Kaye receives Pound-Howard Distinguished Career Service Award

Frances W. Kaye has received the 2016 Louise Pound - George Howard Distinguished Career Service Award. The award was presented to her at a Faculty Senate meeting on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 in the Nebraska Union Auditorium. Below is the transcript of the presentation and her acceptance speech.

Introduction

"In order to recognize individuals with a distinguished career of service to the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, the Faculty Senate established the Louise Pound-George Howard Distinguished Career Award in 1990. This award is conferred upon an individual or individuals who, during his or her career at UNL, has made an exceptional contribution to the University. The individual's contribution may have been made through teaching, research, public service, administration, or a combination of these factors and should reflect a long-standing commitment to the University. This year, the Faculty Senate is presenting the award to Professor Fran Kaye, English. Chancellor Harvey Perlman will receive his award at the March 1 meeting.

"Professor Kaye's career is distinguished by amazing breadth. She is a distinguished scholar; a caring and innovative classroom teacher; has been deeply engaged in service to her department, the university, and her profession; and is committed to outreach activities promoting social justice. Her interdisciplinary focus on the cultural history and the literature and geography of the Great Plains has greatly enhanced the University's reputation in Plains Studies, environmental and ecological criticism, and ethnic studies.

"Professor Kaye's role as a classroom teacher has been driven by a deep understanding that literary and cultural studies are critical to the knowledge of our own and other communities, and that such understanding is critical in a complex world. Her work as an editor for the Great Plains Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains elevated the scholarship in these important publications. And, as many of her supporting letters attest, perhaps Professor Kaye's most significant work has been an outreach to individuals incarcerated in the Nebraska state prison system, where she has run reading and creative writing circles for many years.

"She was appointed to UNL as an assistant professor in 1977, and rose to the full professorship in '93. Fran is an excellent teacher and has received a distinguished teaching award from the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Sorenson award for teaching in the humanities, one of the highest awards the University can give. In her administrative work, Dr. Kaye headed the Indian Studies division of Ethnic Studies for some years, and was editor for the Great Plains Quarterly for 12 years, a period in which it became a very distinguished outlet for seminal reviews and articles.

"Other on-campus services includes years as the faculty advisor for undergraduates majoring in English, but it is her off-campus service that truly warrants special attention and recognition. She has been tireless as a visiting speaker for audiences ranging from small town middle school students to assembled academics at national conferences. She has also been tireless in serving prisoners in correctional institutions both here in Lincoln and in Tecumseh, Nebraska. The humane mission of helping incarcerated individuals to find their voices as writers, as women or men in communities, as participants in spiritual and cultural traditions - this is a vibrant and challenging outcome of work in the humanities, and Fran Kaye has wholeheartedly devoted herself to it, knowing that the most meaningful change often comes from within. Her service is evident in the difference she has made in the lives of many prisoners and their families and communities. It is with pleasure that the Senate awards Dr. Kaye with the Louise Pound- -George Howard Distinguished Career award."

Professor Fran Kaye's Acceptance Speech

"Thank you very much. Thank you, very much to the Senate for this award and thank you everyone for coming today.

"On February 28, 2006, Robert Grey Owl was released from the Nebraska State Penitentiary after serving 11.5 years on two counts of burglary and one count of criminal mischief. Within a year, he would adopt me as his sister, because he needed my pragmatic assistance with dealing with the free world. And I would adopt him as my brother, because I needed his witness to dispossession. My brother is, in all important ways, the reason I am receiving this award today. When he first came to the Maza Tipi - the Iron Lodge - the Pen - the men of the Native American Spiritual and Cultural Awareness society elected him president, because of his idealistic vision for developing cultural awareness, which included bringing Native American Studies professors from the university to the prison to share their knowledge. And so I came.

"The United States imprisons more people both proportionately and absolutely than any other country in the world. People of color are overrepresented in the prisons, and underrepresented in the universities. It is easy for many Americans to write off the incarcerated as 'human scum' that needs to be separated from the rest of us, and mass incarceration rates make sense in our economic system. Fear of prison and its frequent aftermath, homelessness, keeps others working in poorly paid, often dangerous, often dead-end jobs. Those are the angry folk, crying out against our current political system. We live in a culture of guilt, blame, punishment and vengeance. Once, in the courthouse, someone asked me if I were not ashamed to be seen with my brother. "No," I answered, "but I am ashamed to be part of a society that turned such a happy little boy into such a tortured and troubled man."

"My brother spent most of his life in institutions: Indian boarding school, juvy, federal prison, and state penitentiaries. By his own account, he was sometimes a "knucklehead." The schools and prisons gave him an extended education in making bad decisions and yet he maintained always some private reservoir of joy and compassion, wisdom and desire. He learned that all authority is corrupt. "Subvert the rules, whether they serve you well or not." "Truth is powerful. Never waste it when you might be able to get by with a lie." "Never trust anyone. It just makes you vulnerable." "Planning ahead is meaningless, because someone else controls your decisions." "Seize any opportunity that comes your way, no matter the consequences." But brother always managed to be better than he was taught. And surely, none of us wants any fellow citizens to internalize such messages. Not the people who write the laws. Not the people who work in the institutions. I've been greatly honored to question those parameters for everyone.

"Volunteers and other prison educators can be a lifeline to the world for people who are incarcerated. Both vocational and classroom education are crucial for people to maintain their humanity behind bars, and to have a chance to stay out once they get out. But volunteers also serve as role models and mentors, as well as purveyors of skills and information. We provide another point of view than the official one, and we are the eyes for society to see within the dark places our institutions create. When I bring my students to prisons, as I did earlier this month when 12 of us attended a NASCA powwow, they learn the innate humanity of the incarcerated, especially the men who choose to work through the inmate clubs to better themselves. And these are the students who will be the judges and juries, the lawyers and state legislators of the future. We all benefit when inmates and students meet as allies.

"I am most enormously grateful to my department chair, Marco Abel, and to my colleague and nominator Julia Schleck, for putting me forward for the Pound-Howard award; for saying in public what my department has always let me know in private: that a land-grant university is supposed to serve especially the most under-served populations of our state, including the dispossessed heirs whose land was granted for the university, the men and women in NASCA. I'm grateful to my husband, Howard, for letting me go to prisons, and for letting me bring the prisons home when someone like my brother comes to stay. I am enormously grateful to those who wrote letters on my behalf, especially my beloved friends who are behind bars and who, despite what they have done in the past, are champions of justice and the human spirit. I thank the people from the prisons who let me in, especially Shar Most at York, who is the most creative and innovative administrator I know. And I thank the Faculty Senate and the University itself for affirming the inviolable humanity of those who are incarcerated by giving me this award.

"My brother, Robert Grey Owl, died on September 20, 2014. He died of lung cancer. He died of living out the hand life dealt him. His fundamental good gives on; and this award is only one of its more tangible effects. I hope that as we grow this university, we grow this university as a place that will heal people as they come out of the prisons - that among our 10,000 new students, we will have many alumni of NSP and LCC, of Tecumseh and York; the students who need us; the students who benefit from us. I hope that this is the beginning of a new partnership. I'm very grateful to Mr. Frakes, and Miss Smith for coming today. I think you may have seen more of the University as an institution than you were planning to, but now that you know us, I hope you will come back again - and now that you know Mr. Frakes and Miss Smith, I hope that the University will welcome students from the prisons. Thank you very much."