My Academic Journey, A Three-Part Series

I came close to not graduating high school. My sister, my two step-siblings, and I had been cordially invited to leave our house one night in September 1985, my overly-Evangelical father and stepmother declaring the end of their patience over our alleged “rebelliousness.” My sister has movingly told the tale here, so I’ll not recount it in this post. I was a month shy of my eighteenth birthday when I moved out, and about eight months short of graduation.

I lived at the YMCA my senior year, selling Honda motorcycles after school to pay my bills. Because I was now independent of my family, I was allowed to excuse myself from school, a privilege of which I took rather too much advantage. I failed physics and trigonometry, barely passed chemistry, and got through my other classes on a little charm and whatever brain power I could muster. I don’t believe I did any homework that year. Somehow I graduated, my grade point average barely registering a gentleman’s “C.” Most of my friends were off to college. I left the motorcycle shop, took a job as a cook, and registered for some classes at the community college. I failed one of those too.

After a year of such meanderings, I decided to get my act together. I enrolled for night classes at the University of Pittsburgh, trying to realize a years-long dream to return to my hometown. I lived with my Grandmother Katie, took one job at a sports memorabilia shop downtown and another at a local restaurant to pay my expenses, and charted the bus routes to the Cathedral of Learning. About six weeks of that experiment came to an end when the tuition bill came due. I hadn’t really factored tuition into my budget, and all attempts to secure financial aid failed. I had to drop the two classes in which I was enrolled.

On the right, me, my father, Richard, and mother, Gail. Sister Rachel had not yet made her way into the world. At left is my mother's father, Dr. Charles Lee of Philadelphia.

Despite the fact that my mother’s family boasts a roster of high-achieving superstars in academics and the professions, when she passed away my father’s influence came to the fore. He was a very religious man, suspicious of higher education. I remember him once lecturing me to beware the “spirit of intellectualism” that hung around places like Ivy League colleges. He meant “spirit” quite literally: he believed in demons and wanted me to avoid those who resided in ivory towers. Little wonder, as I look back now, that I didn’t understand how to properly enroll in college.

My mother, Gail Margery Lee Snyder (1942-1977), probably around 1969 or 1970. Here she was volunteering at a Pittsburgh hospital, Allegheny General.

So a year and a half after graduating high school, out of reasonable options, I thought I’d let Uncle Sam have a go at directing my life. By now I was certain that I did want to go to school, but paying for it was the barrier. The GI Bill solved that problem for me, at the cost of only four years of my life. I enlisted and originally thought I’d be military police. A few examinations convinced my superiors to recommend language training instead. That possibility evaporated suddenly for reasons known only to the vagaries of army bureaucracy, but they offered the next best thing: military intelligence. So after eight weeks of basic training at the now-defunct Fort McClellan, Alabama, I was off to Pensacola to learn how to become a “Non-Morse Signal Interceptor,” a role that unaccountably did require the learning of Morse code. I still have the award I won for my proficiency, though I’ve long since lost most of the dots and dashes.

By the time I got to my permanent duty station at Fort Meade, Maryland, the Cold War had come to an end. Caught in the sudden drawdown, the brigade scrambled to find work for all of its superfluous signal interceptors. I was given the keys to a 1988 white Ford Tempo and told I was now our brigade commander’s driver. For a year and a half I drove Colonel Pickar to meetings at the Pentagon, Fort Belvoir, Fort Myer, and elsewhere.

It was in many ways a transformative assignment. It was good duty and Colonel Pickar was a good man, allowing me to take night classes through the local community college. I enjoyed most weekends off, and I took the opportunity to visit many of the prominent Civil War battlefields in the area: Manassas, Antietam, Harpers Ferry, and elsewhere. Gettysburg made a major impression, its readily discernible topography producing visions of how those three awful days in July 1863 unfolded. History was coming alive to me, as it comes alive for thousands of visitors to those battlefields. I took those lessons into my community college classroom where the lectures suddenly seemed relevant, even important.

​My enlistment ended in 1992. Though I had enlisted in Pittsburgh, my permanent home of residence was still listed as the Chicago suburbs, a lucky oversight. At the time the state of Illinois offered tuition remission to honorably discharged veterans, an extra benefit on top of the GI Bill. The University of Illinois was the best college I could get into, and hence a natural choice. When I left the army I was only a few credits shy of my associate’s degree. I picked those up at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, where I had moved. I enrolled at Illinois in January 1993 with only two years of credits left to my BA degree.

Gregory Hall, University of Illinois, which houses the fine Department of History.

Most of those remaining credits were in my History major, so I packed those in. The major required seven upper-division courses; I took ten, including two senior seminars. My grades in those courses were exemplary. But I still had a language requirement to fulfill, and some of the old attitude remained. My grades in those courses were less than exemplary.

​I did determine, however, that my love for History as a subject was genuine, and I felt I had some talent for it, even if I was rough and unpolished. I was particularly inspired by my two classes with Professor Robert Johanssen. I marveled at John Pruett’s legendary storytelling about colonial America. And John Lynn made the politics of the French Revolution come alive. A few of the profs were boozy, and a couple too theoretical for me. But I found value even in classes with profs for whom I didn’t particularly care. Most of them welcomed classroom or office debate, helping me determine better why a lecture didn’t land. I thought that was good training for presentations I might eventually give, and this is how I determined to become an academic myself.

Come back for parts 2 and 3.

--David J. Snyder
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