Community Literacy Journal Volume 13 Issue 2 Spring Article 10 Spring 2019 An Interview with David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas Veronica House University of Colorado, Boulder, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/communityliteracy Recommended Citation House, Veronica. “An Interview with David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2019, pp. 125-134. doi:10.25148/clj.13.2.009074. This work is brought to you for free and open access by FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Community Literacy Journal by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. spring 2019 An Interview with David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas Veronica House Veronica: David, you retired in June 2018 from the Brown Chair of English Literacy at the University of Arkansas. Thank you for doing this interview with me about how to find funding and support for community-engaged projects. David: Sure. Veronica: I bet that a bunch of our readers either have community literacy projects that they’re working on or are thinking of launching, and they’re wonder- ing, how do I fund the work I do, and how do I explain it in ways that make sense to people outside of writing and rhetoric studies? So to begin, could you tell us a bit about your position, and the role of The Brown Chair within the university and the broader community? David: Sure. Thirteen years ago, the University of Arkansas called me up and they said, “We’ve got an endowed chair in literacy. Are you interested?” I said, “What does that mean?”, and they said, “Well, we’d like you to come to Ar- kansas and to define literacy in any way you want to define it, of course it’s a big term--and then you have to get to work solving problems.” My first year here, the dean gave me the year off teaching and he said, “I want you to drive around through Arkansas and I want you to get the literacy lay of the land--see where there are issues happening that you could be involved with.” And so I took him up on that and I did several driving tours throughout the state. What I discovered, Veronica, is I live currently in Northwest Arkansas, in the lap of luxury. It’s not that there are no pressing issues here in Northwest Arkansas to work on, but given the socio-political geography of the state, the issues that involve literacy are much more exigent in other parts of the state, and particularly they are much more exigent in the part of the state that’s called the Arkansas Del- ta. It’s the triangle of counties that goes from the North East corner of the state, cuts back in a little bit and then goes back out just South of Helena, Arkansas, so it’s literally a 17-county area that’s wedged between the Mis- sissippi River on the East and this odd geological feature called Crowley’s Ridge on the West. That region used to be the agricultural bread basket of the state. They used to joke and say the soil is so rich there, you can throw out a pound of nails and harvest a bucket of crowbars. But the same thing happened there that happens in agricultural America, has happened for the past 20 years. An Interview with David Jolliffe 125 community literacy journal Mechanization is one thing. It used to take 100 people to run a farm; now it takes four. And globalization: It used to be that the cotton we grew in the Arkan- sas Delta would be shipped to the textile mills in North Carolina, and the cotton grown in Arkansas has to compete with cotton grown in Singapore and South America. And then curiously, the interstate was another problem. The interstate came whizzing past these little towns and pulled all the commerce out from those towns, out toward the interstate. But the commerce that grows up around the interstate tends not to be local commerce, but instead tends to be franchises, fast food places, things like that. So there are counties in the Arkansas Delta that would lose as much as ten percent of their population in a decade, and what evolved, I think, was a three-class social structure, two classes of which have tended to stay in the Delta: there is an older upper-class class that owns property that they would love to sell but there’s no one to buy it. And then there are the people at the other end who really don’t have much wherewithal to leave and find new work. The group that left the Delta was the historic middle class, and think about the businesses that rely on middle-class support: shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and so on. So the populations began to dwindle. A friend of mine who lives in the Delta, a school superintendent, referred to it as the “exodus from the Delta,” the exodus being to Northwest Arkansas and Memphis, where there are plenty of jobs. Given these demographics, my colleagues here at the University of Arkansas and I wondered what we could do in those counties that would be connected in some way to reading and writing and that would to enrich and enhance and sustain quality of life. I think all of us who work in this field know that the connection between economic prosperity and enhanced literacy is not automatic. We don’t want to fall victim to the literacy myth, but there is something to be said for helping people understand that the prosperity of their communities does hinge in some way on their understanding of the roles that reading and writing will play in the 21st century. So that’s what put me to work in that part of the state. I really devoted the first ten years of my time in Arkansas there. Veronica: That’s really an incredible shift that Arkansas has seen. And David, were you coming from Chicago at the time? David: I sure was. Veronica: So you come from Chicago, you don’t know Arkansas at all, and you have this opportunity to do a driving tour and really get to know the state in a way that probably a lot of academics don’t. 126 VERONICA HOUSE spring 2019 David: That is correct. I was very lucky to have my dean’s support, and real- ly lucky also in one other respect: I grew up in a town of 4,000 people in West Virginia, so I know a bit about how small towns work. I had been in a big town for 21 years before I came here, so I was able to tap back into my own experience. The first project I launched, I called the Arkansas Delta Oral Histo- ry Project. Veronica: Could you tell our readers about this project? David: Students from mostly small, rural high schools in the Delta worked in vir- tual writing groups led by University of Arkansas student mentors. Both the high school students and the U of A mentors completed oral history projects on topics of their choice, and both groups of students eventually produced final projects in genres of their choice. I had done a similar oral history project when I was teaching in West Virginia in 1976. So I was able to capitalize on my West Virginia roots. And then, as I think I’ve mentioned to you in our conversations, I had the really good fortune to meet and get connected with Steve Collier who is the CEO of what is now called ARCare, but at that time was called White River Rural Health Center. When I met Steve, White River had clinics in 23 towns in the Delta, and I think they’re up to about 30 towns where they have clinics now. Steve is really visionary. He says, “When I go into a town, I consider myself responsible not only for the physical health of the people but also for the quality of life in the town.” For anything that I wanted to do that would involve community en- richment, community literacy, community reading and writing, Steve has been 100 percent behind me and supported me strongly, even to the point of ARCare buying and renovating an old house in Augusta, Arkansas, AR- Care’s home base, calling it the ARCare Guest House. He told me any time I was in the Delta and needed a place to stay, “our home is your home, and you’re welcome here.” So it’s turned out to be a real friendly partnership with ARCare and that part of the state. Veronica: This sounds like a kind of fantasy for people who do community-based work. You say you were fortunate enough to meet Steve. How does that happen, and how do you convince someone like him that writing is some- thing to invest in, to partner with? David: Well, in the general case or in the particular case, I can answer both of those questions. In the general case, I was able to explain to him that, something that we all know in our field: that smart work in the United States these days tends to be work from shoulders up. No matter what kind of new work you’re looking at, you’re going to need to have people who are problem solvers, innovative thinkers—people who are able to see these problems and potential innovations that come before them as things An Interview with David Jolliffe 127 community literacy journal that require what I call “languaging out”—in other words, situations that involve careful, critical reading and effective writing.