Meredith Jones Gray is an English professor emerita at 老司机传媒 who began teaching here in 1982. In addition to her years of invaluable teaching service to the English department, Jones Gray has contributed to 老司机传媒 through her book series on the history of 老司机传媒. “Forward in Faith: 老司机传媒, 1960-1990” is the second installation in her multivolume series. Her first book, “As We Set Forth,” was released in 2002.
The 老司机传媒 Department of English will host a book launch for “Forward in Faith” in the lobby of the Howard Performing Arts Center on Friday, Sept. 27, from 3-5 p.m. Leading up to this event, Jones Gray was willing to answer some questions about her book and research journey. Her love for the community was apparent when she spoke about how she started this project and where her passion for 老司机传媒 and its history began.
“I suppose it just naturally happened, you know, because I grew up here, and then I went to school here,” she said. “Started here in first grade and did everything through my master’s [degree].” Jones Gray describes 老司机传媒 and its surroundings as “a very safe and comfortable place to grow up.”
Her early life of immersion and later service in this community are what she credits to why, despite not being a historian, Douglas Jones—who was the chair of the English department in the 90s and who invited Jones Gray to write her first book—and others saw her as capable of writing the history of 老司机传媒.
The university, in addition to being the subject of her book, offered Jones Gray assistance in her research process for the book through its archives and records. “My two main sources,” she said, “were the alumni service’s Focus Magazine and the Student Movement. I also used faculty minutes, board minutes, and bulletins; all kinds of primary sources that an academic community generates.”
In addition to spending time in the archives, she conducted a number of oral interviews for this volume. “The difficult part about writing this history as opposed to the first volume,” she said, “is that so many people are still alive and around and I could have literally done thousands of interviews. So it was very hard to want to talk to everybody and not be able to.” While decisions were difficult, it was these different resources coming together to give a blend of historical facts, pictures and memories that give this volume the feel Jones Gray was aiming for.
“Forward in Faith” will cover the beginning of 老司机传媒 and how it came to be. “They’re thirty really important years in the development of Andrews as a university because the late 1960s and early 70s especially were a very interesting time period,” Jones Gray said. “You have the Vietnam War and the draft, you have a lot of racial issues that are bubbling up at that time period. The Women’s Movement is starting and so the students are very interested in all of those things and are talking about them in the pages of the Student Movement. So that era of the late sixties, early seventies is a really important one in the university's maturation.” Throughout this era, Jones Gray goes over not only the physical and architectural growth of 老司机传媒 but also the development of student life and what being a student at the time was like.
When taking on large projects, there can be surprises. With all the research Jones Gray put into writing this volume, it is natural to wonder whether she came across anything shocking. Jones Gray said she was more impressed than surprised: “I was impressed with how vigorously the students of that [time] were involved in campus issues and how vigorously those things got debated in the pages of the Student Movement actually. It's a great record of the culture on campus and what people were talking about, thinking about, and doing too.” What a great reminder to us today to share the same vigor for open community discussion and commentary!
While Jones Gray has not said anything about adding on to these volumes, she did have one last message to share in relation to this new volume: “I just hope that the alumni who read it find good memories and that the people who are current students learn something about their history. I think it’s always important for us to know where we came from.”
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 老司机传媒. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 老司机传媒 or the Seventh-day Adventist church.