Why I Teach
Why I Teach: With Dr. Daryl Carter
Dr. Daryl A. Carter began his first day of teaching at East Tennessee State University on August 25, 2008 – 11 years to the day since he arrived on campus as a freshman.
Returning to his alma mater to teach was an exciting moment for Carter, who now serves as Director of ETSU’s Black American Studies program and as the ETSU College of Arts and Sciences’ first Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion.
Over the past three years, the Black American Studies Program has grown from four to 15 students.
“We’re continuing to grow,” said Carter, a professor of history. “Having an understanding about the African American experience gives you understanding about the women’s rights movement, about the Latin rights movement, about welfare rights, about Native American rights and about others because a lot of them followed Black Americans in terms of tactic, strategies, language, rhetoric, etc., so I think we play a vital role there,” Carter said.
Carter says the program also plays an important part in engaging the community in special events and conversations, hosting nationally-renowned writers, artists, and guest lecturers such as former poet laureate Natasha Trethewey and poet Nikki Giovanni.
In addition to his work in that program, Carter is also an advocate for the humanities, on campus and statewide, through his roles with the Tennessee Historical Society and Humanities Tennessee.
“I think it’s absolutely critical that our students have a strong humanities experience on our campus,” Carter said. “Taking humanities education and humanities values out into the real word and applying them is important.”
Hear more about how Dr. Carter instills an appreciation for history and humanities in this episode of “Why I Teach.”
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Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, one, I think that students need to understand that STEM is important, but critical thinking is important too – soft skills are (as) important as hard skills – that they need to have the ability to engage the world around them, to ask smart questions, to study and research and discover truth, and that the humanities allows us to really make sense of who we are, what we are, where we were, and where we're going.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Hi, I'm Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academics at East Tennessee State University. From the moment I arrived on this campus, I have been inspired by our faculty, their passion for what they do, their belief in the power of higher education, and the way they are transforming the lives of their students. This podcast is dedicated to them: Our incredible faculty at ETSU.
Hear their stories as they tell us Why I Teach. In this episode, we will talk with Dr. Daryl Carter, who in 2021 became the ETSU College of Arts and Sciences’ first Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion. An ETSU alumnus, Dr. Carter joined the ETSU faculty in 2008. He serves as a Professor of history and Director of ETSU’s Black Americans Studies Program. In addition to his work at ETSU, he is a member of the Tennessee Historical Society board of directors and served as chair of the board of directors of Humanities Tennessee. Enjoy the show.
Dr. Carter, welcome to the show. I start my podcast with the same question for every guest: Take me back to your first day of teaching at ETSU as a faculty member, and looking back on that day, what is one piece of advice you would have given yourself?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, good morning, Dr. McCorkle. Thank you for having me today. I would say that my first memory... my biggest memory was being here on August 25 of 2008, which was 11 years to the day after I came here as a freshman. So that was really heavy on my mind that day. I was extremely nervous because I was in the classroom basically on my own for the first time.
I had served as a graduate assistant here and at the University of Memphis, but this was my first class and I wanted to do well, and I didn't sleep well the night before, and I was still working on my Ph.D., so I was a little insecure about that. So those first memories were jitters, they were insecurity. I wanted to do well, and then just thinking, you know, just 11 years ago, I was here walking on the campus as a freshman going to English class. So.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Wow. So, what would you tell yourself about those jitters, and sort of what to... what to make of that?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, one, I would tell myself to relax, not to take myself so seriously. Number two, that, you know, as you go into the classroom, you have this feeling that everything needs to be perfect. Everything has to be just right. And that you have to have all this detail, all this information. But your students, they really don't know as much as you think that they do. So if you're just a little bit ahead of them, you're usually in a good space.
And what I mean by that is if they knew as much as I had thought they knew, they wouldn't be here, right? They’re here to learn from me, and so I would tell myself: Give yourself some grace. Relax and realize that they're here to learn and they don't know as much and just enjoy the students. And I've been able to do that my entire career, and not just in teaching, but learning, because I learn so much from my students about life, about history, about Black American studies, about the country.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
That's great advice. So there's a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that says: “We are not makers of history, we are made by history.” How do you impress upon your students the importance of understanding the past and how it relates to the present and to the future?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, I talk about that in several ways as I go through the course of a semester. One, I explain to the students that when you study history, you are studying people; not just dead people, not just events, not just long-past types of situations, but you're studying yourself. So everything that we do, from our love lives – romance – work, health care, everything has a history to it.
And if you don't know some of the basics of American history, you're really vulnerable to a lot of negative things, whether it's disinformation and misinformation, whether it's political propaganda, whether you do not understand the basics of labor history in the country and how we got to this place here in 2023. So getting students to understand that this is not just about other people, it's about themselves and it's about them taking ownership of themselves and their own future by engaging the past to inform their decision making.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
You are a strong advocate for the humanities here at ETSU and statewide. How do you share and instill the passion for the humanities in your students?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, one, I think that students need to understand that STEM is important, but critical thinking is important too – soft skills are (as) important as hard skills – that they need to have the ability to engage the world around them, to ask smart questions, to study and research and discover truth, and that the humanities allows us to really make sense of who we are, what we are, what we were, and where we're going.
And you don't get that in engineering. You don't get that necessarily mathematics or business. You get that from the humanities. You get that from programs like History; or Black American Studies; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Literature and Language; Theater and Dance. The humanities teach us about ourselves in a way that makes us versatile, that makes us attractive to employers, that makes us better citizens, better community partners, and it also helps us to hopefully not reengage in behavior that has been destructive in the past. So we're using those lessons to make sense of our present.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Dr. Carter, as you know, we recently launched our community-engaged Quality Enhancement Plan that's called “Go Beyond the Classroom.” How do you think the humanities will fit into our QEP, helping to involve more students in community-engaged learning?
Dr. Daryl Carter
I think it's absolutely critical that our students have a strong humanities experience on our campus. I think it's critical to the QEP. When we're talking about a community-engaged learning, there's nothing in my mind that's more important in that regard than our students being able to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it outside the classroom; whether it's service learning projects, whether it's nonprofit, whether it's the corporate sector, business sector, whether it's entertainment – they need that experience. And so taking humanities education and the humanities values out into the real world and applying them is very, very important. I think that's why humanities should be at the center of all talk about QEP.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Yeah. Well, that's great. Dr. Carter, your area of expertise really focuses on the intersections of race, class, and gender and how they impact American political history. Some chapters of our nation's history are quite painful and difficult to discuss. So how do you guide these conversations in your classroom when they come up?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, number one, we have to start with a floor of respect. I will respect you, you will respect me and you will respect your fellow classmates. The topics that we discuss are going to be sensitive. They could be around racism or xenophobia or the Holocaust or sexual assault or something else. And we have to be sensitive to that.
We also need to engage in rigorous and vigorous debate. And so that means we don't attack individuals. We may attack ideas, though. We may say: That's a really bad idea. But we never say you're a bad individual. And so we acknowledge that on the front end. This is difficult. This is challenging. This is not going to make you feel comfortable.
But this is why it's important that we have these conversations. And to that end, we use the safety of the classroom to engage in conversations that sometimes we're not always able to have in the public spaces and the public squares because of the intensity of the moment, the intensity of the feelings and emotions surrounding it. And so guiding these conversations has to have respect.
It has to have, you know, this is compassion for others, a recognition that somebody may be wrong, but they have a right to feel the way they want to feel about a situation. And that we are there to keep them as a part of the conversation, regardless of how they feel about the issue, to keep that conversation going.
And so dealing with difficult and painful issues in the classroom is part of what we do. If we're not making the students feel uncomfortable from time to time, we're not really doing our job. And I think if we would take these types of lessons into the public square, we would be better served as a country.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Thank you. The Black American Studies Program has recently hosted quite an impressive list of guest lecturers, writers, and artists. We welcomed the former poet laureate Natasha Trethewey to campus last spring, and I was honored to introduce poet Nikki Giovanni, who visited campus in the fall. There have been many other well-known guests who have provided engaging educational experiences for our students and for the broader community. In what ways do you see the Black American Studies program making an impact upon our students and the university?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Well, one, I think that the program is interdisciplinary, and that is absolutely vital to understanding what we do. We engage with Appalachian Studies; the Department of History; the Department of Literature and Language; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and others across campus. And so bringing that interdisciplinary vibe to it is very important. Secondly, I would also say that the program is vital in terms of preparing students for the world that they're about to inherit.
We are not a majority country anymore in terms of “White America.” We are now right there in a majority minority country in which people identify as something other than white, or biracial, or tri-racial, etc. Having understanding about the African American experience gives you understanding about the women's rights movement, about the Latin rights movement, about welfare rights, about Native American rights, about others, because a lot of them followed Black Americans in terms of tactics, strategies, language, rhetoric, etc.
And so I think we play a vital role there. We also play a role in engaging the community. And that's important, getting them to events, but also having conversations. So I give a lot of discussions about the Black American experience from various perspectives. Later this afternoon, I'll be at the Langston Center, where I will talk about Dr. King; where I've talked to their young children, you know, school-age children. So I think we play a vital role in helping our own students, but also the community-facing aspects of the university.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Yeah. So what are some of your goals for the Black American Studies program moving forward?
Dr Daryl Carter
Well, obviously we want to grow. So we started – three years ago when I took over the program – with four students. We're now up to around 15 and we're continuing to grow. I just got an email last night from a student wanting to talk about enrolling in the program right after spring break. So we're real excited and we're about to reach out to our academic advisors to talk about promoting the program for students who are getting ready to register in April.
Secondly, we want to have a graduate component of it in future years, where students can either get an MA in the program or they can get a graduate certificate in the program. And we also want to explore partnerships with the Department of History and Appalachian Studies in particular, in those two departments, where we are making excellent use of our resources, faculty and otherwise, to give a diverse experience and to give them a really good understanding of blacks in Appalachia, which is critical for getting rid of these myths, that Appalachia is monolithic, which it is not. And so those are some of our goals. We also want to do more with the community. We want to do more mentorship with the community.
We have a student group, the W.E.B. Du Bois Society, which is just getting off the ground. We got about 15 or so students, not all of whom are minors in the program. And so we want to grow that as well. So there's a number of things we're working on.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
That’s great. I look forward to hearing more about all of that. As you look back over the figures who have shaped our country, who inspires you the most?
Dr. Daryl Carter
Oh, that that is a tough question. Outside of – you know, I'll give you example – outside of baseball, which is my favorite sport, my favorite team is the New York Mets, which means I spend a lot of time disappointed. But I say that because almost everything else, I have like 20 different favorites. But I will throw out a few here.
One: Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. One, I'm writing a book on him now, but secondly, the man lost all three of his brothers violently, lost nieces and nephews, lost his own dignity by his own fault. But the sheer willpower to keep at it, to keep going when all the shine of the Kennedy name went away, when all the scandals started to emerge in the seventies, and he kept going away and was able to retire – from life literally when he died in 2009 – is arguably the top two or three United States senators.
He authored hundreds and hundreds of bills that were vital to the country's welfare, everything from the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to Title Nine to children's health insurance – so much more. So he's one. And I like the fact that he was so badly flawed in key ways, whether as the womanizing, the drinking, all those kinds of things.
And still he was able to move forward. Ida B. Wells would be another one. The great risk that she took to describe lynching in the South – and particularly when she was in Memphis – eventually drove her away and out of Memphis for safety reasons; it was incredible. For society to claim that they were doing nothing wrong, they sure got violent when people described what they were doing. And so the great risk that she took to do that was important. W.E.B. Du Bois is another one. He lived almost 100 years, was an original member of the NAACP, one of the original editors of the Crisis magazine, and a premier American intellectual. So he's– he's another one.
I would also say that James Baldwin would be another personal favorite of mine. Some scholars would say that the lion's share of his work in terms of great importance came early in his career in the fifties and sixties, but his career lasted 30-plus years, and he was one of the most prominent black intellectuals in the country.
So I find him to be particularly valuable in terms of inspiration – he’s doing at a time where it is very taboo to be male, black, and gay. And that I find particularly noteworthy. When he takes on William F. Buckley, when he takes on some others who are basically justifying segregation and racism and things of that nature was fascinating to me.
And recent years, young people have become a big source of inspiration to me because they're looking around them at people like us who are much older than they are, who are not necessarily preparing the country for the future in the way that we should, and they're saying: No, there are things we can do to improve the country.
We can get involved locally, we can get involved with the community, we can do education programs, food drives, we can engage business locally. We can create our own businesses. Seeing that is important because it means that there is a bright future coming, in part because the young people are not following in the same mistakes that earlier generations made. So that's important to me.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
All of your examples remind me of a recent opportunity I had to visit, in Memphis, the Civil Rights Museum, and thinking about that experience and how impactful that could be for students to sort of observe the history, but also to view it as a call to action about things that can be done now to address societal issues. What's been your experience with the Civil Rights Museum and thoughts about bringing students there to experience it?
Dr. Daryl Carter
I think it's a great idea, and I'm currently– I just had a meeting with my student group last week and I said that may be on the agenda for 23-24; if not there, then somewhere else that we can go. I did my stay at the University of Memphis, and so I'm very familiar with the Civil Rights Museum, and we had relationships there, one of my main advisor’s wife worked there, and my main advisor lived across the street.
So I spent a lot of time there. I think it's a wonderful place, in part because of what they were able to do with it, but also because of the history that's there. Part of the problem that I see now is that people do not want to discuss what happened.
Not just with King, but with race and gender overall. You cannot discuss American history without talking about African Americans. It just doesn't happen. Beyond that, we watched as a lot of white Southerners – for example – were exploited, because others, particularly political elites, were exploiting their racial grievances. And so going to these places and saying: Okay, yeah, that happen, how do we not repeat that? is important. How do we give everybody dignity and respect? How do we bring everybody to the table? And last but not least, we talk about business all the time, especially here in the South, that tends to be allegedly more business-friendly, but at the same time, I will simply say when we exclude men, women, people of different races, whatever, there's a human cost to that.
There's a financial cost to that. What are you losing in terms of productivity because you did not hire this person or you excluded this person or because you created policies that drove others away? And so we have to look at this holistically and say: Are we getting everything we can possibly get out of people? By making sure that we are giving those two things dignity and respect.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
Do you have a favorite topic or lecture that you like to present to your students?
Dr. Daryl Carter
I have a couple. I love talking about the Kennedy administration. I like talking about the assassinations – John Kennedy in particular. My students get a kick out of some of the more salacious parts of that, both with the assassination and President Kennedy's private life. And I get all kinds of questions about, well, how could that possibly happen, and where was CNN during all this?
I have to explain to them, CNN didn't exist. You know, totally different environment. And so I enjoy giving that lecture. I like talking about reconstruction. Not because it's a pleasant topic, but because it's an important topic. All that hope, at the end of the war, over 12 years just goes away. And by 1900, Rayford Logan talks about the nadir of black life, because it's all gone there. And that's why Ida B. Wells and other women, particularly black women, are coming forward, because it's so dangerous for black men to go into the public square at that point. They're being lynched, they're being arrested, they're being put on convict lease systems, chain gangs, you name it. And I don't think you can talk about the 20th century or the 21st century without talking about that. Some of the response to President Obama was almost identical language to what we would have heard 140 years ago. And so that's another important lecture for me to give.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
That's great. Finally, what impact do you hope to make on your students?
Dr. Daryl Carter
I hope that when my students leave my classroom, that one they'll feel that they had a faculty member who truly cared about them, who wanted them to succeed, who was inclusive and open to them and their ideas. A professor that they felt they can trust. That gave them valuable tools in terms of analysis and interpretation and critical thinking that is going to allow them to pursue their dreams, their goals, their life's mission. So I want students to feel that they were, in a sense, loved here. And when they go away that they have fond memories of that and that they want to pay that forward when they're in positions of authority in their own lives, whether it's their children or their workplace or graduate school, or they go into the profession themselves as academics, I want them to pay that forward. So I'm really big on not replicating the types of mistakes that you and I learned in graduate school and professional schools, and that the students coming away are healthier than what they were in previous generations.
Dr. Kimberly McCorkle
That's great. Thank you, Daryl. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I appreciate the work that you do to promote equity and inclusion at ETSU, and the impact that you make on your students every day in the classroom. Thanks for listening to Why I Teach. For more information about Dr. Carter, ETSU’s Black American Studies Program, or this podcast series, visit the ETSU Provost website at etsu.edu/provost. You can follow me on Twitter @ETSUProvost. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like and subscribe to Why I Teach wherever you listen to podcasts.