Oral History Transcript - Byron Augustin - November 11, 1986
Interview with Dr. Byron Augustin
Interviewer: Bradley A. Johnson
Transcriber: Bradley A. Johnson
Date of Interview: November 11, 1986
Location: Dr. Augustin’s Office, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Bradley A. Johnson: Okay, basically being in your class, I know you were born in Nebraska, but can you tell me about where, the town?
Byron Augustin: Well, I was born in Hastings, Nebraska, which is the county seat for Adams County. I was actually raised on a farm; my parents were farmers. Our farm was located about ten miles from Hastings. So, when it was time to be born, they went to the only hospital that was accessible, because we lived in a rural area. And I lived in Nebraska until I was twenty-one, and I stayed on the farm.
I went to high school in a small high school. It had forty-seven kids in the whole high school. Some of my elementary school years were spent in a one-room school; my second grade, for instance, was in a one-room with ten kids in the whole school. Ten kids in eight grades. We didn’t even have kids in some grades. There weren’t enough kids to go around.
Then I did five years on my undergraduate degree at Hastings College. It is a private church-supported college in Hastings, and I graduated when I was twenty-one. Then I left Nebraska, pretty much permanently, and went to Kansas when I did my beginning graduate work.
Johnson: Did you have any brothers or sisters there?
Augustin: Yes, I have an older brother who still lives in south-central Nebraska in a little town called Axtell, and he actually teaches in the junior high school in Hastings; he was also a geography major. And then I had an identical twin brother, and we were all three boys were geography majors. That’s probably a reflection of the one geography teacher. One teacher taught geography at Hastings College; it was a small college with eight hundred and eighty students. He was just a fascinating teacher, and I mean it was pretty unusual for a farm boy to go into geography. The only reason I went into geography was because he was so interesting. Pretty soon I had a major; I just kept taking more classes from him, and all of a sudden I said, “Oh, I have more classes in geography than anything else, so I guess I will major in it.” That’s how I ended up in geography, and that’s how all three of the boys ended up in geography.
When I was a senior in college, well, my twin brother was killed in a car wreck, and so that may have had the biggest impact on my life. We were extraordinarily close.
Johnson: Were you fraternal twins?
Augustin: No, we were identical. We had a lot of things in common; we were pals. We were best friends and defended each other. We always stood up for each other, we played together, worked together, studied together; we did everything together. We dated together, we bought a car together; we were inseparable. Everywhere we went together, so it was kind of like about half of me was cut off. I had a hard time adjusting to it for about six months. My grades went down almost a full letter grade that semester. Then some people got me active in school politics and I ran for student body president.
Johnson: Was this at Hastings?
Augustin: Yeah, at Hastings College and I didn’t anticipate being elected; just did it because, I don’t know, somebody kind of encouraged me to do it. It was a surprise when I got elected, and then after I got elected, I didn’t have the time to mope around and worry about how grief-stricken I was. I was just too busy, and I kind of worked myself out of the funk I was in.
Johnson: Were you active in any other things like sports?
Augustin: In high school, I was very active in sports. In a small school, you have a better opportunity to play (humorously). So, I played. I was above-average in football and basketball, and then state-quality in track. I was a half-mile in track and ran in 1959 a 2:07. In a small high school, that was a good time in Nebraska in 1959. So, track I would say was the best sport, because it was a sport I could train for myself and you didn’t have to depend on anyone else. I like team sports, but at least with track you could go about as far as you wanted to push yourself. That’s what I always liked about track.
Johnson: You said you went on down to Kansas for graduate study at KU [University of Kansas at Lawrence].
Augustin: Uh-huh, I applied for master’s work at University of Syracuse, Chicago, University of Kansas, and Clark University. I was accepted at all four schools; I had pretty good grades in undergraduate school. The University of Kansas offered me a nice teaching assistantship, and so it was the closest, and I was kind of a homebody and I didn’t want to get too far away from the farm. Kansas has a good program, so I went down to their program, and I am really happy that I did because it gave me a chance on my assistantship to really experience classroom teaching in the university setting. I found out that I really like that, and that’s what led me to a career in college teaching.
Johnson: Did you just shop around and decide to come down here or was there any reason—
Augustin: Oh, no, (strong emphasis) it had been a long process for me to get to Southwest Texas. I did my Masters at KU and two years on a PhD—I didn’t finish the PhD because I had been in college for nine straight years. So, I was just tired of being in school, just kind of worn out, so I decided to go teach. I was tired of not making any money and always struggling, as you do as a graduate student. I had married the last two years. I was in school, so my wife had been working and we had struggled to try and keep afloat. So I decided to lay out for a while and go teach, and jobs were very easy to acquire then because the Vietnam War was on and a lot of kids were in college. Enrollments were up, and I was offered a job at Northeastern State Teachers College in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I went down and taught for one year and liked it very much, but my wife was from northwest Missouri and I was from south-central Nebraska, and we had always agreed that if a job opening came up at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, which was close to her family, or at Kearney State Teachers College in Nebraska, which was close to my parents, that we would go to one of those two institutions, if all things—salary—and everything were equal. Well, after one year in Oklahoma, I wasn’t looking for the job. Northwest Missouri State contacted me and asked me to come for an interview. I went up and was really happy in Oklahoma, but they offered me a nice salary increase and a three-hour lighter teaching load. So I went to Missouri and started teaching there. I spent nine years there, and out of the nine I taught eight. I took one year out and finished up my doctorate. After teaching for ten years, I was really happy in Missouri, and again I hadn’t planned on changing jobs, but I ran into Richard Boehm, who is the chairman of this department, at a national meeting in St. Louis in November of 1977.
He had been the chairman at the University of Missouri, so he and I for a number of years had worked on various geography projects in the state of Missouri together. We knew each other well, and he had taken the job as chairman that year, so he has been here one year longer than I have. He had a situation where some people hadn’t finished their degrees here, and they could only teach for five years if they didn’t complete their doctorate. They hadn’t completed their doctorate so they were being let go, so he had two job positions that were open and he wanted to build the department in geography. He felt like one of the ways he could build it was to bring somebody in who could attract a lot of students to an introductory course. He knew my reputation at Northwest Missouri State was a good world regional geographer, and he asked me to come down and look at the program. I came down on a lark really—it was a free trip. They paid my expenses, and I thought I might as well go to Texas for a weekend. So I came down, and first of all was impressed with the physical setting. As a geographer, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know that Texas was quite this pretty. The Hill Country really fascinated me and the beautiful streams. The campus is a very attractive setting, and everyone here was friendly, even students that obviously I had never met were friendly to me. I like that atmosphere. I like the personality of Southwest Texas. So I went back, and he called and offered me a job here, and it was one of the most agonizing decisions I have ever made because I had tenure at Maryville. We were close to our families, there were so many things. By that time, I was in my middle-to-late thirties, and it’s not easy to give up the security. I was giving up tenure and I didn’t know what was going to happen down here. I guess finally the bottom line on the decision was if I wasn’t good enough that they didn’t want to keep me here, then I wasn’t very good and I didn’t deserve to stay there. So I had a lot of confidence that I could come down here and fit into the program. One night I just kind of made a decision and called him and said that I’ll take the job. That was in 1978. I have been here ever since, so this is my ninth year.
Johnson: Let me real quick make sure we aren’t missing anything. You came down in 1978, and you have been down ever since—
Augustin: I actually came, I started teaching in July. I started in summer school and taught two courses.
Johnson: I’m in your class, one thing that I have really noticed is that you do have a strong student following; I find your classes fascinating and I really wasn’t too interested in geography. I’m a little bit of a world traveler myself, but your stories really intrigue me. Is there anything that you can attribute to your large student following—the way you capture your audience.
Augustin: Well, I think there are obviously a whole bunch of things. First of all, I’m teaching a subject matter that I love, and so I have a natural enthusiasm for what I teach. I think students detect that very quickly. I know, first of all, I try to remember the things I enjoyed as a student, and it always turned me on when a teacher was turned on. If he liked or she liked what they were teaching, I thought, Man, there must be something about this that is interesting, that they’re excited about it. So that was perhaps, the first critical decision was to go into a field that I really liked. That was largely because of a teacher that I had who was very good. I have patterned a lot of my teaching after the way he taught. He was an extensive traveler, and I firmly believe that if you’re going to teach world regional geography, you can’t teach it as what I call a “textbook” geographer. How can you tell people about the world from other people’s descriptions? You can, but it is a lot more effective to tell them about the world from your own experience, and I believe to a very large extent that students like these classes because I’m able to relate actual experiences and talk about the cultures and things that happen to me in those cultures. You’re in the class, so you know you would have to comment on that, but I think another factor is the slides.
I think those slides are good. I’m getting to the point—I have good camera equipment and I think I take some fairly decent slides. So, I think they might help bring geography alive.
Enthusiasm for the subject matter and knowledge of the subject matter is critical. I think you cannot expect students to enjoy a class where you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. Here I think I have the advantage of several years of experience. I have been teaching for twenty years a subject that I enjoy teaching, and I know my material pretty well. I read a lot and I stay up-to-date, and I think you’ll note that my notes are up-to-date. They’re not out-of-date, they’re up-to-date stuff. Kids don’t like stuff that is ten to fifteen years old; they want stuff that is up-to-date. I think those facts are important. I think that I’m fair. I tell students what I expect of them. I don’t try to hide anything. I have an attendance policy, which I think some students may have some apprehension about the first or second day. Then I try to make the class interesting enough that they don’t mind coming, and for the most part, most students adjust to having that attendance policy. And I don’t believe they actually mind it after a while. Now, if I were real boring and unprepared, then I wouldn’t blame them for not coming to class, but I think they enjoy the class. We try to make it an interesting class. I think that helps; you have to be fair. When I go over a test, if I have a bad question, I’ll throw it out. I mean, it’s more important to me to be fair than to argue with a student over some little minute detail. I think students appreciate that I think I’m friendly, and I think kids like that. I love students (very sincere). I mean that a student can recognize very quickly. It is just like a child or a dog. They can tell when somebody is going to be friendly to them or like them, and students know when teachers like them. I love my job, and I love these students. I’m really happy doing what I’m doing, and I think that happiness rubs off on them, and I just think the kids here at Southwest Texas are the best in the world. I will defend to the death!
I know they are not Harvard students, and they know they’re not Harvard students—they are not trying to fool anybody. They don’t claim to be Harvard students. They’re just good, solid kids! They have great personalities and great sense of humor. They don’t complain if they do poorly on tests. They will admit, I didn’t study enough. They are not dishonest; they’re honest students, and I really enjoy being with them. They make me feel young, and that I feel is critical. I sometime [forget] how old I am because I feel when I’m with them I’m about their age. That rubs off, and I feel good about that.
Another critical factor is that you have to have a sense of humor to be in this business. You have to be able to laugh at yourself and laugh at them. They have to be able to laugh at you and people just for me. Some people just take the world and themselves too seriously. We only go around once. I don’t think we are going to be reincarnated, and I don’t know what I would be if I did. (Humorously) If I could be, I would come just what I am. I really enjoy life a lot. I fully enjoy living. I like to laugh. I think smiling and laughing is important, and I think the kids like to do that too. Those are some of the things that to me would make me want to take my class.
Johnson: Well, going back to what you were talking about earlier, about how your teachers influenced you to become a geographer. I have noticed, just walking around here in the geography department, the articles of, in particular, three top geographers, yourself and two others, and how our geography department is one of the best around—can you tell me a little about your colleagues?
Augustin: Well, one of the reasons I’m here is because of my colleagues. It took a lot to make me move with the security I had. I had a home, a family; I had everything sitting in Missouri. To come down here was a big decision, but I came down and talked to some of the people here, and they looked like the kind of people who were very professional and I would enjoy working with. When Richard Boehm became the chairman, he became the chairman with the goal to make this the best undergraduate geography department in the United States. He felt like they were close; it was a very good department when he came. He felt if he could have the staff grow by maybe double and double the enrollment then we could really have a solid program. Now, most people would have said that was impossible. First of all, geography in most schools is not very healthy. It is not a subject matter that people flock after to take their courses in. So, a lot of people said his goals were out of reach; you weren’t going to be able to go and do that. I think he brought in the kind of people that each of us has separate skills; we are the oddest bunch you ever did see in terms of personality. There are eleven totally different people, but somehow the eleven parts mesh together—some people are better at one thing, others are better at another thing, and someone else does this better. Everybody has things that they do well, and we kind of try to let each other do the things that we do well the most.
I do recruitment and heavy introductory course loads. Jim Harrison doesn’t teach as large of classes, but he runs our internship program—which is critical to our applied aspects of our program. Peterson does field trips and sponsors GTU, and is a hell of a good classroom teacher. Everybody has something to offer, and quite frankly, I think it is fair to say that maybe some other people on campus that might think that we are egocentric. We don’t want to be that way; we just have good teachers in the department. It is very competitive, our guys are very competitive; when we do student evaluations, we run and see how the other guy came out. We want to see where we fit, where we rank with the rest of our fellow teachers. Across the campus, we rank very high in the individual department. The competition is tough as a booger. You have to keep teaching your pants off to stay at the top of this bunch.
I think that is what has made the department a really top-ranked department is the competition and the friendly camaraderie amongst the staff, and all of us, I think without any question, love students. We, probably in this department, and I don’t mind this being on tape, because I think for one, out of this department, our teachers show more concern for their students than any other department on this campus. We do all kinds of things to try to help our students—with advisement, we try to give them sessions before advisement so it makes it a little bit easier for them to go through. We socialize with them. We have a picnic. We take them on field trips. We visit with them in the halls. It’s just a reflection that we like our students. We like our majors, we like the kids at Southwest. Everybody does, not just me. The entire department does, and we have people who are well-trained in their specialties. They are able to teach their subject matter well, and I think you could probably ask almost any geographer who is knowledgeable of undergraduate programs in the United States, and I would say 75% of the geographers would say this is the best undergraduate program in the United States. I mean, no one has the kind of majors that we have, no one has the kind of student enrollment we have. It just keeps growing—it has grown every year since I have been here.
When I started in the fall of 1978, we had 670 students. In the fall of this year [1986], we have over eighteen hundred. So, enrollment has tripled in eight years, so you must be doing something right. We have to work awful hard. There is a price that we have to pay for it. Everybody in this department works long, long hours. We work nights. We work weekends. We work vacations. It just takes a lot of time to do all the little extras. Because we are now expected to do research, and you cannot give your students the services they need and get the research done unless you take the time out of some other section of your life. So you have to do it at night and on holidays. You have to do it in the summer. You have to do it some other time, that’s the only way you can get it done. But it is fun being part of a department. That is great. Anytime you go to a national meeting, everybody knows who you are if you’re from Southwest Texas. It’s kind of like being the number one-ranked football team. People go, Oh yeah, I know who you are. If you’re unranked, people haven’t head of you very much.
We have been ranked in an independent study done at the Wisconsin State University. Back in 1980, they rated the undergraduate departments, and this department was rated number one in the United States. A lot of people would say, “Yeah, that was 1980—what about now?” Well, I honestly believe now that the gap between first and second would be even larger. Because we have a larger program, our staff has been more professionally active. We have more alternatives for our students. I think it is an excellent department. I still think the bottom reason, the bottom-line reason, why it is so successful is excellence in teaching. I’m very proud with the people that I work with. I have worked with some good teachers. It’s not hard for me to advise students from most of my colleagues because they are all good teachers.
Johnson: Being a geographer, what have you seen here in the south-central Texas, or just around here in San Marcos–New Braunfels area? What changes have you seen the past few years that you have lived here? Have they been really drastic?
Augustin: Yes, (very strong emphasis) very drastic, and some of them are not changes that have been an environmental side of joy. I think the biggest change that I see is because I live in New Braunfels, and I drive to San Marcos, and the traffic on Interstate 35 is becoming a nightmare! I mean, they’re beginning to drive on that interstate like they drive in Houston, and I’m beginning to almost fear for my life. I had two guys about a week ago pass me on the shoulder on the right-hand side of the interstate. I mean, they weren’t moving fast enough in the passing lane, so they passed me on the right. That scared the living peewaddle out of me. I can’t understand the rudeness and the carelessness that take place just because people can’t quite get around a car quite fast enough. I mean, they are talking about saving ten seconds out of their life, which they’re probably going to lose when they get up the road and have to stop at a stop light. But they’re so impatient, I wonder where all these people are going and what they have to do that they’re in that big of a hurry. So, traffic congestion in the biggest change that I have noticed.
Industrial development along the interstate part of the corridor development is a big change. The tourist pressure in New Braunfels is where we almost kind of give up our city during the summer. I mean, we are flooded by tourists. The town isn’t as much fun to live in as it was eight years ago because some tourists are rude, and they’re drunk, and they’re belligerent. So, there is a kind of a friction, and yet I know at the same time that it brings a lot of money into the city. So, there is kind of a mixed bag about which is best.
The university itself when I came here it was twelve thousand students, now it is almost twenty thousand. My classes are so big. I have one regret with my teaching, and that is that my classes have gotten so large that I no longer know my students by their first name. For years and years and years, I have prided myself with being able to say by the second exam that I could stand in front of the class and call every student by his first name. That was possible when I had 40, 50, even up to 60, but when you get 120, you can even hardly see the back row. So, you give up something by not having that personal association. All I can do is hope that the students who really want to get to know me better will take the effort to do so. I can’t give them the personal attention that I used to be able to. That to me is a little bit of a tragedy, but that’s the direction the university is taking, and I can’t stop it.
Johnson: I know in class you give us quite a few examples of your world travels, and you give quite a few interesting stories. Is there anything that really in particular that sticks out in your mind? Something that you just can’t actually believe happened to you, or just something that was hilarious, or just one of those once-in-a-lifetime things?
Augustin: I have had probably twenty incidents (laughter) that I would call once-in-a-lifetime things. I have had some really rare opportunities. Rather than just pick one, I would say I list two, maybe three or four things that really struck me as having a big impression on me.
Being at a conference in Jamaica as an officer in the National Council for Geographical Education, and having the opportunity, because I was in that position, to meet and visit with the Prime Minister, Edward Seaga, was a thrill. It was super. He was a very intelligent, gentle man, and to visit with him was, I thought, a real treat. That was a highlight.
Getting to know the country of Mexico; I love Mexico. I go to Mexico two to three times a year, and I’m bothered by the misunderstanding between the two countries. One of my goals for whatever remaining years I have living in Texas is to try and improve the understanding and the relationship between Mexico and the United States. I think that it is critical that the two countries be able to understand each other better. I wished that I could somehow or another pass my knowledge and my love of Mexico onto my students and the people of Texas, so that we work at improving that relationship. That is maybe one of the major goals I have for the future.
I think in terms of a downright exciting adventure, in the jungle, on the worst road I traveled on in my life, and then taking a boat down the Usumacinta River between Mexico and Guatemala to Yaxchilan, an old Mayan ruin, was maybe one of the most exciting fieldtrips that I have ever been on.
I think, overall, those are exciting things that have happened in my life from the standpoint of stories, and I have enjoyed it. I could tell story after story and event after event that have been exciting for me. I think the overall thing that strikes me for the most part, the experience in teaching, is basically how good people are. (Pause) Just the general quality of sensitivity and goodwill that most people have. I mean, the students that I have taught over the last twenty years, I haven’t had a half a dozen students that I didn’t like. I think that is remarkable when you figure that I work with 450 to 500 students a semester. I’m dealing with one thousand, and if I teach in summer, twelve hundred students a year. I just very seldom run into a student who is belligerent and unpleasant and difficult to get along with. I think that has been kind of the icing on the cake in this career is just being able to work with some really fine people that I really—I just love the kids. I love working with them. I’m just one of those people who [are] very rare, people who actually enjoy getting up and going to work almost every day. I would rather be in the classroom than I would be doing anything else. I mean, most people go, “Oh God, I got to go off to class now.” Me, I’m packing stuff up to get out of the office, so I can go to class and so another experience can happen every day. That is what makes the job wonderful, is every day is different. Every experience is different. It doesn’t make any difference how many times you have taught the same material. You’re teaching it to different students who have different questions, who change the whole perception for you. My job is never boring.
Johnson: That is great. I will probably go ahead and leave it there. That would be a real good closing.
Augustin: Okay!
Johnson: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Augustin.
Augustin: You’re most welcome!
Johnson: I really enjoyed this!
Augustin: Well, I am glad you came by, I enjoyed talking about it.
End of interivew