Oral History and the Professor

The events precipitating me into the then unknown realm of oral history include a happy pair of intellectual coincidences occurring in 1986. At that time I was completing studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Colocated with the War College is the U.S. Army Military History Institute, which hosts the Senior Army Oral History Program. Through initial contact as a student, followed by a series of brief tours of duty with the institute, I came to appreciate and value the ongoing work of the oral historians connected with the project. Soon after returning to civilian service as a professor at Virginia Tech, I came in contact with a well-known Harvard professor, Roland Barth, who suggested during a formal presentation to a local Phi Delta Kappa chapter the need for more in-depth and less superficial research in professional education generally, and on the public school principalship in particular. The question then raised in my mind concerned how to go about gathering in-depth information on the principalship. In a flash the answer came-through the use of oral history techniques. This idea appealed to me, since I'd become disenchanted with traditional quantitative data-gathering techniques and was casting about for alternative, and potentially more useful, approaches to the act of research

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