WAUKESHA – Gladis Kaufman, who started her own post-secondary education at a community college in Ohio, will retire from the two-year University of Wisconsin-Waukesha in June. She has taught anthropology at the Waukesha campus since 1982.
Daughter of a farmer who was also a teacher and school principal, Kaufman, 67, believes both in the land and in education. She has pursued a love for the human heritage of the land through her studies.
Her high school valedictorian, she postponed her education to accumulate tuition dollars and then got married and had children. When a convenient, inexpensive community college opened near her home, her youngest child was in kindergarten, and she plunged into the academic milieu. “Education was important to me. Both my parents had college degrees,” she explains.
From Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, she went on to Wayne State University, Detroit. With her first course in anthropology there, she knew the direction of her future. “I continue to find it a fascinating field. It helps in understanding the world, in understanding your own culture. You come to understand better why we do things one way when you see somebody else doing it differently,” she summarizes.
In 1969 she completed her bachelor’s degree, and two years later she had her master’s. For the next nine years, she devoted herself to raising her three children as a single parent, working on her doctorate, and teaching – at Wayne State, at Oakland Community College, and at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. When she finished her Ph.D. at Wayne State in 1980, she accepted a temporary assistant professorship at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, until the tenure-track position opened at UW-Waukesha in 1982.
With a love for her discipline, Kaufman has focused on the American Indian experience as expressed in their art and on the role of women cross-culturally. With art professor Mary Ellen Young, she developed a course on Indian art, which she continues to teach; she organized exhibits in the campus gallery and speaker programs for a Wilderness University series; and she worked with the student American Indian Cultural Association in programming and fund-raising activities. They set up tables and sold fry bread and venison stew during the mid-90’s remodeling of the kitchen facilities, using the money to purchase five pieces of Indian art for the permanent collection.
In her research on women, she has traveled half way around the world. A member of a Sister-City delegation to Kokchetav, Kazakhstan, in the heart of the former Soviet Union, she led a class in a cultural exchange in early 1991 and returned the following fall during a sabbatical leave for additional study in the remote land. She lectured at the Pedagogical Institute, visited schools, factories, and farms, and interviewed a thousand women, some formally, some informally. Later she hosted a visiting lecturer in Russian literature who came to teach at UW-Waukesha during the summer of 1994.
Working with Shamim Naim of the geography department, she did additional research on immigrant Muslim women in the Midwest. She also traveled to Jakarta, Indonesia, to study the life of businesswomen in that Muslim country.
“The Waukesha area is beautiful,” she feels. “I love gardening, wild flowers and bird-watching,” all of which lend themselves to the area. She satisfies her other love – for American Indian art – by going to galleries and attending shows. In her retirement, she will have more time for all of these, especially for traveling to other parts of the country to see exhibits and museums. More personally, she will spend time visiting her daughters, both physicians, along with her three grandchildren in St. Petersburg, FL. Her sister in New Hampshire beckons with invitations as well. Her son, who has a Ph.D. in business, lives in Ohio. |
