Dr. Paul C. Schleifer retired from Southern Wesleyan University almost a year ago.

During his final semester, I typed up and sent him what I dubbed jukebox questions: interrogative quarters that were designed to get Dr. Schleifer playing some classic tunes from a career spent thinking about faith and education.

Dr. Schleifer took the time to type up some responses. They’re entertaining and revealing. Here’s Part 1.

JONATHAN SIRCY: Has your career differed from what you initially expected it to be?

PAUL SCHLEIFER: Not really. I went to a relatively small college, so being at SWU has been more of what I probably thought being a faculty member would be than being at a large university, though I obviously attended one of those, also. Frankly, I don’t think I ever really pictured it in my head. I could never have imagined being a faculty soccer coach, for instance. And I didn’t expect to be a one-person theater department for 10 years.

One other thing that I guess I did not expect in my teaching career was becoming an advocate for faculty rights. In college and grad school, a couple of times I found myself supporting the administration when there were disputes with faculty. But in recent years, I’ve definitely been on the other side.

JS: Did you have a professor like you? If so, who and how? How has your teaching style been influenced by your experiences, positive and negative, with your profs?

PS: I had some really good professors in college and grad school, but they were all different, each unique. The closest to me would be, I suppose, Joe Gardner, my major professor. I did my BA through the Center for Special Studies. A friend of mine (Ellen Schlaefer—now director of Opera Studies at USC) and I made up a major in dramatic literature and theater (and a couple of years later Davidson had a theater major). Joe was recently out of his Ph.D. program, so perhaps I identified with him because he was younger. But I had some really great professors at Davidson, like Rupert Barber, Frank Bliss, Gil Holland, Tony Abbott, and others, but I wouldn’t say that I modeled myself on any of them. In fact, I don’t even think of myself as having a teaching style. I’m just myself.

JS: Is there something significant in your work on which you’ve changed your opinion? Explain. Conversely, what’s an example of something you now believe in more strongly than you did thirty years ago?

PS: This happened relatively early on. Laura Black put a young man in my ENGL 100 class (let’s call him Jimbob). It was Jimbob’s third attempt at 100 though the first with me, and she warned me that his issue was not turning in the work. Sure enough, several weeks into the semester, Jimbob was already behind on turning in essays. I talked to him several times, and he assured me that he would do better, but he didn’t. I told Laura. Then Laura removed him from my class and set him up to do a directed study with her. I was furious. My attitude was basically, if he won’t do the work, he should fail. But she got him through 100. Later on, Jimbob was in several musicals that I directed, and we had a great relationship. I was very happy that Laura Black showed him grace that I was unwilling to show him. Jimbob and I are actually friends on Facebook, and I have sort of kept up with his career.

One thing I believe in more strongly than ever is that teaching is about relationships, not about techniques, and that my job is about sharing what I know—content and skills—with my students. My job is not to stand on the side while they discover things that I already know. And I can do my job when I have a good relationship with my students—a teacher/student relationship. Of course, some students don’t really care about what I have to share, and while I can take different approaches to try to establish a rapport with them, ultimately I cannot reach everyone.

JS: You’re an avatar of institutional knowledge. From your position, what’s the best way to use that knowledge? What’s the value of that type of expertise?

PS: Those are good questions, although the premise is questionable. The thing is, I know what I know, and part of what I know is based upon experiences over my 27 or 28 years here at SWU. And I’m assuming that the question is about how SWU might use that knowledge because, frankly, I can’t not use it.

But as for SWU, I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that the people in charge need to consult the people who actually do the job, and the job is teaching students. Yes, chapel is important, but people can go to church. Yes, student life is important, but people lead their lives away from college. What makes college unique is that we teach.

There’s an old business-school story about a plant that made toothpaste. The last thing on the assembly line was putting the tubes into boxes for shipping. On occasion, a box would come through without a tube, get shipped, and then be returned. The company wanted to reduce the error rate, so they hired an engineer. The engineer designed a scale that would recognize when a box was too light, and in this system, an alarm would sound and the entire operation would come to a halt. The new system cost only $100,000. They monitored the system for several weeks. A couple of weeks in, he noticed that the error rate, as measured by the frequency with which the alarm sounded, dropped dramatically. So he went to investigate it.

He spoke with a guy whose job it was to restart the system, the last guy on the assembly line. The guy told our engineer this: “We got tired of everything stopping and that darned alarm. So I went to Walmart and bought this fan. Now, if a box comes through without a tube in it, the fan blows it off the belt before it gets to the end.” So a $50 fan did a job that the engineer’s $100K system couldn’t even do. I think there’s a lesson in that for every manager, every director, every president. BTW, I spent a year working toward an MBA, but then I got bored. Fortunately, my wife stayed in the accounting program.

JS: You value personal freedom. How have you incorporated that value into your professional life?

PS: I value personal freedom, and academic freedom is part of that. That’s one reason I am an advocate of tenure—as Jim Davis, a colleague of my wife, said years ago, “Job security is my CV; tenure is academic freedom.”

Students who were in my Student Productions can also tell you that I encouraged freedom. I used to tell the actors, “Make a choice, and I’ll tell you if it works. Any choice is a good choice. It’s just a matter of whether your choice works with others’ choices.”

There is only so much freedom you can give students in a class because you have to accomplish certain things. I guess what I encourage in my classes is personal responsibility, a trait that goes hand-in-hand with personal freedom.

And I believe in personal freedom in my spiritual life because I believe that God endowed us with reason so that we would take some responsibility for our lives, though ultimately we all fall short and thus need God to make up the difference for us. If God did not give us the freedom to fail, we would be nothing but marionettes. But even though we know that God has given us the gift of His Son freely, with no strings attached, we still have the responsibility to respond to His gift appropriately.

I think I did a lousy job answering this question.

JS: A hypothesis: theatre is literary criticism with skin in the game because you must collaborate to bring an interpretation to life. What could people interested in literature learn from the theater crowd and vice versa?

PS: Theater is a team sport (BTW, I spell it the American way, not the British way, because I’m an American). All of the things that people say about the benefits of playing sports can be said about doing theater, except the physical conditioning, though of course theater doesn’t get one injured nearly as often. But it’s a group of people working toward a common goal, using their varied talents, playing their varied roles (including the tech people and the box office people and the marketing people, etc.). One thing that a lot of non-theater people don’t realize about plays is that, while there is usually a playwright, even their work is collaborative. A play will often have out-of-town previews and in-town previews with the playwright working on scenes and dialogue up to the very minute of the official opening.

But there is a sense of literary criticism in directing, and I say, “directing,” because it is, in the modern theater, the director the one who ultimately decides where an individual production of a play is going to go. Shakespeare wrote for and worked with a specific theatrical company. Samuel Beckett worked with several actors and designers over the years who helped him to develop his works (Jack MacGowran, Billie Whitelaw, Jocelyn Herbert, and Walter Asmus). A good director has a vision for a show when they begin, but they are flexible, able to adapt to the vision of individual actors and designers as they work on the show. Sometimes their interpretations are a disaster (see The Goodbye Girl with Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss), but sometimes they are iconic (see Peter Brooke’s 1970 RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Of course, in my own directing, I’ve always thought of my shows, whether at SWU or at CLT, as educational, as sharing a classic with an audience that has perhaps had no chance to see it, or has seen it only in the movies. So I’ve never really tried to do an interpretation, though the costuming for our production of Godspell was unique, but that was the actors more than the director.

JS: Pick a handful of cherished books, say five or six. Explain why they hold a special place in your heart.

PS: This one is tough, but I’ll give it a shot. So, in chronological order:

Jude the Obscure: my mom would get books from the public library for me, especially when I was sick and home from school or during the summers. One time, when I was in the sixth grade, I think, she brought home this Thomas Hardy classic. Early in the novel (for those who don’t know it), Jude, who has ambitions for his education and career, is seduced by a young woman, who gets pregnant; his life never gets back on track. I think I learned from that to stay focused on my ambitions, to stay on the path. Of course, I’ll never forget “Done because we are too menny.” My recommendation: don’t give this book to your sixth grader.

That same year she brought home The Hobbit. Keep in mind that this is like 1966, and The Lord of the Rings was not as big as it became just a decade later. I loved it, and I read the trilogy the next year. It was in 11^th grade that I did the trilogy for a self-selected book report and found out that some of my friends were just getting into Tolkien.

Also in seventh grade, I had to read I by Esther Forbes. It was assigned reading. I remember being at home sick, and I had taken it home with me. I read the whole thing. It was then that I realized that I was a nerd—nobody likes books that are assigned by English teachers.

Big jump: Paradise Lost. Okay, I did a book report on it, with a friend, in 12^th grade, but I have to say that I didn’t really understand it. I read it again in college, and that is when I started to understand what was going on. Of course, I had a professor to guide me in the reading, to help me understand it, and that was critical. But then I read it again in grad school, with Dr. Coburn Freer, who ended up being my dissertation director. I had a good grasp of it before we started, but Freer helped me to see the nuance and especially the humor of PL. And I guess I learned the value of deep reading and re-reading.

Windmaster’s Bane, by Tom Deitz. Tom was a dear friend of mine throughout most of my grad school years. This was his first published novel, and he wrote a bunch more after it, all cross-over fantasy. Tom was never a bestseller, but he wrote what he wanted to write, and he loved doing it. He even did it full time for a while. He didn’t care if not a lot of people were reading his books. But he got great feedback not only from friends but also from young guys, his target audience.

The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker. I used to read detective novels growing up, but I discovered Parker in grad school and fell in love not only with his books but also the hardboiled detective genre. I even taught a class on the detective novel a few years ago. And it’s the genre I have played around with in my own writing.

I suppose that I should talk about the Bible here, too. I grew up with the KJV, though I remember the controversy over the RSV in my dad’s church. But even though I prefer the NIV, some passages of scripture just don’t sound right except in the KJV, probably because I had to memorize those passages when I was growing up—like the 23^rd Psalm—or because I learned them while singing music from Handel or other classical composers. And perhaps it was that early familiarity with Early Modern English that prepared me to study Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Middleton, upon whom I wrote my dissertation.