A Festschrift Honoring Wallace P. Warfield: The Proceedings of a Conference Held April 30, 2010 in Arlington, Virginia Convened by Kevin Avruch and Mara Schoeny
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Foreward, by Dennis Sandole:
There is a natural tension between “forewording” a group of presentations made in honor of a distinguished colleague on the occasion of his or her retirement and one made in memoriam of that same colleague as a consequence of his or her death. Such is the case with our distinguished colleague Professor Wallace (“Wally”) Warfield.
The comments in the papers compiled in this Festschrift were delivered on April 30, 2010, at an event at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) at George Mason University. We were honoring Wallace who was retiring from active employment but retaining a post-retirement connection with ICAR, which would involve him keeping an office, doing some teaching, serving on some dissertation committees, and the like. This is typical of academics that have had a mutually beneficial relationship with their university, colleagues, and students upon retirement, which is clearly the case with Wallace.
On August 21, 2010, before this Festschrift had gone to press, Wallace passed away, necessitating that I as well as those whose comments follow, re-locate to the“edge of chaos”between“in honor”and“in memoriam.”The objective now is to strike a respectable balance between these two otherwise disparate narratives.
When we celebrated Wallace during his retirement event in April, he mentioned that I had invited him to a class way back in the 1980s, when he was Acting Director of the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice (established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964). This delightful bit of serendipity encouraged Wallace to develop an interest in coming to ICAR, which he eventually did in 1990. Back in those days when I tendered the invitation to him, I was the only “core” faculty at ICAR (then the Center for Conflict Resolution [CCR]). At the time we made a great deal of use of practitioners “actually doing” CR in the field and Wallace, the consummate practitioner, was certainly in that category. Chris Mitchell, who was then ICAR director, eventually hired Wallace, indicating at the event commemorating Wallace’s life that this decision was one of the best he ever made. So, too, was mine to invite Wallace to one of my classes!
In his remarks at the tribute to Wallace, Rich Rubenstein implied that there had been some tension at ICAR during the early years between “theory” and “practice.” But Wallace never bought into this, always defending the utility of the role of theory in everything he ever did. He was especially adamant about the critical role played by culture in shaping conflict and our responses to it. In this regard, he was usually first among ICAR colleagues to defend the teaching of the kind of great course still offered at ICAR by Kevin Avruch, whose comments follow this foreword.
A few years after Wallace came to ICAR “full-time,” I undertook the coediting of a volume with my then graduate research assistant (and subsequent ICAR PhD alum), Hugo van der Merwe of South Africa. The volume was entitled, Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice: Integration and Application (Manchester University Press, 1993). Wallace contributed an excellent chapter, “Public Policy Conflict Resolution: The Nexus between Theory and Practice.” This is the paper that Marc Gopin mentioned in his beautiful letter to Wallace, shared with us again at the tribute to Wallace by his partner Alicia, which turned Marc on to Wallace’s contributions to the literature.
Three years ago, when I was diagnosed with cancer, Wallace reached out to me, indicating that he was a cancer survivor. I’ll never forget the feeling of empowerment that revelation provided me with: here was this vital, articulate, elegant, intelligent, sagacious man telling me that, in a sense, it was “OK”: life could go on despite the savagery of this beast and the treatment for it. Regrettably, his life was cut short during the summer of 2010, making me realize that, like Howard Gadlin, whose comments also appear in this Festschrift, I had failed to say certain things to Wallace over the course of our friendship. For example, I was rendered nearly “homicidal” when Wallace related the story to another class of mine, about being home one fine Sunday afternoon mowing his lawn when a car full of potential home buyers stopped to ask him, an African/Native American, if “the owner was at home”!
On a selfish note, I am no longer one of two ICAR faculty “recovering” from cancer, but, as far as I know, the only one with no one else to commiserate in the hallways. I can only hope that I can continue to keep Wallace in my heart so that my continuing journey will not be too lonely.
One small step in this direction is to introduce this wonderful collection of revealing comments about Wallace by friends and colleagues such as Kevin Avruch, Howard Gadlin, and Christopher Honeyman; and former students and colleagues such as Rachel Barbour and Mara Schoeny.
These comments touch upon who Wallace was and will remain in our memories: the gifted, selfless teacher and mentor; the humble, humane, persevering intervener in the conflict-ridden spaces of some of America’s dispossessed; the scholar-practitioner — or, as Chris Honeyman captures with his neologism, the “pracademic” — who could invest his scholarship with years of deep experience on the ethical dimension of reaching out to people in great need, in the process, crossing multiple disciplinary and professional boundaries.
If readers have not already done so, they will certainly detect in the comments that follow that Wallace was – and will remain — one in a million!
Dennis J.D. Sandole