Carl Campbell: A Quiet Enabler

Abstract

Carl CampbellA Quiet Enabler Aleric Josephs (bio) For the last several years Professor Carl Campbell has been my colleague. While that has been so for decades, I still relate to him as teacher. In fact, the roles overlapped in time. And as I reflect on our association, I can only think of how he quietly had an impact on my life as I moved from student to colleague. I met Carl Campbell as an undergraduate. I doubt he recalls that encounter as it was a brief one; he was coordinator of the then Caribbean Research Paper which was required by all final year students in the Faculty of Arts and General Studies. I am grateful that he saw my desire to do a history of the high school I attended as a viable project. Having approved it, and having assigned me a supervisor, that was the extent of our contact for a while. I was privileged to encounter him in my postgraduate years which merged into/overlapped with my years in the department as a tutor and then Lecturer. As my teacher and colleague, my association with Carl has enriched my life. My reflection on this association has led me to recognize that he has quietly encouraged and enabled me over the last several years. He was a part of the team that taught my batch of MA students the historiography of the British West Indies. He taught with no hype or fanfare, but left an ineffaceable understanding of historiographical analysis in general, and of the free coloureds of the British Caribbean in particular. He quietly pointed me in the right direction when as a graduate student I had to approach the then Board for Higher Degrees to negotiate an extension of time to complete my research. And no, he was not my supervisor; he might have been in the chair as Head of Department, but his guidance was so quietly stated that its wisdom could have been overlooked. I went to complain and got a single sentence, brief and to the point, and that was all I needed. His quiet guidance and assurance as part of my supervisory team, as he reviewed my work for consideration of readiness for submission, and [End Page 122] his quiet conversational inquiry during the oral examination, helped me to release my anxiety, caused from attending the oral examinations of others. I had come to expect confrontational and aggressive investigation, but his vastly opposite demeanour led to calm and ready responses to his no less incisive questioning. I worked with Carl Campbell as tutor in Atlantic World and Caribbean History courses. In that experience I learnt that he was a quiet enabler, something that seemed to have come naturally to him. He taught me through informal discourse to appreciate the dynamics of understanding the diverse community of students and their classroom/tutorial delivery as I worked with them to achieve their potential. It was his unassuming review of my grading of scripts/assignments that helped me to moderate the strict criterion marking I was wont to apply, without lowering the standards. He enabled me in producing my first academic piece, published in 1991, when he encouraged me to do an article from my MA history paper on Mary Seacole. At the time I was not even aware of the importance of publication in my academic career. I recall with new understanding those informal conversations as we met in the department offices and talked about my life’s journey. Of course, I did not see it as such then. We were just having conversations, but those brief encounters helped me to understand my own journey, to make sense of what I did, the path I took to become an academic in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies. As I reflect on those brief conversations, I recall what a student once told me chuckling: Professor Campbell was called the “fifteen minutes man” as his lectures rarely lasted longer. His exchanges were brief, but no doubt said much, as I carried on the conversation with myself and so enhanced my understanding of my obviously different journey in academia. The understanding brought...