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