bill Gurasich, and Tim McClure — founded innovative advertising agency GSD&M. The agency is behind many of Texas’s best-known lines, including the iconic “Don’t Mess with Texas,” and after more than 50 years it’s still longhornled, with Duff Stewart as CEO. Stewart’s path to being an advertising exec, however, wasn’t linear. It featured stop-offs at the Texas Capitol building, commercial real estate leasing, and, of course, a lot of fun as a UT undergraduate. A few themes run all the way through his story, though — take care of your relationships, and leave the place better than you found it.
On (not) choosing a major: I got involved again with UT’s Department of Economics when Jason Abrevaya, who then was head of the department, reached out. The department was launching a magazine and they wanted to interview me and I said “great.” So Jason came over to our offices and we were chatting. I said, “Why did you choose me? I’m a history graduate.” And he said, “No, you’re not. You’re one of us.” What had occurred was — and I do not remember this —I had enough hours for both history and economics, but at that time UT wasn’t offering double majors. So, I had to choose one and I guess I chose economics, but for years I told people I got a degree in history because I love it and I didn’t go to school to get a job, I went to school to learn, you know, something like that. But Jason set me straight. Then a few months later he called and asked, “Would you give the commencement speech to the school?” So I went and gave the talk at Gregory Gym to the economics graduates and all of their families, and I learned that economics had grown to become the largest degree-granting program in the university.
But I really loved history — I just loved learning about people — and economics was interesting because it is kind of like business. And I loved learning about both subjects because of the professors I had, like Tom Philpott and Robert Abzug in the history department and Cliff Grubbs and Harry Cleaver, Jr. in economics. They were just really interesting people who had done really interesting things.
I took a class in labor economics with Ray Marshall, who was at the LBJ school and also taught in the economics program, in the spring of 1984. That’s when he was the economic advisor to Walter Mondale in his campaign for president, and Roy and Judy from the agency were doing the Mondale campaign media, including the TV spots and communications. So these two worlds really overlapped — one where I was involved in an internship at the time at Cornerstone, which was related to the agency, and the founders are doing this national campaign, and then another where I’m going to class with the guy who’s Mondale’s economic advisor and talking about the campaign and the economics inside 1984 IN THEIR WORDS
the campaign. On top of that my wife, Liz, who I met at the agency later, was working with Roy and Judy and the team in Washington, D.C. on the campaign during that time. So all these different things and people from my life came together in this one moment. Liz and I didn’t start dating until four years later, but lots of things were all wound up in this campaign and in this course.
On how not to treat a cowboy hat:
There used to be a place up Guadalupe off Maiden Lane called Uncle Nasty’s. My friends and I used to play Galaga there. We would study and then we’d meet for beers at around 10:30 at night. You could either have a pitcher of beer or a pitcher of margaritas, and I think it was $5. So, if you went with your friends, it was relatively inexpensive. And there was a place called the Silver Dollar where you could go country and Western dancing, which I cannot
do, but they had nickel beer night on Wednesdays so I ended up there a lot. I got into trouble one time — I went around the tables and started stacking cowboy hats, which was not a good thing to do to people who own cowboy hats. That was a very early lesson that I learned in college: Leave a gentleman’s hat alone.
On giving back:
The founders of GSD&M formed an agency because they wanted to stay in Austin, stay together, and make a difference. They always were involved in political stuff as well as giving back to the university. It was GSD&M who actually came up with the “We are Texas” tagline for UT.
One of our founders, Roy Spence, was originally invited to participate in a group to identify the core values of the university, back when Dr. Robert Berdahl was president of UT. That led to Larry Lay, who was head of development back then, and Randa Safady, who’s now at the system, coming to us and asking for help with a slogan and a campaign idea for the first billion-dollar fundraising effort for UT. We presented the line, “We are Texas,” to them with the background of the Tower. Larry was not a UT person, but Randa was. Larry asked, “Where’s the rest of it? What else is there?” but Randa completely got it. If you went to UT, you got the braggadocious attitude. And Roy presented that to the development board with a video and it was overwhelmingly and resoundingly appreciated. There was a funny article in the Daily Texan about UT paying all this money to have this two-word tagline, but the truth is UT didn’t pay any money. It was all former UT graduates that did this for their school pro bono.
As each UT president has come along, the campaign has evolved, but we’ve been a part of it all and we’re all proud of it. It’s a big part of giving back to the university. Because I’ve worked for — and eventually became the CEO of — an organization that is so grounded in the university, and because a big part of what our founders are about is paying it forward and paying it back, making the place better than you found it, that’s just a lesson that I learned.
Image generated in Midjourney by Arielle Winchester
Karen Kaplan
Ph.D., Linguistics, 1984
Karen Kaplan grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Kearny, New Jersey. After graduating with her BA from Oberlin College, Kaplan came to Austin to study linguistics at UT. Her studies led her to life abroad and then back, but it’s arguably after graduation that she made her biggest leap — attending seminary and being ordained in 1992 as one of the nation’s early female rabbis. For 15 years she served as a hospice chaplain, sitting with countless patients as they faced the end of their lives, and in 2014 she published a book based on her experiences, Encountering the Edge: What People Told Me Before They Died. While the subject matter can be heavy, Kaplan says she tries to keep a “kind of whimsical, humorous tone” when speaking or writing about her work in hospice. She continues to write about her work as a chaplain and her experiences with language on her blog, offbeatcompassion.wordpress.com
On getting involved:
In my undergraduate years at Oberlin, I did my own self-designed major and studied linguistics. I picked courses like “History of the English Language” and sociolinguistics from the anthropology department, and I went to some summer institutes at the University of Chicago. I saw that UT had one of the top linguistics departments in the world, so I thought I’d apply to do my Ph.D. in Austin. I also liked the idea of all the social events and cultural events outside. I got accepted and went and I was active in all kinds of things while I was in Austin, including Jewish life at the Hillel. I even ended up leading a service or two when the rabbi was off, so that was a precursor to things to come. And I had good friends at UT, too. I’d never had such good friends, and I still know them now.
On working in security:
a non-European language. Linguistics doctoral students needed three languages, so I had Spanish, Japanese, and English. I lived in Kurashiki, which is a small town with no English, and I was really intrigued by the culture and the grammar. Japanese has different levels of formality and informality that are much more extensive than in French or Spanish. It depends on your gender, your age, your work history, all these different levels of formality. It’s very interesting.
When I was back in Austin I had a summer job as a security guard for a women’s dorm. I was the first woman to be hired as their security guard, and it was a lot of fun. I just walked down the halls and made sure everything was okay. Boys had to give me slips to come in, say why they were coming into the dorm, and I got to walk around the garage and have a little unit one, unit two radio with the boss saying things like “come in, please.” Thank God nothing ever happened. Once I asked my boss, “Why 1984 IN THEIR WORDS
During my Ph.D. I took one year off to teach English in Japan because the program wanted students to learn
did you hire me?” He said, “Well, you’re well-traveled, you went to Japan.” So that’s how one quirky thing led to another.
On working as a hospice chaplain:
After I graduated with my Ph.D. I joined the Spanish department at Denison University in Ohio. Then I realized that I really enjoyed Hillel and expanding Jewish life, and I decided to be a rabbi. I didn’t get tenure and there wasn’t much chance to really do what I wanted at Denison— they only had me teaching very elementary Spanish to kids that were not interested in it — and I thought, “I need to do something more meaningful, use my skills.” So, I decided to go a different route and become a rabbi, which was pretty unusual for women in those days. I’m about the 200th female rabbi, definitely among the first 200.
At first I did some pulpit work and then eventually I saw that pastoral care was my strength, so the bulk of my
career has been that. When I worked as a hospice chaplain what I tried to do was make it not so frightening for people. And I’d hear these amazing, intimate stories or memories, sometimes very nice memories, and all kinds of things that people would reveal because they knew I was there to really listen without any baggage. With a relative they might have to act cheerful, whereas with a spiritual supporter they could just say what they really were thinking. I would create a lot of quiet time, not talk much, and ask very general questions — which is really the whole point of being a chaplain. It’s not to impose anything or direct the dialogue or, God forbid, proselytize. Chaplains don’t do that, they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to create a sacred space for the families and the patients to open up and talk about whatever it is, whether it’s a football game, or the meaning of life, or what happens when they die, or how are they going to cope with death. And once in a while there’s a real genuine interaction where something special is being shared, and it’s hard to describe, but it’s so poignant.
Kurashiki, Japan. Photo by Tatushin, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Terasa Cooley
BA, English, 1984
Terasa Cooley came to UT Austin from the small town of Alvin, Texas, about halfway between Houston and Galveston, where she was raised in a home that was both politically and religiously progressive. She arrived at college and deepened her involvement on both fronts, becoming an active member, and then leader, of the University Young Democrats, and later joining a nearby congregation of Unitarian Universalists. After UT, she worked briefly in party politics, including for then-state Senator, now U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett, then went off to Harvard Divinity School to get ordained as a Unitarian minister. She’s served as a minister ever since, these days mostly moving from place to place as an interim minister for congregations that need repair and healing after some kind of difficulty or scandal.
On Jim Hightower, Ann Richards, and the transition in Texas politics:
What Jim Hightower and Ann Richards were able to capitalize on was a populist message. Hightower was super engaging with people, and he put together an unusual coalition of farm workers and agricultural guys and consumer unions. It was a really great lesson in coalition building. He also was just a popular speaker and funny and engaging. Ann [Richards], who was State Treasurer at the time, was very much the same way. She had that sense of humor. She had that ability to really engage with people on a personal level. I think that’s what helped get them into office even though both of them were more progressive than the median voter.
Hightower saw the brewing revolution in Texas politics, that the Democratic Party was in trouble, and he kept sounding the alarm. People wouldn’t pay attention. He was always very intuitive about politics. He saw the increasing conservatism, and he could feel how much
more vulnerable he was in his own office. But because he had been re-elected so many times, people didn’t really think he was in danger until he lost in 1990 to Rick Perry, who had switched from being a Democrat just the year before.
On growing up Unitarian:
My parents discovered the Unitarian church when they were living in Chicago, before they moved to Texas. We were active in the church in Houston, and that really saved me because it meant that I had a progressive group of people who I could connect with. In Texas the first question is always: what church do you go to? So to be able to have an identity that made sense to me—I’m sure that catapulted me into what I’ve been doing for the last 35 years.
On going from politics to religion:
A big part of what I did, during and right after college, was work to get Democrats elected, and that’s what drove me
out of politics. I was tired of helping to get people elected just for the sake of getting them elected. I felt like they sort of lost sight of a lot of the issues that were important. It was when I started to get really disenchanted with politics that I started going back to church. I decided almost completely on a whim that the ministry sounded good. For a little while after college I did database management for campaigns, and I was good at it. That was when I learned a really essential lesson of life, which is just because you’re good at something doesn't mean you like to do it or should do it.
On the split between theists and humanists in the Unitarian Universalist Church:
I'm a theist, which has sometimes put me at odds with many of the congregations that I’ve served. They’re very humanistic, and a lot of them are what we call “comeouters.” They came out of more conservative Christian churches that they really disliked or felt abused by, and they're still reacting to what they grew up with. I didn’t have that growing up. I had a very positive relationship to church and faith. I’ve always gravitated toward religious exploration.
Photo courtesy of Terasa Cooley
John Adamo
BA, Government, 1984
When John Adamo first left his hometown of San Antonio to become a freshman at UT Austin, he thought he would enjoy studying government. He was right. “I think I was the only person I knew who never changed his major,” says Adamo, who recently retired, after a long career in law and state service, as associate general counsel for the Texas Department of Family & Protective Services. Adamo loved his government courses. He also ended up dedicating a great deal of his time at UT to more direct involvement with politics by way of the University Young Democrats. He became an officer in the group, served on the state organization of young Democrats, interned in Washington, D.C. for a local Democratic congressman, and spent a lot of time drinking beer with his fellow young Democrats in the beer garden at Scholz’s.
On majoring in government and being into politics: I wanted to become a lawyer from the time I was 10 years old and was just very interested in government and politics. I think I was the only person I knew who never changed his major. One class that I loved — I forget what it was called — was like a simulation of the Texas Legislature. We were all assigned roles to play, and toward the end of the semester we got to walk over to the Capitol and play it out on the Senate floor over the course of several days, introducing bills and such. I was a committee chair. It was fantastic.
I was very active in what was then called University Young Democrats, now University Democrats. I was vice president as well as representative to the state organization. In 1978, a couple years before I started at UT, Bill Clements shocked the world by getting elected governor. He was the first Republican since Reconstruction to be elected. In 1982, he was defeated for re-election by Mark White. I considered myself a Mark White Democrat. He won the
nomination against someone to his left and to his right. The people I hung out with were more on the progressive side of the party. I was a little more conservative than they were, more of a classic liberal — into free speech, government regulation of big business, equal opportunity, those sorts of ideas.
The group that I was with was quite diverse, students of all races and religions and sexual preferences. I spent my lunch hour on the West Mall. We’d set up the table and talk to whoever came by. There was a real diversity of views on campus, and a lot of encouragement for people to speak their mind in class and outside of class.
On Father Time:
There was this older guy on campus, probably in his 60s, who had a long gray or white beard, and everyone called him Father Time. He was a student on campus, and the rumor was that he was the beneficiary of the will of a rich relative and one of the conditions of this will was that he
would only be able to accept money from the trust fund when he was a student. So he never left, just kept taking courses. He was my ideal. I loved learning so much and I still to this day enjoy the variety of learning experiences.
On technology now and then:
It’s hard to imagine what it was like before cell phones, before word processing. I had an electric typewriter which I typed my papers on. If you wanted to do a big edit you had to start all over again. My roommate finally got this word processor thing our senior year, and it was so much of an improvement.
We did not have a TV in our room, though some people did. For the two years I was in the dorms, there was a TV downstairs in the rec room, and people would sometimes gather for popular shows or historical events. I remember watching Reagan taking the oath of office. I remember when Pope John Paul II was shot and when Reagan was shot.
We definitely had a stereo system. There were occasional stereo wars, when everyone would put their speakers up to the window to see who could play records the loudest.
On social life on campus:
The drinking age was 18. They finally raised it to 19 when I was a senior. You could actually get pitchers of beer at the student union. We’d hang out at the union and drink beer. We saw a lot of live music. The Cactus Café was a great place to go. I saw Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett, and Lucinda Williams there. I remember emmajoe’s, a bar down on the Drag that allowed musicians to play. Antone’s was on the Drag. I saw the Talking Heads on their Stop Making Sense tour. It cost $10.
I spent a lot of time drinking beer at Scholz’s. A lot of politicos would hang out there. We would go to Barton Springs a lot. Go to Lake Travis.
Basically it was hanging out with friends, seeing music, and trying to be outdoors as much as possible. I had a wonderful time. I look back on those days as among the more enjoyable days of my life.
On meeting his wife Colleen:
We were at a small party my senior year that was hosted by a girl I’d dated in high school in San Antonio. Colleen was a friend of hers. Everyone was drinking too much. We were drinking, but not as much. We got in this long conversation and were the last people standing. I wanted to keep the conversation going, so I picked up the Daily Texan to see what the midnight movie was at the student union, and it was Dr. Strangelove. I said, “Hey, you wanna go see a movie?” She said, “Sure.” That was it. It’s been a strange love ever since.
John and Colleen Adamo. Photo courtesy of John Adamo.
William “Bill” Shute
BA, English, 1984
Bill Shute’s involvement with UT didn’t end with his graduation in 1984. After finishing his law degree at the University of Houston, he went on to spend his professional career working in federal policy, including stints as the executive director for federal relations at SBC Telecommunications and at the government relations firm R. Duffy Wall & Associates. But in 2001 he returned to UT — this time at the UT System level — as the system’s vice chancellor for federal relations, a position he held until 2019. Shute’s now at UT Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, where he’s the LBJ Washington Center’s executive director and teaches graduate courses on public policy and policymaking.
On the importance of Shakespeare:
For the past 23 years I have had the pleasure of engaging with and mentoring Longhorn alumni and students. I tell each one that every good thing that has happened to me as an adult started with my decision to attend UT.
One of my favorite experiences was meeting my future wife in Parlin Hall while taking Jim Ayres’s Shakespeare class. In lieu of a written final, Jim offered us the chance to join a group of other classmates and perform a scene from one of the classic plays. Of course, I volunteered in a heartbeat.
A girl named Zelda — the only one who had read our assigned play — handed out the roles in Act 3, scene 2 of King Lear. None the wiser, I agreed to play “mad” Prince Edgar (only learning later that he runs around naked in the rain pretending to be a poor beggar) while our fearless leader gave herself the role of Lear’s servant, Kent (with no more than six words, by the way). After our performance one of the other actors hosted a cast party, which turned out to be nothing more than a blind date for Zelda and me; a blind date that has led to 38 years of marriage.
Fast forward to the early 2000s when Larry Faulkner was president of UT and I had recently become vice chancellor for federal relations with the UT System. Larry approached me during a Board of Regents meeting and asked why he had been told he needed to host Zelda and me at Winedale that coming summer. I replied that I wasn’t sure, but someone in his office must have heard me tell our Shakespeare origin story. He graciously offered to find a date when the three of us could make the trip.
On the day of the performance, Larry picked us up at our hotel and drove us to the theater in Fayette County. Lo and behold, the students were performing King Lear that weekend. It was a thrill to catch up with Jim Ayres, but the highlight occurred during intermission. The program had pop-up tents outside, selling lemonade, memorabilia, and Shakespeare-related goods to raise funds. As Zelda and I perused one of the tents, the volunteer asked if we were familiar with Winedale. “Indeed we are” was our reply, and we mentioned that we had met in Jim’s class while performing a scene from King Lear.
“You’re the couple!!” she exclaimed much too loudly. Apparently Larry had been spreading our story around the area. Still my favorite UT President of all time…
1984 marked a turning point in the anti-apartheid movement at UT Austin. In March, students held commemorating the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which 69 Black demonstrators were killed by White South African police. For more on the campus divestment movement, scan the QR code. Photo by Bill Leissner.
"Jeez Louise!"
ACROSS
1. One from 1984 might include the USSR
6. Hair accessory
10. Pool units
14. Miami Dolphins coach in 1984
15. ___ Runner (1980's computer game)
16. Wheel part
17. *Michael (b. 1949, musician and music faculty member at Lehman College)
19. No-goodnik
20. George Michael Bluth player, in "Arrested Development"
21. Against
22. *Jackie (b. 1951), Tito (b. 1953), Jermaine (b. 1954), Marlon (b. 1957)
28. Make like Anthony, in a Billy Joel song
DOWN
1. Query
2. ___ Terminator (hit movie of 1984)
3. I ___ Austin (t-shirt slogan)
4. Legendary boxer who endorsed Reagan in 1984
5. ___ Panza, Don Quijote sidekick
6. Bordeaux wine, to a Brit
7. Not too far from the 40 Acres, say
8. Wedding statement
9. Notetaking need, before laptops were widely used in the classroom
10. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Magic Johnson, in 1984
11. Neuron parts
12. Planet in 1984...but not now
13. Solidify
18. Emilio Estevez to Demi Moore, in 1984
22. Dummy
23. Donald's wife in 1984
24. Cartoonist's block
29. Turn about a fixed point
30. Aloud
31. Spend a semester far from the Forty Acres
35. Persona ___ grata
36. *Anthony Cicconne (b. 1956)
39. Major happening of the 1910's, briefly
40. 1997 movie, named after a type of snake and nominated for 6 Razzie awards
42. "Did you get the ___?" (classic "Office Space" line)
43. Little bit
44. Michigan State athlete
47. *Gary Garland (b. 1957, former Denver Nuggets basketball player)
51. Having lots of windows, perhaps
52. Messes up
53. Focus in CNS or Cockrell
54. 1984-relevant phrase that also describes the relationship between the starred clues and their respective 1984-relevant celebrity answers
60. "Do you like ___ coladas...?"
61. Austin's Treaty Oak, for one
62. Star of the 1984 movie "The Bostonians" (who is more famous for playing a superhero)
63. ___ count (statistic tracked in many health apps)
64. First name in classic animation
65. Got under control
25. Widely used data storage format that is pronounced similarly to the leader of the Argonauts
26. Actor Alda who starred in one of the most watched TV events of the 1980's
27. Country that refused to participate in the 1984 Olympics
28. ___ Lisa
31. India's smallest state
32. Scanlon's "What We ___ Each Other" (classic philosophical work that plays a crucial role in "The Good Place")
33. "Jeez Louise!"
34. Singer who released the album Mélanie in 1984, which topped the charts in Quebec for 10 weeks (but who wouldn't enter the English language market for another few years)
36. It goes through phases
37. Poker stake
38. Subject of the film "The Longest Day"
41. PDF available on the Visit Austin web site
42. Star of the 1984 motivational video "Be Somebody... or Be Somebody's Fool!"
44. Icy treat
45. Kitty's satisfied sound
46. Mix
47. Stingers under the eave
48. "And begin!"
49. 1984 Grammy Award winner ___ Cara
50. "Phenomenology of Spirit" writer
54. "And another thing", in text speak
55. Glass you might hear while you're driving?
56. Earl Grey, for one
57. Clothes line
58. Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' ___
59. Texas's election map color, in recent history
Office of the Dean
116 Inner Campus Drive, G6000
Austin, TX 78712-1257
Twyla Tharp and her company of modern dancers kept audiences spellbound at the PAC Nov. 8-13, 1984.
Photo courtesy of the Performing Arts Center via the 1984 Cactus yearbook