Sheldon Ekland-Olson,
Executive Vice President and Provost
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Executive Vice President and Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson is living proof--if any were needed--that a liberal arts education can fuel a wonderfully interesting and varied career. His years at The University of Texas at Austin have seen him teaching classes on statistics and research methods, leading seminars at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and working with law students on the intricacies of prison life, prison reform, and capital punishment. He also volunteers to teach Freshman Seminar courses each year. In 1998 Ekland-Olson became the chief academic officer of the University. For five years prior to that appointment, he served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. "Sheldon Ekland-Olson has earned the support of the faculty and of the liberal arts community," says Professor Robert King, the College's first dean and Ekland-Olson's predecessor in the job. "He has been a valiant steward of the liberal arts legacy." Ironically, the Southern California native started out in a very different direction: he entered Seattle Pacific University as a chemistry major, seeking a career as a biochemist. As a junior in college his life took a turn toward the social sciences when he was enticed by an anthropology professor to assist on research with a Kwakiutl tribe in Canada. He then earned a B.A. in 1966, and five years later a doctorate in sociology from the University of Washington. His life took a second fateful turn when, at his graduate advisor's suggestion, he applied for--and won--Yale Law School's prestigious postdoctoral Russell Sage Fellowship in Law and Society. At Yale he became interested in the criminal justice issues that would underpin his future research, together with an invaluable legal background. In 1971 he traded the Ivy League for a position on UT's Sociology faculty. 
A highly productive researcher/writer, Ekland-Olson has authored or co-authored six books, including Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Texas Monthly Press, 1987), as well as dozens of articles. His nationally recognized expertise in the thorny realm of violence and corrections has led him to become a consultant with such agencies as the Texas Prosecutor's Council, the Texas Department of Human Services, the American Bar Association, the National Institute of Justice, and U. S. Department of Labor. No less impressive is his classroom dedication, which persists in spite of mounting administrative responsibilities. Over the years he has taught a wide array of courses, from "Institutional Reform" (in the Law School) to his favorite, the undergraduate "Issues of Life and Death." He has taught in both Plan II and Humanities and is a charter member of the Freshman Seminar faculty. His many awards include Alpha Kappa Delta Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher (1978), Outstanding Teacher: Dean of Liberal Arts (1981), Liberal Arts Council Teacher of the Year (1987), the Texas Blazers Faculty Excellence Award (1997), and the Margaret C. Berry Award (1998). Says past Liberal Arts Foundation Advisory Council Chair Michelle Brock: "Underlying all of his accomplishments is an unparalleled commitment to students and teaching in the liberal arts." From 1988-91 he served as a special assistant to then-Chancellor of the University of Texas System Hans Mark. Ekland-Olson became an associate dean in 1991, and in 1993 was named dean of the College of Liberal Arts. As dean, Ekland-Olson set goals to broaden the honors program, overhaul the undergraduate advising system, enhance computer-assisted instruction, and implement international programs--and he drew upon the College's wealth of talent to carry them out. He met with success in the consolidation of Plan I Honors, the establishment of the Undergraduate Writing Center, and the realization of full Internet connectivity for the College. More recent innovations include the newly revitalized Religious Studies Program; the Democracy 2000 and Criminal Justice programs; and the Freshman Seminars, which counters UT's vastness by providing entering freshmen with a variety of small-group opportunities. His tenure as dean saw the birth of the Tracking Cultures program--a multidisciplinary exploration of Hispanic influences across time and place; the Technology, Literacy, and Culture concentration; the burgeoning of computer-assisted classroom technologies; and two nascent Tracking Cultures spinoffs focused on Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Generous gifts from the Charles and Sarah Seay foundation and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport foundation during this period helped Ekland-Olson to realize his vision. As provost, Sheldon Ekland-Olson has become involved in the broader life of The University. International programs remain high on his agenda, with special attention given to Latin America. He will continue to look for ways to increase undergraduate programs that are designed to welcome, inform, engage, and challenge University of Texas students. By Rae Nadler-Olenick
Sheldon Ekland-Olson on criminal justice, capital punishment, and the paradox of communityIn addition to serving as Executive Vice President and Provost of UT Austin, Sheldon Ekland-Olson is also an accomplished professor and author of several books, including Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Texas Monthly Press, 1987) and The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas 1923-1990 (University of Texas Press, 1994). He is an authority on criminal justice and prison violence, owing his prestigious legal education to Yale Law School, but claims he never intended to practice law. In this interview in Texas Alcalde magazine he shares his thoughts on issues such as capital punishment, cloning, and the importance of liberal arts. Has your career taken a series of logical steps? No, I don't think it is a very straight line from where I started to where I ended up. The life course sort of takes its own path. I don't want to call it luck, but just chance. I had no idea that I would end up as a sociologist of law at Yale Law School. I was a chemistry major as an undergraduate. My professional development took a dramatic turn because I could type. I had an anthropology professor who asked me to transcribe interviews he had done with a Kwakiutal Indian chief, Jimmy Seaweed. By the end of the summer I had typed 75 hours of interviews and I thought, "Man, that's interesting!" They had to do with how this 80-year-old man had adjusted in Nanaimo, British Columbia, to social change that had taken place in his village. This sounded more interesting than chemistry, for whatever reason, at that point in time, so I changed direction. In graduate school, I went to my advisor when I had finished my exams and said, "What other courses are there that I might take?" And he said, "Well, there is this fellowship at Yale Law School. Why don't you apply for that?" I didn't plan on that. My interest in prisons and capital punishment has just evolved out of a number of interesting circumstances, so I am not sure. I feel like the career choice has been more a matter of taking advantage of opportunities as opposed to plotting out a career path. Looking at your experience and reading some of your writing, it seems these chance opportunities have meshed together pretty well. Yes, they really have. When I went to law school they asked me if I wanted to be a lawyer. I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer; I wanted to teach. I didn't care about anything else. So I said, "I don't want to be a lawyer, I want to teach in the university." So I just approached law school differently. I didn't have to worry about being on Law Review. I didn't have to worry about getting a job with a firm on Wall Street or whatever. Law school, in that sense, was a very different experience because I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. I looked at law school more as an experience in studying history than getting under my belt knowledge of precedents and procedures so that I could be a successful practicing lawyer. With this perspective, I approached family law, corporate law, and First Amendment questions differently than I would have otherwise. When did you become interested in criminal justice? Well, I was in law school beginning in 1969, which was just at the tail end of what is now known as the Warren Court era. There was a lot of change going on in the legal system as it related to a wide variety of issues concerning defendant rights, all the way from arrest to punishment. During that time, there was a group of maybe 15 core academics in that area of the country who were interested in prisoners' rights. I had some training in how to conduct surveys and do ethnographic research and that sort of thing. Because I had that experience, I got involved with a legal aid program for persons who were in jail awaiting trial. This is an interesting area because you have persons that are not yet convicted and therefore presumed innocent, but you think they did it or else you wouldn't have arrested them. From there, when I got to Texas, I worked on a study funded by the Department of Labor to treat released convicts as if they were eligible for unemployment insurance. When people are released from prison, they are most likely to recommit crimes in the first two years after release. The study was based on the proposition that if they got past that transition period, they would make it all the way. I eventually got involved with the discussion about prison reform and what came to be known as the Ruiz case. From this, Steve Martin and I wrote the book Texas Prisons. According to the book, hundreds of petitions were filed the same year David Ruiz filed his. What made his special? [Motions to a photo on his bookshelf.] The people who filed are that group of people sitting in that picture there. Ruiz is the guy on the far right. It really was a number of people helped along by a volunteer lawyer who filed the case, and it ended up in Judge William Wayne Justice's court. He consolidated all these petitions and styled the case Ruiz v. Estelle. This was just a case that Judge Justice felt raised legitimate issues. Everything else sort of fell out from there. It used to be that prisons were worlds apart. They were kingdoms unto their own, with little or no external regulation. The courts refused to hear cases dealing with prison administrative matters. The rules in the late '60s to the mid-'70s started to change on the prison officials, and that is when they got into trouble. It was the changing of the rules. It wasn't that prison officials were doing anything different. How did you get inspired to write your latest book, The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle? I had contact with the prison system and had studied prison reform and violence in prison. Obviously, at some point, you start looking at death row and it is out of that interest in death row, as part of this larger interest in prison, that James Marquart and I decided to write The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle. In the book you discuss the idea that modern capital punishment in the South evolved out of the practice of illegal lynchings. Was that connection apparent going in, or did you discover it along the way? That came out pretty early. When we started doing research in the late 1980s, 98 percent of all death sentences were in states of the former Confederacy. We wanted to understand this basic fact. In more recent years, the death penalty has begun to filter out all through the country, but as recent publicity indicates, Texas still is by far the leader in actual executions. It is just an interesting phenomenon. I haven't looked at it in the last year or so, but my guess is that 90 percent of the executions are still in the states of the former Confederacy. Did your feelings on capital punishment change because of this project? Absolutely. I spent half a year reading through all the death sentence cases in Texas. If you do that, you come to understand that these are situations in which people do horrendous things to other people. I think in the process of reading all those cases, I began to think more clearly about the conditions under which I would support the death penalty. I think I went into the study more anti-capital punishment than I came out. There is a question about whether we have the moral right to kill anybody. I think we do. And therefore, in that sense, I am pro-capital punishment. But if you ask me, and if I were king of the world, I would abolish all capital punishment tomorrow. The reason is that we will kill persons who are innocent--clearly, we will do that. For me, this inevitability outweighs any benefit that we gain either in terms of revenge, retaliation, healing the harm for the victim, or deterrence. The fact that we will kill innocent people, for me, is a moral problem I just can't live with. So I would abolish all capital punishment tomorrow. And that is not the argument I would have made going in. In addition to the risk of executing innocent people, aren't death sentences costlier because of repeated appeals? I don't buy into that. I know a lot of people say, "Well, the appeals cost money and you have to pay for the judge and you have to pay for the bailiff and you have to pay for the lawyers and the lights and the electricity in the courtroom," and so on. Well, if we did away with the death penalty tomorrow we would still have the judges and the lawyers and the bailiffs and the lights on and the water running. The special nature of capital cases is just in the appeals. The studies that say sentencing somebody to death and holding them in prison for 10 years is more expensive than 50 years in prison, just don't work out. It is in some sense more expensive because there are more appeals, but even if we did away with those appeals we would still have the judges, the lawyers, the courtrooms, so you wouldn't save that money necessarily, you would just use it for other things. The resources would be given to other cases, but you wouldn't save any taxpayer money. Have you witnessed an execution? I have. It certainly gets your attention and is very moving. The way it is structured now, it's very regulated, a quiet kind of experience in the sense that people are very somber. It is very routinized. People know exactly what they are going to do at various points in time. The execution itself, the person visually, just seeing it happen, goes to sleep. That is what it looks like. In some other states, physically it is different. Electrocutions, gas chambers, hangings, or shooting are much more gruesome. The reason that I wanted to witness an execution was I didn't want to be involved with writing the book without some more direct experience. Why do you think U.S. executions are at a 42-year high? It has to do with the law and order political climate we are walking through. I don't think you justify executing somebody without dehumanizing them. For some time now, we have defined persons who engage in crime, in general, as less human than the rest of us, as outsiders, sometimes as predatory animals. That is much more the opinion now than it was 30 years ago when there was more interest in whether or not people could be rehabilitated and whether or not we should dedicate resources to rehabilitation. What we have gone to now is sort of a "three strikes and you are out" system. Criminals are considered predators. That presents a very different picture of people. I think because of that general image we have of people who commit crimes, we have dehumanized them. Once dehumanized, we have been more willing to execute. Whether or not we will eventually back off will be contingent upon whether or not the image of the person who commits a crime is re-humanized. So what happened to the concern for prisoners' rights? We have had--backlash is too strong--a "rethinking" of that. Some have said, "The Warren Court is so bad, a bunch of mushy-headed liberal bleeding hearts, and it is because of them that the crime rate is going up." We have tended to see prisoners as evil as opposed to protecting their rights as we were doing in the '60s. These things tend to cycle. It is a basic kind of dilemma, but right now, we are on the end of the continuum where we think of criminals as distinct outsiders, not members of the community. So this generation is more interested in victims' rights. Exactly. When we gave increased rights to defendants and prisoners, people said, "Wait a minute! What about the victim?" These two things pull you in opposite directions. Both are important. Because they are both important and because they pull you in different directions, we see the cycle. And it will cycle again. We have been talking about capital punishment. How do you define bioethics in broader terms? I think the main ethical question in the whole arena where we are called upon to control the life-and-death process is the notion of personhood. That is, we must decide who is included and who is excluded in the human community. So that, for me, is the central question. For example, bioethics at the end of life, whether or not you want euthanasia, hinges in part on the question, "What is a person? What are the characteristics that a person has? Is this person now a vegetable?" Notice the dehumanization. At the beginning of life, there are the same kinds of questions: "What do we do with abortion? Neonatal care? In vitro fertilization?" All of these questions hinge on whether or not you define the life as having attributes of a person at that point in time. And if you find that they do, ending life is murder; if you don't, it becomes acceptable. When I teach related courses, we try to look for themes that run through all of the issues presented by our ability to control life or death. One of these issues is how do we go about imposing, interpreting, developing, a logic of exclusion or inclusion. So personhood, for me, is the central question of bioethics. But, beyond that, bioethics simply has to do with the ethics that deal with biological life, the protection of life, the termination of life, the creation of life, and the cloning of life. The cloning issue is really a fascinating one right now. Why? Besides the fantastic technology that is involved, it raises in bold relief the idea that our moral system evolves according to technological developments. It is a perfect example of how technology and moral change are linked together. What technology does for us is provide new opportunities for action, and many times those new opportunities are not covered by existing moral or legal codes. Given new possibilities of acting, we have to come to terms morally, and eventually legally, with things we didn't have to cope with before. What are other examples of this question? You mentioned euthanasia, for one. Absolutely. Euthanasia is a perfect example, as is in vitro fertilization, as is the birth control pill, as is transplantation of fetal tissue. There is just a whole series of examples in which technological developments have raised ethical questions, legal questions, moral questions that we simply have not had to deal with before. Most moral codes we know of, the Ten Commandments or whatever other authorities we rely on, simply don't deal with fetal tissue transplants, and they don't deal with cloning and so, through analogies, we draw parallels between whatever cloning involves and what we believed to be true yesterday. In the process, our moral system evolves. In many ways the ethical issues are identical whenever we are involved with the control of the life process. Whether that is capital punishment, or euthanasia, or abortion, or whatever, it raises the question of whether or not we should be playing God. And in the case of cloning, the implications of the technology are so far-reaching and so ambiguous that it is generating a lot of concern, legitimate concern. You cite "the paradox of community" as one of your research interests. What does that mean? The paradox of community may be the most interesting thing to me right now. Basically, the things that bind us together are often the things that keep us apart. Throughout life, we develop a sense of identity, meaning, and community. These bind us together. At the same time, and in the process, we separate ourselves from others. This plays out most dramatically in the case of ethnic relations. If we allow the things that bind us together to keep us apart, then related problems are going to be with us for a while. Speaking of ethnic relations, you wrote a piece with [former UT System Chancellor] Hans Mark in 1991 about multiculturalism in higher education. Are you dealing with this issue a lot now? . . . Well, for me, the mission of the College of Liberal Arts, the basic reason that it's in existence, and the reason that we ask taxpayers to support us, is to develop a deeper and more inclusive understanding of the human condition and community across time, place, and life circumstance. That is why we are here; that is the core mission. I am against a single course that is said to cover multiculturalism because that is the whole mission of the college. If you have a single course, and you say, "Okay, we will take care of the problem of multiculturalism in this three hours," it trivializes the issue. You don't want to set your core mission off in a little corner in a single course. How do you do that when faced with the argument that the canon has blatantly excluded groups that have come to represent multiculturalism? You expand the curriculum. You design courses to look for the common ground. For example, we have developed this program called "Tracking Cultures," which looks at the culture in the southwestern United States and traces it back through colonial and pre-colonial Mexico, Spain, and imperial Morocco or Northern Africa. I think our understanding of the human community emerges from comparative analysis of people across time, place, and life circumstance. And that is how we ought to be organizing the curriculum. Can you teach multiculturalism in a classroom? Well, multiculturalism is a loose concept, and it is so overladen with political connotations that I find myself avoiding the term altogether. But if it is the case that you are trying to teach people to be sensitive to one another, that happens in far more important ways outside the classroom, in my opinion. It can happen in the classroom; I don't want to say that it can't. By studying other peoples in other places, times, and life circumstances, you come to better understand yourself, and you come to understand that your joys are their joys, and your pain is their pain, and that is helpful. What's the value or the advantage of a liberal education or a liberal arts degree? At the undergraduate level we ought to be preparing students to understand the world that they are about to enter in the broadest sense possible. They should walk away with a good understanding of math and science, a good understanding of culture and history and literature. If you walk out of the University with these perspectives and skills in hand, you are far better able to adjust to the particulars in whatever job you end up in. Corporations, newspapers, TV stations, all train their people in the specifics once they are hired. If I were a corporate executive, I would want someone who has a good sense of the world in the broadest sense possible, especially now that corporations are so clearly engaged in the international arena. If someone is going to deal with people in China, I don't want them just to know finance; I want them to have some sense of history. I think that in the more advanced stage of your career, once you have this solid foundation, then you start looking for the things the technical professional schools are so good at, whether that is law, business, journalism, or education. But I think the first thing to get under your belt is a broad understanding of both the physical and the cultural world in which we live. . . . What made you get involved with Meals on Wheels? Well, I have an aunt in California, who is the last member of my mother's family, and Meals on Wheels helps her. This is my way of paying back. The thing I like about Meals on Wheels is that it is incredibly well-organized. . . . I love the organization. Do you find helping out this way more rewarding than writing a check? Oh yes, but it is more than that. My aunt had a really high fever when she was young and it damaged her brain a little bit, and everybody assumed she couldn't learn how to read, so she didn't. She is now about 79 years old, and this woman who was delivering meals and staying to chat with her asked her one day if there was anything she would really like. My Aunt Margaret said, "You know what? I would like to learn how to read." Fortunately, this woman knew Hooked on Phonics or something and got some Sam I Am books and some other materials, and about six months later, Margaret called me up and said, "Sheldon, guess what? I can read!" Here is this wonderful story about a 79-year-old woman who is illiterate, basically, but just a genuinely magnificent person and clearly has a capability that just got bypassed in life. That is why I feel like I owe a debt back. By Rachel Shaw Jones
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