Wallace Warfield's Legacy

I wanted to choose something to read which might begin to capture the complexity and humanity of this person who has contributed to the field of CR and to us all personally.  And for many of us academics, it might be hard to find passages in our writings where our humanity and humor materialize.  But that is because for an academic, it is all too easy to talk about something, rather than about our relation to it, to define something abstractly, rather than tell a story.  Well it is no surprise to us here today, that we can find passages in Wallace's writing where wit meets wisdom, where theoretical abstraction is grounded in a story of experience.  So here is one such passage from his article "Is This the Right Thing to Do?" from the Handbook for International Peacebuilding:

 Much international peacebuilding takes place in the form of training nationals in various aspects of conflict analysis and resolution.  In this field, training has become increasingly popular and taken on a dimension unto itself.  Trainers may have some sense that users are facing a conflictual situation; however, the mechanistic nature of a lot of conflict resolution training has a tendency to make conflict abstract, divesting it of personal meaning.  In many international scenarios, conflict is not an abstract; it is an all-too-tangible reality.  In these settings, there is no bright line between training and a more direct form of intervention, particularly in an ongoing conflict situation.  Is it ethical for external practitioners to portray themselves in one guise when in fact they are operating in another?

An illustration to highlight the last two points might be useful here.  Several years ago, I was a member of a team of conflict resolution specialists who traveled to Moscow to conduct a series of training workshops with Russian scientists, academics, and environmentalists on methods of responding to environmental conflict.  None of us was Russian speaking, so virtually all interactions were handled through translation.  One day, after the formal training sessions were over, a Russian participant asked us if we would like to visit a site in a community where the government was planning to construct a new power plant that would supplant a smaller and older one.  The government's rationale for building the plant was that additional power capacity was necessary to handle the energy needs of a growing immigrant workforce.  Residents of a community on the outskirts of Moscow were protesting the construction on the grounds that the older plant was more than adequate to produce the needed energy.  A larger plant would increase the risk of pollution, and there were no plans for necessary safeguards.

We all hopped into a car thinking we were about to embark on an interesting but harmless field visit.  Instead, we were driven to a home in the suburbs of Moscow where waiting for us were a half-dozen local activists, including a local political representative.  We found ourselves drawn into a discussion about strategic options in the guise of interest-based negotiations.  In reality, we were four foreigners on an intervention team who were engaging in a form of advocacy for one side in a conflict and, at worst, pursuing our own agenda--in a country not fully withdrawn from its cold war discourse and possibly leaving community representatives to deal with negative externalities.

In an attempt to extract ourselves from this uncomfortable situation, we indicated that we really wanted to see the plant before returning to Moscow.  "But of course," our hosts replied.  "In fact, we'll join you."  We hapless American trainers and our entourage then descended on not just the plant but the plant manager as well.  Once we were there, the local residents confronted the plant manager with their protest, not too subtly indicating they had American experts to back them up.  We were now thinking we were one telephone call away from jail and probable expulsion from the country.  Somehow, we managed to extract ourselves from this ever-thickening ethical dilemma and amid a flurry of anemic excuses fled back to Moscow, looking over our shoulder all the way.

This story is notable for many reasons.  First, it is theoretical and grounded in lived experience; second, it is a chapter on ethics, but rather than preach what should be done, Wallace had the grace to use his experience as an example, a parable, about what to watch out for.  He put himself in the ethics frame, as he was talking about ethics--a true reflective practitioner.  Third, it is a story that reveals the wit and wisdom that so characterized Wallace's approach to life and to learning.  These kinds of stories, about human beings being human, are truly Wallace's legacy to us.

--Sara Cobb

Wallace Warfield (1938-2010)

Wallace Warfield entered university life professionally relatively late in his life, in his fifth decade after more than thirty years in municipal and federal civil service. He had held the rank of assistant U.S. attorney general as acting head of the Community Relations Service (CRS) in the Department of Justice, a rank from which many are content to retire and consider themselves well accomplished. Wallace came to Mason in 1990, as part of ICAR’s Conflict Clinic. His position would be considered, in law or medical school parlance, a clinical one. But he had briefly encountered ICAR before this, when Professor Dennis Sandole asked him to guest lecture in one of his classes. Wallace was, as they say, a natural, and pretty soon the consultancy and project-based work he did for the Clinic was augmented by time in the classroom. When the Clinic folded it made sense for Wallace simply to transition into a full-time instructional faculty appointment. While working for ICAR he completed his Ph.D. in Mason’s School of Public Policy under the great American sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset. And with the Ph.D. now in hand he was able to join the medieval guild of the professoriate as a full member. We are lucky he did so.

But the real beneficiaries were the large numbers of students Wallace taught over the years. In the classroom he was, as I said, a natural. Naturally enough, given his background in CRS, Wallace was a core member of the “practice faculty” at ICAR, central to the Applied Practice and Theory (APT) component of our curriculum. But he also taught core courses in theory and contributed to teaching the crucial introductory course to our Masters students. Added to this, finally, was his continuing consultancy and practice, in Africa and elsewhere, which always informed his teaching and his overall ethical orientation to the field. If one thinks of “practice” as the way in which the field retains its connection to the real world of social conflict – its legitimacy and authenticity – then it can be said that Wallace never really left his roots, working on the streets of Spanish Harlem with gangs and dealing with the ways in which violence and deprivation constrict lives and life chances. When in the classroom Wallace connected “theory” to “practice,” students knew that he knew whereof he spoke. It was, like, real.

It was in the classroom that my finest moments with Wallace occurred. Back in the days when ICAR offered “shadow sections” of required courses – that is, two sections of the same course taught on the same day and at the same time, often in close proximity as a way of accommodating our growing enrollments – it would happen that Wallace and I were shadow teaching dual sections of CONF 501, the introductory MS course. Whenever we could, or it made pedagogical sense, or we could convince ourselves it made pedagogical sense, we combined our classes and actively co-taught. These times I loved – and students did too, as I recall. For some, maybe it was just a matter having two New York accents and two fairly animated styles jazz up an evening class after a day of work. For me, it was having the opportunity to work “on the stand” with Wallace Warfield.

I used the expressions “jazzed up” and “on the stand” for a reason. Wallace and I both loved the music, and we talked about it a lot. I had long thought of jazz performance as a model for my own approach to teaching: know the material as well as a musician knows the melody and the changes, and expect you can take “technique” for granted. Being a natural doesn’t mean one doesn’t work damn hard, and Wallace did: on days he taught his office door was closed and he worked hard to be prepared for that day’s class. But knowledge of chords and scales and technique aside – or assumed – the real joy of performance comes in the improvisatory moments: when you come upon something new, maybe generated by some thought you had, often by something a student just said. A new way of looking at old facts comes to you; a new conception of old material. Whatever the joys of doing this solo, it was, as any working jazz musician would testify, in the context of a group that the best moments arise. And so it was when working with Wallace in those days. Sometimes I would feel as if we were riffing together, or trading fours as a drummer might do with a lead horn (we alternated), and sometimes something new would come to us in unison, and we would interrupt one another – polyphony – to get it out.

Wallace and I talked about the music a lot. Because he had more than a few years on me, and reached maturity (drinking and club age) a decade before I did, he was able to go to legendary New York clubs (like the Five Spot) that had shut down before I could take the subway into Manhattan, and see musicians live that I could only listen to on records (like Monk, Ornette, or Booker Little). I always envied this. Once we were talking about a flutist, a musician long on technique but lacking the improvisational fire that others possessed. Wallace seemed especially dismissive of him. I protested, pointing to one or two recorded solos where the better artist in him emerged briefly. “Why so critical, Wallace?” I asked. “Well,” he said, smiling, “Maybe it’s not fair. But Hubert once stole a girlfriend from me.”

So all politics is local and somewhat personal; why not music criticism? Both in the classroom and outside it, Wallace lived an intensely political life in the best sense of the term. It was a life always informed by his sensitivity to what was local – to what mattered to the folks most affected by what was going on and by how an outsider’s intervention might make things worse. And it was always, for him, a matter of intense personal conviction. Students knew this, and his colleagues, who so honor him, did too.

-Kevin Avruch
25 August 2010