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“How a Benzie Boy Became a Global Citizen”
Presented by Ron Atkinson
Video Replay Link:
This presentation will provide a narrative of the complex journey that led Ron to become an international citizen—a journey he could not have begun to imagine while growing up in Benzie County and even when he left in the Fall of 1963 to start college at Michigan State University.
Presenter: Ron Atkinson
Ron Atkinson graduated from Benzie Central High in 1963 and then went to Michigan State University as a mathematics major. By the end of his freshman year, he began to question whether math was indeed what he wanted to pursue. Then, during his first term as a sophomore, he decided to abandon his math major and signed up for a variety of humanities & social science courses for his second term.
He also decided to transfer and moved to Kalamazoo College for his final sophomore term, drawn to its comprehensive foreign study program, in which 90% of its students participated. There, he eventually majored in history, spent six months studying abroad in Nairobi, Kenya, and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1967.
In 1968, he received his M.A. in African History from Northwestern University before joining the Peace Corps to work on an eye disease project in eastern Uganda from 1969 to 1970. After leaving the Peace Corps – but not Uganda – he spent 18 months doing precolonial history research among the Acholi people of northern Uganda.
He returned to Northwestern in 1972 for three years of PhD coursework, after which he spent three years working with autistic children and their families, writing his dissertation, and earning his PhD in 1978.
Next, he spent two years teaching and conducting research in Ghana, West Africa, and then worked for four years in Tampa, Florida, holding a variety of mainly non-academic positions. In 1984, he was hired as a faculty member at the University of South Carolina, where he taught and researched Sub-Saharan African History until his retirement in 2011.
During those 27 years, more than half of his time, from 1989 to 1995, was spent in South Africa during the political transition from apartheid, co-administering a program to train black teachers in educational management and leadership. Five years later, in 2000-2001, a Fulbright Research Fellowship took him back to Uganda. After a three-year break, he returned to Uganda in 2005 and continued research and project work there for varying periods over the next 16 years (nine years into retirement), until the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought that work to a close. During that time, he worked with dozens of people from Uganda, North America, Europe, and beyond on their PhD research in northern Uganda.