We learned a lot at Mansfield. Right? We took a lot of great classes with a lot of excellent teachers. Many of us owe our professional careers to the four years we invested in good old MSC. I feel very fortunate to have been working in higher education for the past forty years. My Mansfield education made that happen. But that education was not limited to a planned program of study. I frequently learned the most when I was least expecting it. Or even trying to avoid it.
I enrolled in the fall of 1972. I was assigned to a tiny room in the temporary housing experiment known as Hickory Hall. Almost immediately (it seems) someone introduced me to David Bowie’s album
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
I thought my brain was going to explode. I had never heard anything like it musically or lyrically. Then someone put on
Trilogy
by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. My heart stopped. How did they make those sounds? Then came King Crimson, Leon Russell, the Strawbs,
All the Young Dudes,
Harry Nilsson, and
Close to the Edge
by Yes. It seemed like I was being introduced to my new favorite band every fifteen minutes. My mother would send me money for “warm socks,”
and I would blow it all on Todd Rundgren and Jethro Tull. It was the best Introduction to Music class I never took!
That same year I wandered into the office of Mike Leiboff, a professor in the Speech and Theatre Department. He had posted a sign on his bulletin board advertising the Mansfield debate team. I had done a little debating in high school. I was not very good at it but had enjoyed the experience. Mr. Leiboff informed me that there really wasn’t a debate team at the college. But I could participate in something called “Individual Events”
with the oddly named “Forensics Team.”
What the heck, anything to get off campus a couple of times a month. What I thought was going to be a once-in-a-while, leisurely extra-curricular activity, turned into one of the most rewarding (and educational) experiences of my life.
By the end of my sophomore year I was a complete Forensic-holic. I worked up a bunch of interpretive readings based on the works of Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal, Edward Estlin "E.E." Cummings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Thurber, Woody Allen, John Lennon, Edward Lear, and Elwyn Brooks "E.B." White. I discovered, and attempted to critique, the comedy of Lenny Bruce. I wrote informative speeches about the evolution of editorial cartoons and the history of
Mad Magazine
. I researched the dangers of Ritalin and wrote a persuasive speech advocating handgun control. If any of my professors had assigned me this kind of work, I would have whined about it for weeks. But Forensics was fun. And you could win trophies!
During my junior year, I signed up for a class called “Introduction to Film Criticism”
with professor Ron Scheer. Not a required class. I was simply looking for an “easy”
elective. How hard could it be? I knew how to watch movies. I’d been doin’
it for years. Guess what? That class turned my world upside-down. Professor Scheer had the ability to deconstruct a film down to its cinematic DNA. He began by breaking down a sequence from
Bonnie and Clyde,
edit by edit. I had never thought about film this way before. Where was the camera? Why? Who made those decisions? How did they affect my perception of the film? It was
Ziggy Stardust
all over again. Then he started teaching us film history, taking us all the way back to the silent era. Wait, what? There were horror films before
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
? Then came the great directors, like Fritz Lang, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Orson Welles. I had never seen
Citizen Kane
. Ron Scheer showed it to us. By the end of the semester, I was voluntarily writing a critique of a Hungarian film called
Father
by
István Szabó.
Hungarian! In black and white!! With subtitles!!! I ended up taking another class with Professor Scheer, “Films and Filmmakers.”
It was even better than the first. I have been studying film ever since.
So where did I end up after all of these left turns? I got into graduate school on a scholarship coaching Forensics. I coached teams and directed Forensic programs for the next fourteen years. I met my wife through the activity. Thank you, Mike Leiboff. I teach at least one film class each semester. This semester it’s Science Fiction Film. Thank you, Ron Scheer. And for the past fifteen years, I have been the faculty advisor and general manager for my university’s campus radio station. Thank you, everybody in Hickory Hall with a turntable.
Could the same things have happened to me at another school? Maybe. I know that I tend to over-romanticize my four years at MSC. But I honestly feel that I went looking for an education, and that education found me. The people who made that happen could not have been found anywhere else in the world. I learned a lot at Mansfield. But I discovered some of the best stuff
—
the mind-blowing, life-changing stuff
—
in places where I wasn’t even looking. Maybe you learned a lot “by accident”
too?
The Writer
Dr. Keith Semmel graduated from Mansfield State College (MSC) in 1976.
He completed his Masters (1977) and PhD (1980) in Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH. Semmel has been employed as a professor of Communication Arts at the University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg, KY since 1990. In 2016 Semmel received the Society of Honors Distinguished Educator Award from Mansfield University.
