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Alisha Green
History professor Gordon T. Stewart grew up in Scotland, and although when he came to the United States he did not intend to stay, he explains how he ended up staying and why he’s happy here. Born in the small town Newport-on-Tay in Scotland, Stewart describes his hometown as a sleepy, pretty place to live. Situated on the River Tay, the bustling industrial city of Dundee was on the opposite shore. Stewart’s family moved to the city when he was about 6 years old. The main industry in Dundee was textiles, namely jute (or burlap, as it is called here). The industry fascinated him as a child, because he knew the jute came from India. “One of the things I used to do was get my bike and go down to the docks, and I’d see these ships coming from halfway around the world,” Stewart said. “So I got some sense, long before I was interested in history, of the global economy at work.” He ended up working in the jute mills for a few summers while he was a student, and this led to even more realizations about the ways of the world. Many women were employed in the mills because they could be given lower wages than men at that time in Scotland. “In a sense they worked outside the home – it seems modern and advanced – but paradoxically they were working outside the home because they were regarded as cheap labor, and were still doing the domestic chores in the home as well: that was a very traditional gender thing,” Stewart said. “So the women had to go to work and then come home and look after their families.” He recalls being struck by how different the women in the mills were from images portraying women as delicate creatures. “When you’d get on the bus at night to go home from work there’d be loads of these woman swearing like troopers – real coarse, tough, young women out there making their way in the world. It didn’t fit the stereotypes I had from the normal idealization that takes place in young men,” he said. Stewart was a typical boy in most ways because of his schooling and work in the factories. His mother was a primary school teacher and his father was an organizer for the Labor Party, as well as a lifelong socialist and pacifist. Both of his parents were also Quakers, and therefore against war under any circumstances. This led Stewart to be set apart in some ways because Scotland had religious-based schooling at the time. There were separate schools for Catholics, but anyone else went to the schools in which religious Presbyterian instruction was supported by the government. “I’m not trying to say I felt any active discrimination at all – I didn’t. But for example, in Scotland, at the beginning of each school year, and on every Monday, there was a school service where a minister would come and we’d have religious service in school,” he said. Every Easter his schoolmates went to the church, and Stewart remembers feeling odd that he was not part of it. He said, “That, too, made me, especially when I came to this country, realize how important it is to try to keep that separation here, because the Scots thought that they had a neutral school system, but in fact it wasn’t neutral.” The religious divide also led to some interestingly charged school sports games. “I remember as a kid when we played soccer with them, for example, we always got suspicious because there would be priests on the Catholic side who would be doing prayers. We worried that there was too much religious input on the other side,” he said with a grin. He pointed out that the intertwining of state and religion in Scotland has changed. “The United States is odd because religion is such an important part of the culture here. I don’t think you could run for office here if you said you were agnostic or atheist. But in Europe the religion has declined considerably, so I think these issues which were present in my childhood have receded considerably,” he said. After his basic schooling, Stewart attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which is on the North Sea in an old Cathedral. Founded in 1410, it is the oldest university in Scotland. “There’s a kind of medieval atmosphere to it,” he said. “It’s often seen as the Scottish equivalent to Oxford at Cambridge because of its small size and its buildings, and it is ancient. It’s not as old as Oxford at Cambridge, but almost.” He added that it was a very academically focused school, with small class sizes in which the students often had close to one-on-one instruction with a tutor. “They had a kind of tutorial system where you met the professor once a week, maybe twice a week, but then you’d have to do a lot of reading and writing on your own, so a lot of time you spent in the library writing essays, then you’d share them with your tutor and he or she would critique them,” he said. Like any education system though, it had its pros and cons. Stewart said that it “was wonderful in a sense. You could get that individual attention, but it was also challenging because there was no room for anonymity. If you didn’t read the books or write the essays you were exposed right there. So you had to be on your toes all the time. That was the other side. Because there were just one or two students, you couldn’t hide in the crowd.” One person that stood out from the crowd for Stewart was Jacqueline, who is now his wife. They shared a passion for traveling, and had been through most of Europe but wanted to go to North America. When Stewart learned of the job offer at MSU, he applied with the intention of staying in the United States for two or three years to do his job and travel. This plan, however, changed. As Stewart said, “Once you get to a certain age and make moves it gets more difficult to go in other directions because once we got here we were married and we began having children. We began to put roots down. We didn’t intend to stay, but here we are.” Being in the United States has been different than Stewart expected it to be in some ways, but all of the differences he lists are positive. “It’s different in a sense I got ahead professionally more than I imagined,” he said. “In the British academic system, it’s more like a civil service, more where you go up, year by year, depending on your experience. Now if you’re really brilliant, you can burst through those bounds, but I wasn’t really brilliant.” In the standard system for higher education here in the United States, faculty are judged on merit, so they receive raises and earlier promotions for publishing books and articles. He felt that this system was more open for him. The friendliness of the people here was another reason he and his wife decided to stay – he said that they were able to quickly form bonds with colleagues here, and that made them feel welcome. Though he is happy here he has stayed here, when he first moved his family was not supportive of his decision. He said, “My family is very anti-American because my father was a socialist and both of them are pacifists. So they see the United States as a deign of inequity, or capitalism run wild, no national health care system, violent, gun-toting… I’m exaggerating a bit here, but they were clearly uneasy about us settling down in the United States because of the stereotypes they had of this country.” When his parents have come to visit Stewart and his wife here, he said, “We’ve actually had to physically introduce them to friends who don’t carry rifles.” While this tactic seems to work when his parents are here, he said they tend to fall back into their old ways of thinking once they are back home. “The Bush administration has made it very difficult to defend the United States, I’m afraid, and that’s typical that many Europeans have this negative view of the country,” he said. “They’re very interested in America. We try to mitigate the Bush facts and tell them about the good things in this country, including the students I teach here at MSU, but they simplify and stereotype American culture. I think each culture does that to others.” Having connections to the United Kingdom and United States has allowed him to be more aware of stereotypes on both sides. He said that most Americans tend to have a romantic view of the monarchy in Great Britain, but in actuality most people there do not really pay attention to royal matters. He also said, “I think one big misperception about the United States is about how healthcare works in Britain and European countries.” Some Americans tend to think socialized medicine is a failure, but “in fact, most people in the United Kingdom, although they have complaints, think the national health service works well. And if you look at the state of the American health care system, it’s the best in the world; but if you look at life expectancy, child disease – in fact, countries with socialized medicine do better than the United States,” Stewart said. Stewart and his wife go back to visit the United Kingdom every year, and though they are not technically subjects, they still feel at home there in a sense. “It’s like going back to a foreign country in which you’re absolutely fluent in the language and have an intimate knowledge of the culture, and therefore it’s really enjoyable.” Questions? Comments? Contact Alisha Green at greena11@msu.edu |
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