O.W. Wilson: Leaping Before Looking

I’ve met some of the most brilliant students right here, and it’s amazing that they don’t know it... I have to let them know just how smart they are. - O.W. Wilson, professor of political science

O.W. Wilson is a been there, done that kind of guy. He wouldn’t say so, but his accomplishments are all over the map – literally and figuratively. Recently the longtime professor of political science added another accomplishment right here at Dominguez Hills, when he received the 2005-2006 Presidential Outstanding Professor Award. It is another step in an astonishingly multifaceted life’s journey, that can make it seem that Wilson hasn’t just done that; he’s done it all.

The professor of political science at California State University, Dominguez Hills founded the Afro-American (now Africana) Studies department at CSUDH. He was the coordinator for the Manpower Development and Training Act for National Technical Schools and the first African American in the United States to become a business manager for a school district, Enterprise School District, now part of Compton Unified School District. He was an instructor and counselor at Compton Union High School, a professor and acting dean at Leland College in Louisiana, and a teacher of returning GIs.

He was the founder and president of Data Automation System Services, Inc., a company that put data onto punch cards in the era before computers became desktop essentials. His list of clients included Lockheed, Pacific Bell, and Borax. He was also the owner of the 5-4 Ballroom at 54th Street and Broadway in Los Angeles, which, in its day, was where musicians destined to become blues legends got on stage out West. Wilson started a dry-cleaning business in Louisiana, which he left for his brother to run, opened his own chicken restaurant, and founded a construction business working through most of the L.A. Basin.

As a teenager, he talked his way into work in a shipyard, and before he was a teenager he was a literacy teacher for rural adults because, as he recalls, “This dignified older man I knew as Mr. Jones asked me to.” At the age of 8 he worked in a drugstore in his home town of Plaquemine, Louisiana, where one of his duties was to help the store owner translate the dozens of dialects extant in the parish of Baton Rouge.

The elderly man who asked the young Wilson to teach adults to read and write was John S. Jones, the first dean of Southern University in Louisiana and the father of future Grambling State University President Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones. “I didn’t know that until years later,” Wilson says.

Among the more interesting places he’s been recently is Oxford University in England, where he presented a paper at the internationally known Round Table. It takes an invitation to present at the Round Table, whose members include ministers of education from many nations and several governors from the United States, and which convenes to consider major issues in contemporary educational policy in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other nations. Wilson presented on the public policy implications of viewing diversity through the lens of federalism.

Ask him how he came to do so many – and such varied – things, and he raises his expressive eyes to the ceiling for a moment, brings his gaze level again, and then speaks, slowly, with pauses between phrases. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he says. “I always wanted to be educated. Then an educator. I just…well, I just found a way to do it. I guess I always would leap, then look.”

And that’s what he teaches his students.

“I tell them to dream great dreams and think great thoughts,” he says. “I teach them to reach for the stars and grasp at the moon, to go ahead and do things, but be prepared to be nimble, to adjust. That’s especially important to get across because I have so many students who are first in their families to go to college.”

Turning thoughtful again, he says, “I had a chance at Oxford to talk to the students there. I asked how they felt about being in a university, being at Oxford. They loved it. I saw no attitude problems. They were just happy to be there and to be students.

“I don’t always see that same unblemished attitude here,” he notes. “Sometimes I see some attitude, perhaps because of the cultural backgrounds. But some of these students, well, I’ve met some of the most brilliant students right here, and it’s amazing that they don’t know it. I have to shake those students up. I have to let them know just how smart they are. That’s part of what I do.”

As pleased as he is to be the recipient of the Presidential Outstanding Professor Award, he isn’t sure why he’s getting it – and he sees plenty of reasons why he wouldn’t get it.

“I’ve been extremely outspoken,” he says. “I’ve criticized the University’s presidents, and I’ve gotten in trouble for doing so. At one point, during the presidency of Don Gerth, I put together a resolution and got all the California chapters of the NAACP to sign it to halt construction on campus until more black faculty had been hired. I’ve been outspoken on other issues, too.

“But I’m different pretty much all around. I’ve been active in the NAACP, and I’ve been strident. But on my wall there is also the highest honor the Republican Party can bestow: the Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom, the same honor given to Margaret Thatcher, Colin Powell, and Bush the Elder [former President George H.W. Bush].

“I’m a student advocate,” he continues. “I’ve helped them in many ways, to help them get over, to pass the bar exam, that kind of thing. There have been times when it burned my pocketbook because, once in awhile, one wouldn’t pay me back. You win some, you lose some on that. But you know, I like students. I will go all the way for them.”

- Russell Hudson