Professor Makes History More Than Dates, Dead Presidents
11/01/1998 By Penny Owen Staff Writer EDMOND -- Call him a psychologist of times past. Call him demanding. Call him obsessed.But seated in his American history class at the University of Central Oklahoma, odds are you'll call Jim Baker anything but boring.
Where, besides in history, can people learn what might happen next? Where else can they see how people act under the stress of war, in the craze of innovation, or with a national hero to lead them?
This is Baker's logic. This is what he tells his students. If they're bored, he says, don't blame history.
"It's the only laboratory we have where we can see what people do and what the consequences might be," explained Baker, a passionate, boyish-looking professor who still insists on teaching a freshman class after 26 years.
"When we're learning about other people in history," he says, "we're really learning about ourselves."
Those other people don't only include dead presidents and generals either. Baker brings to life the poor who needed iceboxes, the coal miners who breathed toxins in West Virginia, the victims of meat packers who practiced the worst of unsanitary processing.
"You get them to try and feel the pain, to understand ordinary people," said Baker, who serves as chairman of the history and geography department. "I can't associate with the president -- some of them, I don't want to associate with. But I found out students really get into this when you start talking about ordinary people."
In order to get there, students must come to class already knowing the presidential-type history. So Baker, 55, requires advanced reading. To ensure it gets done, he quizzes them. That and other teaching tactics have earned him the reputation of being demanding.
Students like Janice Bastik don't mind.
"He allows me to see history, the truth of history," said Bastik, a senior who is attending her second history class by Baker. "Some of the freshmen in the class think he's hard. You must work for your grade. But it's just because he wants you to learn. He wants you to see the real side."
That real side includes such things as how more than a century of slavery was overshadowed by Thomas Jefferson's "beautiful lie" of all men being created equal. And the adulterous behavior of his personal hero, John F. Kennedy Jr., which he grudgingly discusses.
"I try to rub their noses in the injustices of the past -- and some of them need their consciences jerked," Baker said. "But then I try to give them optimism."
More than anything, Baker loves teaching about World War II.
Though never in the military, Baker is fascinated by soldiers in combat. With years of studying and research to back him up, Baker tells his students not only how many soldiers died, but how they felt about dying.
"One of the real fears that soldiers had was dying anonymously -- dying without anyone knowing the circumstances of their passing," Baker said.
World War II had 70,000 soldiers who, as Baker says, simply disappeared.
Someday he hopes to visit Normandy, France, where troops stormed the beach on D-Day and turned the course of history around.
Baker was among the first to see the movie "Saving Private Ryan" when it hit the box office. He found the chaotic beach scene to be painfully realistic. What the movie left out, however, was the pain of surviving such a battle, then returning to fight another one.
Baker uses this movie and "Titanic" to encourage his students to study history beforehand.
"Do you know how much more you could've gotten out of the Titanic, besides the love story ... that never happened, if you were to study the background of the Titanic and the real people that were on the Titanic?" he asks.
Baker is almost as passionate about things he does outside the classroom. He hosts an annual social science fair each year at UCO, where about 250 middle school pupils from Oklahoma City and Edmond bring their history projects and revel in them.
Baker, a native Texan, originally entered college on a golf scholarship. After realizing he could earn good grades about as well as he could swing a club, Baker took on history. He's never looked back.
"Even if I'm tired, when I walk into the classroom, it's the greatest experience in the world," Baker said. "I will do the best I can to stimulate your thinking and to challenge you and to put together the puzzles, the mysteries, the whys and that sort of thing.
"Then we'll see if you're bored."