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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, JAN. 18, 2016 | VOLUME 131 ISSUE 1
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While marriage age is trending upwards, some people still opt to marry younger
HIGHER GPA FOR SCHOLARSHIPS.
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DAY IN THE LIFE
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CAROLINE FISS/KANSAN passion academically.
ony Balden's love for funk and blues started early, inspired by his parents. He then pursued h
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BRIANNA CHILDERS
@breeanuh3
When Tony Bolden, an associate professor and undergraduate adviser of African and African American Studies, was young, he considered himself an artist.
But when he uses the term artist, he doesn't mean a singer or rapper — he means a reader.
Though reading didn't become a passion until later, growing up, Bolden always wanted to be a writer and said he understood that the two were closely related.
When he was a child in the 1960s in Berkeley, Calif., his mother used to play BB King and Aretha Franklin in their home, which Bolden remembers giving him a warm feeling. His father was a reader, and though his father never went to college, he studied jazz on his own. Bolden's father also studied Egyptology and taught himself how to read hieroglyphs.
Bolden's father would also read to him. Bolden fought it at that age, but he would realize its importance later.
When Bolden was a soldier in Korea, he had a negative emotional experience and, while he still doesn't know why, the next day he went to the local library and picked up a book by James Baldwin called "Go Tell It on the Mountain."
'When I read the book — remember, I am 19 years old and thousands of miles away — and I couldn't understand what I understand now, but all those characters reminded me of my aunts and uncles and gave me a really warm feeling," Bolden said. "That's where I started."
When Bolden returned home, he moved back to California and went to school at Merritt College in Oakland. At the time, his father lived in Oakland, so he would stop by on his way home to Berkeley, and his dad would teach him the history of jazz.
"He taught me how to identify the sounds of individual instruments and individual instrumentalists, and then he taught me how to listen for certain kinds of sounds that sort of reflect certain feelings or moods or ideas," Bolden said.
His father also taught him genealogies of musicians and who had influenced whom. They would sit and listen to music for hours, and when he visited him on the weekends, his father would take him to the living room and put on the record player with music from 1945-70.
Despite his father's focus on music, Bolden's attraction to being a writer and a literary artist remained. For him, an artist meant an intellectual.
"I aspired to be an artist, and one thing that happened was one of the older artists I knew told me in a formal voice, 'Tony, if all you want to do is read and write, why don't you go and pick up a master's degree somewhere?" Bolden said.
That's exactly what Bolden did. After enlisting in the army in 1975, he moved south, went to college and started a family. He received his bachelor's degree in English at Dillard University in New Orleans, his master's degree in African-American Studies at the University of Iowa, and has his doctorate in English from Louisiana State University.
His first job was teaching at the University of Alabama, and he came to the University of Kansas in 2009.
"I had been organizing a symposium on funk music at the University of Alabama, and the chair at KU said I could do that here, so I came for a campus visit and really loved the energy of the place," Bolden said.
Though Bolden isn't teaching any classes at the University this semester, in the past his classes have focused on music. He has taught black popular music and the introductory course of African and African American Studies. He also created a course called "The Life and Times of limi Hendrix."
Bolden said his students learn critical skills, how to phrase questions and how to evaluate and formulate their own arguments. He said these are life skills that students can always use in any real sort of endeavor.
["What I teach my students] is also important in terms of the history of the country in many ways," Bolden said. "I know [my classes are about] entertainment but in many ways these musicians exuded democratic principles and they reconciled the conflict between the interest of the individual and the collective."
Aside from teaching classes, Bolden achieved his goal of becoming a writer, focusing on funk and blues music. He currently has three published books and has been working on his current book, "Blue Funk: Performing the Grooves in Black Cultural Philosophy," for 10 years.
The reason it took so long, he said,
is because he is a literary scholar and
his training is in how to interpret literature. While he writes the book, he reads on his own and trains himself
on the information he is learning.
"Blue Funk" traces the history of the concept of funk from its early beginnings.
"The best way to explain ['Funk'] is: Have you ever danced before and had fun? That feeling you get, the goosepimply feeling, well in African-American cultures way back when, that was all expressed religiously." Bolden said.
Dancing was the way people praised God, but after slavery, there was a split in the church, where dancing had previously been allowed, Bolden said. Young people couldn't express what they had experienced because church rituals had become conservative. Because of this lack of space for expression, blues music was created.
"The test of good blues music was to create that feeling that you feel in dancing, but within a profane or secular context, so I'm tracking that feeling and how those ideas get expressed in music," Bolden said.
Despite working on the book for years, Bolden said he hasn't been discouraged.
"I have a high standard, so when I put my name on something I want it to mean something." Bolden said.
While teaching at Alabama, Bolden met Willie King, a singer and guitarist who would go out into the woods to perform. Bolden joined and watched the performances.
Bolden recounts that it was almost like going back in time because there
"Out in the country, everybody danced, and there was no taboo," Bolden said. "The only taboo was disrespect, and that was the only thing that wasn't allowed, so it was a really spiritual thing."
were no paved roads and there were barbed wire fences. He said it was like an "old dilapidated juke joint" with plywood floors.
"There were very poor people, but they had all this dignity and there was just a beauty to the music," Bolden said. "You had the entire community there, from 18 to 78, and everyone from 25 up would dance, and they could all dance and they had their own movement."
This experience not only plays into his book writing, he said, but also in the way he teaches.
Tara Green, a professor and director of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, was a student of Bolden when he was teaching at Dillard University.
Green said Bolden has a clear and broad outreach, he is very comfortable and always very willing to give parts of himself to other students to help them be at the level he is now.
"I don't recall any other professor I had bringing music into the classroom, and I think, for me, that was something that stuck with me, because when I teach now, I teach music," Green said.
Starting from listening to blues and jazz music in his home at a young age to writing books about blues and jazz, Bolden has come full circle.
"But having listened to the blues, I began to understand it wasn't just entertainment," Bolden said. "There was a logic to this, and it had to do with a philosophy of life."
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tion Center.
The center was established in October to centralize the University's sexual assault prevention methods. Previously, education and prevention efforts were coming from several different offices, including Public Safety, Student Affairs, Watkins Health Center and the Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access.
Vice Provost of Student Affairs Jane Tuttle said the new center will initiate its own programs as well as help steer other offices to ensure all components are on the same page.
“[Before the center], there [were] no centralized folks, so sometimes our efforts weren’t as effective as they could be if
Tattle said she believes Brockman is the best person for the director position because of her experience.
Brockman, who will begin Jan. 20, has a history of tackling sexual assault issues. After getting a bachelor's degree in criminology and sociology with a focus in victimology from Drury University, Brockman went on to get her master's in organizational leadership from Gonzaga University.
Brockman served as a sexual assault prevention educator at the University of Arkansas, and most recently, executive
She has since gone on to work in several sexual assault prevention coalitions in the Midwest.
Brockman said she thinks University students are poised for helping prevent assault.
"I think KU is positioning itself well to really have an intentional approach and effort to curb and eliminate sexual violence on the campus," Brockman said.
"You're high-activist, high-energy, and you've got students who already ready to go," Brockman said.
The first item on her to-do list is to build trust and cooperation within the community by understanding the culture and the components at work, Brockman said.
"I think the first step is to really understand KU's culture and make myself available and
The University currently offers several options for students who have experienced sexual violence, including off-campus advocates, medical and psychological counselors and resources for filing a coma few ideas she's got in mind. The center's main focus will be prevention work, offender accountability and behavior recidivism work, that is, working to curb patterns of repeating sexual violence.
Brockman also said she looks forward to working with the University to make sure its policies are "reflective of the work and the philosophical standing of the center's charter" as well as developing victim resources.
"We need to be able to promise them we have their back," Brockman said.
Brockman said the center will hire two more employees sometime in the spring. She said the hires will be two educators, one focused on male engagement and bystander intervention, and the other on dating and healthy relationships.
Although Brockman said she feels nervous about being the first director of the newly-established center, she's said she's excited to get started.
"There's a lot of unknown, but this is really the opportunity to create something amazing from scratch," Brockman said.
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