Thomas W. Russell – 50th Reunion Essay

Thomas W. Russell

3201 Virginia Avenue South

St. Louis Park, MN 55426

952-933-1986

Education: DFA, Yale Drama School

Career: Editor, On Film magazine; Professor of English, Shakespeare, and Cinema, University of Minnesota, Clemson University

College: Berkeley

Define your career? Yegadz! How intimidating, especially when the starring role arguably came right after college. But then, that college was Yale… Though, rigorous honesty, I only got into Yale on the second try. But then, as the Berkeley of the Midwest, Madison in ’65–’66 was the perfect introduction to the late ’60s—beards, protests, the first time I’d heard about Vietnam, and boys and girls living together.

Right after Yale, three friends and I from the Yale Film Society and the New Journal started a film magazine, with an emphasis on classic American directors.

On Film magazine won a lot of prizes, was featured in a number of graphic design magazines, and went bust in a hurry. I lost more money than I’m ever going to see in one place again. Next time use somebody else’s money. Like most lessons in life, learned just too late. But I’m still proud of what a bunch of completely green 22-year-olds managed to accomplish.

I retreated to Yale Drama School, where after seven years I picked up a DFA (Doctor of Fine Arts) in dramatic literature and something called dramaturgy, though if you know what that is, you know more than I do.

I wanted to teach Shakespeare, which I briefly did. But those three initials, DFA, cost me a lot. Dean Bob Brustein wanted to pretend it wasn’t an academic degree. Well, three years of classes, orals, and a dissertation looks pretty academic to me. But try explaining that to a chairman of an English department. I did teach for three years at Yale, including a year teaching directed studies, where I was in Shakespeare’s words, “A little o’er-parted.”

After that, five fun years at the University of Minnesota. I went there to teach Shakespeare, but—no surprise—my film classes quickly became more popular. One term my Alfred Hitchcock class had 120 day students and 60 evening students. I’d never had a teaching assistant before, and suddenly I had this empire of TAs.

Then seven less fun years at Clemson, a big South Carolina football school, until I got turned down for tenure for not publishing enough. I cared more about my students and my teaching than churning out the required number of pages. In academia, fatal mistake.

My next-to-last year at Clemson, though, I had a life-changing experience: I volunteered in our local first grade and kindergarten. What can I say? They were so much better people than my Clemson students that Mr. Tom fell in love, hook, line and sinker. So, I went back to school to get certified in early childhood education. But too many people couldn’t understand why a man would say he wanted to work with small children if he didn’t have an evil agenda. So, no jobs.

I kept looking for work. I loved teaching—I once told students that while I was as grateful as they were for Friday afternoon’s move from classroom to bar, on Sunday I just couldn’t wait for Monday morning, and that’s just not what I hear from most of my friends in 9-to-5 jobs.

More positively, I haven’t mentioned the (few) wonderful women in my life. I realized there was no need for me to be pining after Heather Locklear. I’ve been lucky enough to have long-term relationships with some remarkable women, and to always “date up”—they were all ahead of me in some way. Either smarter, more emotionally attuned, or otherwise leading me on a path I wanted to follow. Any description of my life that didn’t mention them would be not only incomplete, but manifestly unfair.

Women were a late discovery for me. After years of all-boy schooling, they were the passport to a new world of wonder. If I’d had the benefit of coed schooling, it might have saved me years of analysis.

Also, on a positive note, I’ve done a fair amount of writing, mostly about the arts. I even got to ghostwrite Otto Preminger’s autobiography—best summer job a grad student ever had (the only time in my life I was actually overpaid. Something I heartily recommend!).