AC_1965_Web

103 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z M c N E I L McNEIL DAVID David at Grand Tetons. THEN AND NOW 4 B.A. History 4 M.A., European History, Stanford 4 Ph.D., European History, Stanford FAMI LY �Wife, Faye ADDRESS 4 P.O. Box 366 Columbia, CA 95310 CONTACT 415 200-6585 dmcneil@alumni.stanford.edu A U T O B I O G R A P H Y I S A L S O fic- tion and my own story is about paths taken or forsaken. I did well choos- ing Antioch over Swarthmore and Oberlin, for I thrived in the co-op program,AEA and campus culture. I also quickly learned the important lesson that I wasn’t as smart as I had thought (thank you George Geiger and many student friends) but still had hopes for an academic future (thank you RogerWilliams and Mike Kraus). My professional life has cen- tered on Europe and (mostly aca- demic) politics and Antioch was for- mative for both realms. I arrived in Yellow Springs quite an innocent boy from Arkansas.While abroad on AEA for eighteen months I found my interests in history, ancient cul- tures, French and Italian. I lived on a boat while working at UNESCO in Paris and biked and hitched around three Mediterranean continents. I arrived at Besançon with hepatitis, discovered ancient and Renaissance history and topped off the AEA year with two more great co-op experi- ences in Greece: a U.K. group com- munity development project in Thesprotia and a Harvard Neolithic dig in Macedonia. I returned to Yellow Springs grown up enough to form lasting relationships with fac- ulty and classmates along with life- long European connections. One of these relationships was a mixed blessing. My first (ex- tremely tumultuous!) marriage was to an Antiochian, who did help me get through grad school at Stanford (Renaissance history) and a disserta- tion year in Paris. (The Midpeninsula Free University and dabbling in Subud and Zen provided an impor- tant counterpoint to academics.)We produced two children but then en- gaged in years of litigation about cus- tody (even ownership of an apart- ment at a French “naturiste” center was an issue). Still (or maybe be- cause of all this excitement) I wrote my dissertation (and book, about a sixteenth century Frenchman), got tenure and promotion, began a re- search project into the history of plague, organized a quixotic FCC license challenge and application (several years of “in propria per- sona” litigation), and got child cus- tody (also after hundreds of “in pro per” filings). The radio project was an out- growth of my work atWYSO,ham ra- dio (which I continue to enjoy), and work at FM station KTAO, which, in its turn, has resulted in my work on the board of an educational founda- tion based in San Diego and points south (small victories for humanity, e.g. providing water bottles in des- ert border areas). By the time I got tenure and cus- tody I was involved in faculty poli- tics at San José State.Of course I was active in the faculty union! I served in the academic senate for 30 years (receiving the first campus faculty service award) and the California State University academic senate for 24 years; I also chaired both groups, as well as the SJSU history depart- ment. Probably it was here rather than in the classroom that I scored modest victories for humanity, or at least for a generation of students and faculty with a lot of influence on policies about academic free- dom, faculty rights to control of the curriculum, and student access to the university in keeping with the much-battered California Master Plan. I also experienced great frus- tration in helping administrators un- derstand academe. A professor of European history can have frequent sabbatical trips to Europe. I went to Paris to com- plete my research on French human- ism (where also connected with the Living Theater, one of those paths taken and abandoned), later to Aix- en-Provence (where I headed the CSU’s year abroad program), and especially to Venice, where I mar- ried Sally,my second wife.We subse- quently lived in Florence for a cou-