Moore: The history of the Ozarks and the University of Arkansas are deeply connected, and a new program at the university seeks to keep it that way. Jared Phillips is a teaching associate professor for the Department of History and the man in charge of the new Ozarks Studies minor that begins this school year. He recently joined me in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio Two to discuss the new minor. He says the idea for the program came after a conversation with Dr. Brooks Blevins, a renowned Ozark scholar and professor at Missouri State University in Springfield.
Phillips: Several years ago, Brooks, after a conference, brought some of us together and said, we need to think about, there's enough of us working on the Ozarks now, we need to think about creating a formal sort of academic association. So about eight years ago, seven years ago, myself and several other people formed this thing called the Ozarks Studies Association. And that's still going on. In a few years, we're going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that. We'll be back here in Fayetteville or Northwest Arkansas to have that meeting.
But around that same time, I started to think, boy, it'd be really cool if we had a dedicated program of study here at the University of Arkansas, if for no other reason, then this is where Vance Randolph was at, and Mary Celestia Parler. And we have so many different collections here, so much energy around the Ozarks as a region, distinctly Northwest Arkansas and how we understand it. But the last 10 or 15 years have seen this kind of explosion of interest. And so I thought it'd be really cool to start putting together a program proposal.
Moore: Why a minor?
Phillips: That's a good question. On the one hand, it's easier than a major to put it together administratively. There's just a whole lot more hoops you have to jump through, and so that makes it difficult. And then on the other hand, I didn't want a program that would be prohibitive to people. So minors are pretty easy to get a hold of. They have a little bit more heft and weight on a resume, and if you want to go on for other studies or professional training, then say like a certificate program does, and it lets me be a lot more interdisciplinary.
So me, me as a stand-in for the two other folks that help me put this program together. That's Joshua Youngblood, one of the deans over in the library system. And then Virginia Siegel, who is the head of the Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts program. And so they were instrumental in helping me get this whole thing put together. And the three of us agreed from the beginning, this had to be a program that had a very wide appeal.
Moore: Talk about the interdisciplinary element of it. Because I think when folks think about majors and minors, they think about, this is something that puts me on a certain pathway.
Phillips: Yeah.
Moore: And the sound of it is that that's not necessarily the intention with a minor like this.
Phillips: Yeah. No, not at all. To a degree, it's sort of reflective of the place itself. You know, the Ozarks, we are a make-do place, right? As we've kind of been talking about in our history segments, like we kind of just make do with what the world throws us. And this is kind of how I thought about the minor.
I want students to come out with an intellectual toolbox that lets them take the skills of critical thinking, of research, of writing, of clear communication that you can learn in any discipline, any major, but let's do it through an Ozark lens. And then, because so many people that come through the University of Arkansas tend to stay in the region or close by, it'll help them develop a more kind of sharp appreciation of the place that they call home or calling home, at least while they're here in school.
Moore: Before this minor existed, you taught a class that was about the history of the Ozarks. I've heard from many students who said, he will never know, but Jared's class was one of my favorite classes that I took.
Phillips: That's kind.
Moore: What do you think it is about moving from this idea of just like a survey class or, you know, an auditorium full of students to a more concentrated education on the Ozarks? What's the change there? What's the difference for a student?
Phillips: Yeah, I think for a student, at least, what I hope is that they won't just have a one-off experience. So I teach a history of the Ozarks class every fall. That's the gateway class for the minor. If you want to take the minor, that's one of the only core required class you have to take for it. And most students, that's their only touch point to think about the Ozarks, beyond running out to the Buffalo and floating or going to a festival or something like that.
And so what I wanted to do was create a framework that would give students, based on their own interest, more ways than just a sort of a historical narrative for the Ozarks. How to think about the place, right? So right now, the minor's anchored by the history of the Ozarks class, and then you can take classes in historic Black Northwest Arkansas. You can take classes in rural sociology, in folklore, in popular music. You know, there's several departments that were very gracious to partner with me on this.
But as the minor gets up and rolling this year, what I want to start doing is, again, working with these partner programs, developing classes. Let's work with somebody in the literature department to run an Ozarks literature class. You know, the publication of the biography of Frank Stanford most recently. Well, he's not necessarily an Ozarker. He's writing while he's here and he becomes, you know, well known and beloved in the literature community, certainly because of the work he does while he's here, right? But we also have people like Donald Harington, with Vance Randolph. There's a whole host of poets and, you know, and fiction authors and nonfiction authors that come out of the Ozarks that often get swept aside when we think about the grand narrative of literature, right?
So if we have literature majors, I want them to be able to find themselves here. I want music students to find themselves. I want history students to find themselves, or, you know, ag kids from the ag college. I want them to find themselves. And so the idea is to start to create, we're going to always have this broad, interdisciplinary, multiple subject base that you can come to, to understand how to think about the Ozarks within the American, you know, experience. But then we're going to develop a kind of a honed-in suite of classes that allow us to have a more focused discussion of what it is about the Ozarks that is both unique to us, but also the same as our other, you know, companion regions in the country.
Moore: A lot of this is due in part because of the work that the Fulbright College has done to make this happen. As you think about other colleges within the university, you've talked about the ag school, you think about Walton School of Business. What are other ways that you are hoping that other schools within the university, other colleges within the university will say, hey, I think this will really benefit our students, too?
Phillips: Yeah, that's, you know, right now that's kind of more of a future-facing question than I've really been thinking about, right, the last several months. As you know, Fulbright College Dean Raines and former associate Dean Chris Schulte, they were just so instrumental in how they saw the value in the program. They helped figure out a way to communicate it to the board of trustees and to the folks in Little Rock, who also agreed and saw the value in the program. And the Honors College, under the direction of Lynda Coon, has also been huge in just sort of championing the study of the Ozarks ever since she's taken over at the Honors College.
I think the other colleges on campus, what I would hope, you know, it's really easy for me to think about a connection to the ag college. So much of Ozarks history is in agricultural history, right? And while there's some really big questions that are asked at the ag college to do with row cropping, you know, and systems of agriculture that we don't see here, they are also, I mean, I drive past the cattle unit in Savoy all the time. I drive past poultry houses. We all drive past poultry houses all the time. And so those are huge in our history.
And so I've had students, you know, ag students come take my classes before, and their comment has always been, this helps them put what they do daily into a broader context and see how we as a region fit in the agricultural story of the United States. And I would hope that would be the case too, you know, if business students were to come over. And the business college, thanks to some of the work that they've done on outdoor entrepreneurship and things like that, I think there's a natural tie-in in there as well.
Moore: When you use the phrase "make do," I also can't help but think about a phrase like, why not?
Phillips: Yeah.
Moore: And I think that really plays into this idea of going into this study. It's not a laborious, you know, amount of classes, but I think that "make do" and that "why not" really fit together well here.
Phillips: Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, I mean, I'm biased because I read and think about the Ozarks all the time, but I just kind of look around like, why wouldn't you want to know about your home? You know, it's a conversation that we had in the dean's office and we've had in the college for a long time now, is that the university, because it's had so many other priorities and so many other kind of urgent fires to deal with, because it has the land grant mission for the state, the university has often had to put its own home, you know, here in Fayetteville and in the Ozarks, kind of on the back burner.
And in the last decade or so, underneath Charles Robinson and underneath, you know, the current dean, there's been a really dedicated effort to say, yeah, why not? Why not? Let's focus on this place. This is an amazing place. It's got a really interesting history and a really incredible culture. Let's prioritize it and be proud of it, just as we want to prioritize, you know, be proud of the Delta, of the Arkansas River Valley, you know, all the other regions in the state. We can celebrate the whole state.
Moore: University of Arkansas has a bit of a stigma of being a place where Texans come to study here at the University of Arkansas. What impact do you think that plays on people coming and studying the Ozarks if they're not, whether they're from Texas or otherwise, people who aren't from the Ozarks coming to do Ozark studies? I mean, as you just talked about, you know, you've got people from Cornell and people from St. Louis and other parts of the country interested. Do you think there's that same fervor from the student body of people outside of the Ozarks?
Phillips: I think so. I mean, you know, depending on whose numbers you look at, somewhere between 40% to 60%, depending on how we feel about the traffic in Fayetteville, of the student body here is from out of state, you know, out of the region.
And I think kids that come in, they're trying to understand where they're at, you know, beyond just figuring out their classes and stuff like that. What I've noticed, whether or not they wanted to minor or major in something related to the Ozarks or history or whatever, they're asking questions about history and they're asking questions about culture. And they hear about square dances and community singings and things, and they're like, wait a minute, that sounds cool. I want to go do that. Well, they're participating. They're actively making Ozark culture and life active, actively helping us evolve into whatever comes next. So I think that's a part of it.
I think another part of it is if you come in and you decide you want to start to ask questions, more deep questions about what the place is, you start to realize that the stereotypes about us are problematic, right? So we've talked about this before, but you know, if your only exposure to the Ozarks is a show like "Ozark" on Netflix, then you're going to have a skewed understanding of who we are. It's like if you watch "Justified," that's your only understanding of Appalachia. Well, that's not Appalachia.
And when you come in and you start to see, oh, wait a minute, we have world-class businesses, we have world-class musicians, we have world-class fishing, we have world-class hiking. We have, I mean, you know, we're just as unique and powerful as anywhere else. We just happen to be a lot farther away from anywhere else. And so it makes it hard for people to get past the stereotypes. Well, this will help students, I think, see past, you know, "Beverly Hillbillies," and get a better kind of truer understanding of what we are.
Moore: Jared Phillips is a teaching associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas, and the program director of the Ozarks Studies minor. You can find more details about the program at history.uark.edu.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
