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SHSU Faculty Build On A ‘Legacy’
Oct. 20, 2014
SHSU Media Contact: Amy Barnett
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| SHSU professors from all over campus have a family history of service to the university, including (from the left) Frieda Koeninger, associate professor of Spanish; Melinda Miller, chair of the language, literacy and special populations department; Philip Morris, chair of the accounting department; and Lee Miller, associate chair and associate professor of the sociology department. Not pictured is John Payne, assistant professor of security studies, in the College of Criminal Justice. —Photo by Brian Blalock |
If you stand inside the office of Frieda Koeninger in the Academic IV Building and look outside her window, you will see the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Building. But Koeninger sees something else, something to which her eyes and heart are drawn.
“My father planted those four pine trees in front of the building, where the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Building is today; that’s where our house used to be,” said Koeninger, an associate professor of Spanish at Sam Houston State University. “Those pine trees are very dear to me.”
Koeninger has a special connection to SHSU, as do four other SHSU professors.
The children of former SHSU professors and administrators, each, you could say, are part of the university’s legacy, with a unique story of how his or her family history directed them to where they are today.
For some, those stories begin in their childhood.
Frieda Koeninger
“There are really layers of memories,” Koeninger said. “When I walk to the Administration Building, I see the banisters that my friends and I used to slide down when we were kids. I often think about the Estill Library; I remember exactly the way it smelled. It was a wonderful library.”
While not all of Koeninger’s memories are as pleasant, they are historical, nonetheless.
Her late father’s time at SHSU did not end with a retirement party; instead, after 15 years of service, he was fired for being “too liberal” in the eyes of the then board of regents, according to his daughter.
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| Rupert C. Koeninger taught sociology, and also chaired the department, from 1947-1962. —Photo from the Acalde |
“In reality, he was in favor of racial integration and that was threatening to them,” she said.
Rupert C. Koeninger began his career at Sam Houston Teachers College in 1947 and became the chair of the department of sociology and was the faculty sponsor for the Young Democrats on campus.
He was known for promoting race relations through churches in Huntsville and once arranged for soulful singer Lead Belly to perform on campus in the Old Main auditorium.
“I still have a very fond memory of Lead Belly singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’” Frieda said.
While bringing the popular African-American singer to campus was not supported by many at SHSU, it was what he did next that became the “last straw” for administrators.
“My dad directed his students in the Young Democrats to set up card tables outside businesses in Huntsville and help African-American citizens pay their poll taxes so they could vote,” Frieda said. “I was a teenager and too young to vote at the time, but I also helped people register. My dad got in trouble for making it ‘too easy for blacks to vote.’”
Labeled a “radical” and “communist sympathizer,” Koeninger was fired in 1962.
While he could have left quietly, his daughter explains that he “took a different approach.”
“He got the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Association of University Professors and had Sam Houston put on a black list,” she said. “The board of regents didn’t care until they realized they couldn’t hire competent professors if they were ‘black-listed.’”
In 1964, in response to the actions of the NAACP, Sam Houston administrators accepted the application of an African-American female and admitted her to school.
“The case they (board of regents) drummed up portrayed my father to be something he was not,” Frieda said. “He was not confrontational; he was a gentle person, someone who was always trying to work things out.”
Decades passed, times changed, and Frieda was drawn back to SHSU.
During her father’s earlier years at Sam Houston, he would take students to Puebla, Mexico, for a field-study course and often bring teenagers from Puebla back to Huntsville to study.
As a teenager, Frieda Koeninger also made the trip to Puebla. She loved the city and people there and even married a man originally from Puebla while she was finishing up her degree at the University of Texas.
In 1995, after earning her doctorate, she began teaching Spanish at SHSU and directing the same field-study class in Puebla that her father took part in years before.
She has now been at SHSU for 19 years.
“I love the students and I love the challenges they bring,” Koeninger said.
A love for students and teaching is a common thread among the second-generation professors at SHSU.
Melinda Miller
Melinda Miller, chair of the department of language, literacy and special populations, calls SHSU her childhood “home away from home.”
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| Melinda Miller and her father John Schwetman on Miller's graduation day at SHSU. Schwetman taught English at SHSU for 29 years. —Submitted photo |
“My sister and I grew up on this campus,” Miller said. “My mom worked here for a while and my daddy was an English professor. So in the summer, they would go to work in the morning and would pick us up at lunchtime and bring us back to campus. We would swim in the pool that was here at the time and we would walk to the Lowman Student Center; there was a candy shop there and a place to get a coke.”
A love for the campus and watching her father prepare for his classes were major factors in Miller’s decision to become a professor herself.
Her father, John Schwetman, taught in the English department at Sam Houston for 29 years.
In the late 1960s Sam Houston was making the transition from being a state college to a state university and needed to hire more professors with doctorate degrees. Schwetman was one of six new professors who met the criteria and joined the English department in 1972.
During his tenure, he was also president of the faculty senate for one year, allowing him to meet and become friends with many other professors across campus.
“My primary areas of emphasis were linguistics and Medieval English Literature, but I also taught things like the modern 20th-century American novel or sometimes a course that I put together with professors from different departments,” Schwetman said. “One of my greatest joys was being allowed to go to the chair and say ‘I’d like to teach this next year.’”
Schwetman earned a reputation for being “tough, but fair” in the classroom; his daughter can attest to the reputation, as she took one of her father’s undergraduate English classes.
“He gave pop quizzes and there was one day when I didn’t read my assignment, so I failed his pop quiz; I was so humiliated, but I learned my lesson. I knew I had to do all of my reading from that point on,” laughed Miller, who ended up earning an “A” by the end of the semester.
Miller finished her bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas, returned to SHSU to earn her master’s degree and then got her doctorate from Texas A&M.
While Miller spent 11 years teaching in public school, she always felt her place was on a university campus.
“I grew up watching my dad read and prepare for class,” she said. “I remember there were always yellow legal pads around the house and he was always taking notes on what he was reading; it made a lasting impression on me.”
Miller accepted a position at SHSU in the spring of 2001, and the timing is something she and her father will never forget.
“I had a retirement party one Saturday afternoon and the day after my party, I got a phone call from Melinda saying she got the job,” Schwetman said. “So there was no loss of continuity at Sam.”
Miller has now been at SHSU 13 years, has been the department chair for the past four years, and teaches doctoral classes.
To make her job even better, her daughter is attending SHSU and is a student worker in her building.
“I love it all,” Miller said. “I really enjoy coming to work every day.”
Others who expressed the same sentiment are two of Miller’s colleagues. They, too, are the children of retired SHSU professors and are former high school buddies of Miller.
Philip Morris, chair of the department of accounting, also “grew up on campus” as his father, the late Phil Morris, taught in the sociology department for 25 years.
Lee Miller, professor of sociology, is the daughter of the late Jim Miller, chair of the department of theatre and musical theatre from 1976-2005.
Philip Morris
“When I was really, really young, Sam Houston was just a place where my dad worked,” Morris said. “I remember seeing him get ready to go to graduation each semester by putting on his robe, and I always thought that was neat.”
Morris earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in management from SHSU and then earned a second master’s degree in accounting from the University of Houston-Clearlake before getting his doctorate at Texas Tech.
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| The late Phil Morris, taught in the sociology department for 25 years. —Photo from the Acalde |
While he spent some time working as an accountant for an oil company in Houston, he knew he wanted to take his career in a different direction after earning his doctorate.
Morris got the attention of an SHSU recruiter at a career placement seminar in San Antonio in 2000 and was later hired to begin teaching in the accounting department in the fall of the same year.
“It’s been great for me; things have really fallen into place for me here at Sam Houston,” Morris said.
Morris has received tenure, served on the faculty senate, was chair of the faculty senate, and was named chair of the department of accounting in 2007.
Morris’ father passed away in the spring of 2014 but left no mistake in his son’s mind that he was proud of him and his accomplishments.
“My family was happy when I took the position because I was close to home,” Morris said. “My dad was proud of the fact that I was teaching here and department chair.”
Morris couldn’t be happier to be at SHSU.
“I think the really great thing about this university is that you feel the fact that you’re making a difference,” Morris said. “We see our students all of the time. Our class sizes have gotten bigger, but I think the faculty still tries to give students one-on-one attention.”
Lee Miller
Lee Miller was a year behind Melinda Miller and Morris at Huntsville High School but shares similar childhood memories, especially those at SHSU.
She moved to Huntsville in 1976 when her father, the late Jim Miller, took a position as professor in the theater department at SHSU. He later became the department chair and retired from SHSU in 2005.
Her mother, Julee Miller, was also an adjunct professor in the English department for several years, allowing Lee to spend memorable free time on campus when she was a young teenager.
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| Lee Miller's father, Jim, began his career at SHSU as a theatre professor in 1976. Before his retirement in 2005, he also went on to serve as department chair. —Acalde photo |
“When you are young, college students are ‘cool adults;’ so for me to get to come up and interact with college kids was a lot of fun,” Miller said. “It was fun to come up and see theatre, musical and dance performances. We had access to all of the wonderful cultural offerings that were available on campus.”
After graduating from high school, Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Smith College in Massachusetts and a master’s degree and doctorate from Yale University. She lived and worked in Italy for 11 years and spent time working in international education in Pennsylvania.
In 2005, she decided she wanted to be closer to family and began looking into the sociology department at SHSU.
“I interacted with some of the students and saw how diverse Sam Houston is, and it made me think that being at Sam Houston would make a lot of sense, and I could be really happy here,” she said.
Soon Lee Miller experienced the same exciting news her colleague Melinda Miller had just four years earlier—her father retired in the summer of 2005, and she was offered a teaching position that began during the fall semester of the same year.
“My father was very glad I was at Sam Houston and glad to have my daughter and me back in the community where we could spend time together,” she said.
Her daughter spends time on campus regularly, just as she did as a teenager, but that is not the case for all of the children of SHSU professors, as many today do not live in Huntsville.
“When I was growing up, so many faculty members lived in Huntsville, so everyone connected to the university was also connected to the community; it’s not as much like that anymore,” said Miller.
That is the very reason she is excited about her involvement with the Center for Academic Community Engagement.
“ACE works with faculty as they are revamping their courses to see if some of their learning objectives for their students could be strengthened or furthered by a service-learning project,” Miller said. “We help faculty build that into their courses so the students and faculty work together with community organizations to identify needs in the community, and the students work on a project related to their coursework.”
While Lee is hoping to help reinforce the link between campus and community, securities studies professor John Payne is proud of his link to SHSU.
John Payne
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| John Payne (far right) celebrated the naming of the Gaertner Performing Arts Center Concert Hall after his parents, David and Grettle (center, with their other three boys) shorly after the GPAC opened in 2010. Both David and Grettle worked at SHSU, with the former beginning his career in the sociology department before becoming provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, and the latter working in the Continuing Education office. —By Brian Blalock |
John Payne’s father is David Payne, former provost and vice president of academic affairs, who dedicated 14 years to raising the bar of the quality of academic programs and services at SHSU.
“Ever since my dad started working here, he’s been telling me all of the awesome things about Sam Houston and bragging about the College of Criminal Justice,” John said.
Unlike the other professors with early SHSU roots, John did not grow up in Huntsville, but in Missouri and Kansas. He majored in international politics at Brigham Young University, where he also received his master’s degree. He earned a doctorate in political science from MIT in 2011.
After teaching for one year at Texas State University—San Marcos, he began looking at possibilities at SHSU.
“My dad retired a year before, and I thought it would be nice for my wife and baby and I to be near family,” Payne said.
He applied for a position in securities studies and found his interview at SHSU to be “refreshing.”
“They wanted to know what my vision was of security studies and what I thought SHSU should be teaching for graduate education in security studies,” he said. “That was a fascinating conversation. I loved the visit and was delighted when they made me an offer.”
He now teaches “Foundations of Homeland Securities Studies.”
“One of the things we are trying to do in the department is figure out how to connect the top and bottom approach of national security–how do we help people who are implementing the policy to see the big picture? How do we help the people at the top tier better understand all of the good info that’s coming from the people on the ground?” Payne said.
He loves the challenge of teaching the coursework and how “service-oriented” the professors are at SHSU, not to mentioned all of the wonderful things he’s heard about his father.
“I love that,” Payne said. “That’s one of my favorite things about coming to Sam Houston.”
His father could not be happier that he followed in his footsteps.
“I had a very happy time at Sam Houston and worked with wonderful people and so it of course made me very happy to see my son be involved in the same culture,” David said.
Whether it is the young professor carrying on a family tradition or a tenured professor with decades of memories surrounding the university, these five have something in common—they strive to continue the high standard of education their parents established before them.
Koeninger said it best as she admired those four pine trees outside of her office window.
“I love doing things one-on-one with my students. I love the adventures of taking them to other countries. I feel like it’s something my dad would have done, and it’s part of his legacy.”
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