Dr. Richard Cahill, Director of the Francis and Louise Hutchins Center for International Education (CIE) and Associate Professor of History, has poured his passion for international education into the College through various programs sponsored by the CIE.

Dr. Richard Cahill

“Life in a different cultural setting,” Cahill said, “can be a really transformative experience.”

Cahill earned his bachelor’s degree at Westmont College, his master’s degree at the University of California, his Ph.D. at the University of California and has also studied at the American University in Cairo.

Interest leading to a deep passion for the Middle East began with Cahill’s first visit at the age of eighteen. After Cahill’s first year of college, he peddled his heart out biking around Europe. His plan was to explore, observe and discover new cultures and viewpoints. After four months of biking in Europe he decided to hitch-hike in Africa. “I discovered the genuine hospitality of Egyptian people and fell in love with their way of life,” Cahill said. Cahill remembers feeling, even then, that all students should have opportunities for study abroad.

The life of academia had always influenced Cahill. Throughout high school and college, teachers and professors encouraged him to become an educator himself.  He followed their advice. At Berea College Cahill teaches “Pre-modern Middle East,” “Introduction to Islam,” “History of the Arabic-Israeli Conflict,” and “Contemporary Global Issues.” His academic background is in Islamic and European history.

The first part of Cahill’s academic career was focused on both Middle Eastern and European history; however, in 1996 he switched over to only Middle Eastern history. That same year Cahill was appointed the Director of the Middle East Studies Program (MESP) in Cairo, Egypt. He lived in Egypt for six years. In 2002 he returned to California and taught for three years — until a friend from Cairo, who was living in Washington, DC, contacted Cahill about a position as CIE director at Berea College. “He knew that I was into the kinds of things that Berea cares about,” Cahill said. “Primarily social justice, inclusive world views and interesting students.” After researching the college and discovering its ideals and history, he applied for the directorship of CIE and a position on the faculty. Cahill has been working at Berea College since 2005.

As Director of the Center for International Education, Cahill oversees education abroad, international student and scholar services, campus programing for internationalization and faculty and curriculum development. The campus programming entails events every Friday, known as the “Think Globally Its Friday,” or TGIF, and the first Monday of the month, which has a global focus on cultural events. Faculty and curriculum development encourages teaching abroad, researching international and global issues and bringing international and global issues into the classroom.

International events on campus arouse curiosity and desire to study abroad. Cahill said, “Students often say that traveling abroad is a life changing experience. Sometimes the students experience hard transitions into the culture. It isn’t always an easy experience, and it takes time to reflect on how monumental the experience actually was. It’s nice when students return to Berea years after graduating and reflect on their experiences studying abroad.”

Cahill notes that it is also a transformative experience for the international students who come to Berea College. When domestic students become friends with international students, their view of life becomes multi-cultured and diverse. Many domestic students have a different view of life because they had a roommate from someplace far away. Currently there are over sixty countries represented on campus.

What better way is there to expand your knowledge than to take a class abroad? Dr. Cahill shrugged. To ensure this remains the case, the CIE is always looking for new and improved international education opportunities. “We are always trying to raise awareness and encourage students to take advantage of opportunities to study abroad,” Cahill said. He was between his freshmen and sophomore years when he first biked and hitch-hiked abroad, and now he’s realizing a notion that came to him at that time — that students should have opportunities to study abroad. “It seems to be going very well,” Dr. Cahill said with a grin that won’t be restrained. And behind his bright blue eyes you just know there’s a part of him that wishes he could go with each and every one of them.

Dr. Richard Cahill on Berea College campus

Dr. Alicestyne Turley, Director of the newly established Carter G. Woodson Center and Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, holds degrees in Anthropology/ Sociology, Public Policy Administration, and History. The question of how these seemingly disparate degrees work together is one Turley admits to receiving often. For her, the answer is a long one, and it began very early in life.

“When I was a kid, a little kid, my aunts and uncles would tell us the story of Moses, my great-grandfather who escaped on the Underground Railroad.” Turley was told that her great-grandfather also became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, assisting other escaped slaves on their journey to freedom. It was frequently told story on her family’s farm in Powell County in Eastern Kentucky. In middle school, however, Turley encountered a teacher that challenged the story, telling her that the Underground Railroad was a myth. “I really kind of shut down after that. I didn’t know whether to believe my family or not, so I decided not to deal with it at all.”

With the story of her family’s history tucked away but not forgotten, Turley graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Toledo. After two years of study as a communication major, however, she abandoned her studies in Communication realizing the difficulties a woman of color would encounter in the field.

Deciding to stay in Toledo, Turley entered the workforce as assistant to the Director of the city’s Economic Opportunity Association. As her talents and dedication were recognized, a string of increasingly impressive jobs followed. Turley became the first African American secretary to Toledo City Council, and the first African American to serve as secretary to the mayor. A position with the Lexington Human Rights Commission brought her back to Kentucky, where a board member took a special interest in her. “He said, ‘You’re too smart to be working here. You need to go back to school.’ He went over to Georgetown College, paid my admission fee, and I was off to college.”

At Georgetown, Turley earned the first of her four degrees, double majoring in Anthropology and Sociology. She also met a professor, Dr. Robert Bryant, who encouraged her to revisit the story of her great-grandfather Moses. Turley told Bryant about the story, and he challenged her to prove it. That effort became the topic of Turley’s Bachelor Honors Thesis and the foundation for much of her career. “It helped me understand how to conduct oral history interviews, and determine what information was important and needed to be captured.”

Before graduation, Turley met the President of Mississippi State University, a Georgetown College grad, who, like her benefactor from the Human Rights Commission said, “You need to complete your terminal degrees,” and offered Turley a full scholarship to the school’s John C. Stennis Institute of Government. There she earned her second degree, in Public Policy Administration. In the process, she worked with the director of the Institute and Mississippi State officials, including serving as an intern for the Mississippi Municipal Association on public policy implementation. It was an opportunity for Turley to affect the policies she had so long observed. “I worked with the political figures making decisions in Mississippi. That just launched me into the realization of the importance of legislative policies—how policy is made and how it affects people’s lives.”

Returning home to care for ailing parents, Turley obtained a second Masters degree and completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Kentucky. Returning to her family history, she found connections to the world of politics. Although she had verified one Underground Railroad story, Turley found dozens more wanting confirmation. She began working with the State Historic Preservation Office to develop the Underground Railroad Research Model for the State of Kentucky requested by the National Park Service. She reached out to the National Park Service and aided in developing standards for preservation at the national level. “There weren’t that many people involved with that aspect of African American history then. After that, whenever Kentucky began talking about various aspects of preservation associated with African American history in Kentucky, they called me.”

The work led her to develop locally and nationally implemented policies. Her recognition in the field of historic preservation resulted in a special invitation from First Lady Hillary Clinton to celebrate restoration of Ellis Island in New York Harbor and from government officials in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, the site of the recreated slave ship, Amistad. While serving as director of the Underground Railroad Research Institute, the institute she established at Georgetown College, her work with the Park Service culminated in formation of a network of national and international Underground Railroad sites, the Network to Freedom Association. The association brought together for the first time, known members of protected national and international Underground Railroad sites for the purpose of furthering preservation and research efforts.

“That’s how you marry history with policy.” For Turley, it is the intersection that matters, between people, the stories of their past, and the direction of their future. “That’s policy. When you study history, you’re really studying policies that have made an impact.” Those are the kind of policies Turley has worked to implement throughout her career.

When she received the offer from Berea to direct the newly formed Carter G.Woodson Center for Interracial Education, she saw it as a way to continue making history and new policy. “Woodson himself said Berea was the place where his ideas were shaped. His whole educational model both as principal of public schools in the Philippines and in Washington, D.C. was developed here.” As she looks to the future, Turley is excited to tell Woodson’s story, to make the world aware of Berea’s role in influencing education that created change in public education throughout the region, and to continue furthering the cause of interracial education Berea has championed for so long.

Art greets visitors to the Carter G. Woodson Center for Interracial Education

Rev. Gail E. Bowman in Danforth Chapel

“So far as we know, at Emancipation, the Bowman family came off a plantation somewhere in Kentucky (!), moved west to work the soft coal mines in northern Missouri then moved north into Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota when those mines played out around the turn of the century. My grandfather was born in Iowa, and so was my dad. Only 2% of the population in Iowa is black. My sister and I were the only black kids in our elementary school classes. It was rough.”

One of the challenges of being a minority, then and now, was race-based assumptions. “When I was about 8 years old, my parents became concerned because my report cards from school reflected poorer performance than they could understand. They made an appointment to go talk to the people at school and were told I was simply not too bright. I didn’t hear about this until I was an adult. They just told me to keep working…hard.”

“As I grew older I began to appreciate my parents’ position — my family’s position — on the matter of race, of being black in America at that time. My parents were both well-educated and recognized that the nation was changing, and that there were opportunities in place that had never been there before. They felt a burden, whether it was ever expressed like this or not, that blacks in their position were building a bridge for others to cross over. Consequently, my sister and I were expected to behave ourselves, do well in school, and be above reproach.

“My closest association with other black kids came through church. At that time, going to church was something black people felt compelled to do for an assortment of reasons. But to be honest, I wasn’t buying it. There was this sign at the front of the church that said ‘God is Love.’ But that wasn’t the message I was hearing in the preaching. I was hearing that God was ticked off at us because of what we did. And the people teaching Sunday school couldn’t answer my questions, so beyond believing in God, I wasn’t sure what to think.”

After high school Bowman enrolled in the University of Iowa. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, though. While I was there I had seven different majors. My father was somewhat concerned about my numerous changes in major. One semester I took a course in Swahili and I remember getting a call from him: ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t they teaching French down there?’”

Three semesters deep in college, Bowman was at home when a friend of her father’s came for dinner and opened the subject of what she wanted to do after she graduated. He asked if she’d given law school any thought. When Bowman responded that the problem with that plan was that she would have to major in political science, he responded that she could just as easily major in history. She returned to school, began a history major, and later added a second major in political science.

“I did well on the LSAT exam and my dad and I discussed what law school I should attend. He asked if I’d considered Harvard. I said it had crossed my mind but the application fee was too expensive. He said, ‘If I pay, will you apply?’ and I said Why not? I ended up getting accepted.” However, a week before Bowman started law school at Harvard, the family got word that her mother had breast cancer.

“The entire time I was in Harvard Law School my mother was fighting a long and painful battle with cancer. At one point I confessed to my mother that I didn’t know if I should continue. But she was adamant. She made me promise that I would finish. And I did.” Bowman’s mother died in the fall after Bowman graduated.

Bowman chose Washington, D.C. as the place to practice law, working first for a small firm and then for the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Carter Administration. When the Democrats lost the Senate (Reagan election in 1980) all the Democratic staffers, including Bowman, lost their jobs. Bowman accepted a proposal of marriage and moved to Los Angeles to take the California bar exam and prepare for the wedding, but the relationship “crashed and burned.” She returned to Washington to look for work and try to put her life back together. She found a position on the House side of Capitol Hill and worked on several exciting initiatives, including the creation of the Martin Luther King national holiday. Then she began to recognize that all was not well with her.

“There were two events that I consider spiritual that set me on the path to ministry. The first was the suffering death of my mother. I was not able to get past that. The other was that I was not enjoying my work. I finally prayed what I did not then realize was a ‘dangerous’ prayer. I promised that if God told me what I should do with my life, I would do it. I had not thought, in my wildest dreams, that a ‘call’ to ministry was coming, but that’s what happened.”

At this point, Bowman was not even a member of a church. A friend put together a list of possible churches and Bowman began trying them, one at a time. “Finally, I walked into a church and knew immediately that I was in the right place. After the service I made an appointment to come back and talk to the minister. During that meeting I told him ‘I think I’ve been called to the ministry.’ He seemed pretty startled but then he asked if I’d been baptized and I said, ‘Of course. I was baptized in the AME church,’ and he said, ‘Oh no, that won’t do. You need to be baptized by immersion!’ When the scheduled date came around I showed up with my hair cut off very short.  I didn’t want to have to try to keep my hair dry; I wanted to get completely wet. What I didn’t realize was that this church thought the long hair on a woman’s head is her ‘glory’ and I’d just defiled it. We proceeded when I confessed I was unaware of that passage. After the baptism the pastor sent me to his friend, Lawrence Jones, at the Howard University Divinity School. Dean Jones recommended that I apply; I did, and that’s where I ended up going.

“From the very first night, I loved divinity school. This is where all those questions I had asked in Sunday School were being answered. I really got my money’s worth, because I arrived not knowing much more than the 23^rd Psalm, and that there are four Gospels. I enjoyed writing papers there. One professor asked me where I learned to write like that and I said ‘in law school.’ (Law school, I figure, is the perfect generic graduate school experience.) All in all, I was in seminary for four years because I started out part-time.”

After seminary, Rev. Gail E. Bowman could not find a job in the D.C. area. None of the black churches there hired female pastors. She ended up at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

“I enjoyed working there (PTS). I loved hanging out with the Presbyterians, but my job there was administrative and the President of the seminary told me I did it so well I’d probably never be given any other position there. So I started checking out all the appropriate papers for job openings. I had accumulated a big stack of periodicals in my office and was on the verge of sending them all to recycling when something made me yank one from the stack and flip through it one more time. I saw an ad from Spelman College in Atlanta (historically black, all female) — they were looking for a College Minister. The possibility of that was so exciting I couldn’t apply fast enough.” She ended up spending five years at Spelman.

“Then, during a change of administration at Spelman, a representative from Dillard University (historically black, co-ed) in New Orleans turned up in my office asking me to consider a move. It took two visits, but I finally did. New Orleans wasn’t an immediate hit with me but Dillard was.  I adored it. By the end of that first year I began to ‘get’ New Orleans, and eventually identified it as the ‘home on earth’ I had always been looking for. Then, in 2001, we got one of the massive grants from Lilly, one of the PTEV’s (Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation), and we were set with funding to try all kinds of exciting initiatives.” Things went well until August of 2005.

“The Dillard campus, my home and the homes of lots of our staff and faculty were in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans which was completely inundated by flood water from the Katrina disaster. Here’s the most effective way I’ve heard of expressing the damage done to the university by the flood: Debris removal ALONE cost $25.9 million. We could not return to the city for four months. Many of us finally returned on December 16, 2005, moving into a downtown hotel that would serve as our campus for the next seven months. I had been told all was lost in our area; ‘throw your keys away.’ Coming on campus, I ran into some facilities people who told me my office was okay. So I found my keys, which I had not, thankfully, thrown away, and went in and the only thing that I saw different was a line of silt on the windowsill. The chapel itself was fine, it had not flooded. We had roof damage, but that was it. The chapel was the only building on campus that did not flood.”

“Having the chapel functional helped us a great deal in the months of rebuilding. We were able to have an outdoor graduation ceremony in July ’06 on campus by staging it out of the chapel. Of course, we had to set-up port-a-potties and fresh water because nothing was working. The landscaping was not the usual beautiful Dillard landscaping. But we were back.

Life on campus returned to normal very slowly. “In some ways, rebuilding the physical structure was easier than re-building our spirit. That was such a tough journey. Katrina posed huge issues for us theologically. Lots of folks voicing opinions in the mass media blamed the devastation on the sin of New Orleans. One of the things that offset that meanness was the enormous out-pouring of prayer and help. The help — the importance and the value of it — was indescribable.

“I love New Orleans. There are so many races of people there, and so much cultural exchange. Mardi Gras, with its peculiar history, is just one of many ways people have invented to be together and enjoy each other. I didn’t always go. Sometimes I just stayed at home and worked (I’m a writer on the side). But it felt so good knowing that, around me, my city was having a good time.”

On May 18, 2012, Rev. Gail E. Bowman, J.D., said good bye to Dillard University in an eloquent letter that can be read online (see link, below) and, a short time later, she appeared at Berea College and assumed the roles of Director of the Willis D. Weatherford, Jr. Campus Christian Center and College Chaplain.

Rev. Bowman in one of the Danforth Chapel gardens.

“Berea is so interesting! There is so much to learn here. The community and what we are trying to do resonates with me because it brings together so many aspects of my life experience. Berea is race, it is history, it is possibility, it is quality; it’s Appalachia but it’s also the world. Our convictions require us to get along with each other differently than many other schools, and the struggle to live up to God’s expectations of us keeps us moving. This realization — that this was God’s project first — is part of what makes the Campus Christian Center central to the mission. Howard Thurman (African American theologian and author, favorite writer of Martin Luther King, Jr.) said ‘A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.’ The ideals of Berea, our commitments, are such a crown, and we in the CCC are honored that we have a role to play in the everyday and overall growth of this ‘beloved community.’”

***

Related links:

• Gail E. Bowman’s Baccalaureate speech at Stanford University before the class of 2011
• Gail E. Bowman author page at Amazon.com
• Reverend Gail Bowman Bids Farewell to Dillard

Photography by Alicia Carman ’13 and Doug Widner