Wallace Warfield: a Celebration of Contribution and Influence
Though only his closest friends and family know about the first two decades of his life, the ICAR extended community was recently treated to a review of Wallace Warfield’s professional career, which officially began as a street-gang worker in New York. Our mini-Festschrift was not the traditional tribute as there was no memorial volume filled with essays about Dr. Warfield’s huge contribution to the Institute, the field, and to his students and colleagues. Rather, we launched an extended celebration that reflects the way we want to honor his work. While this brief article highlights the retirement event, ICAR has also organized a site offering video testimonials as evidence of how special this guy really is.
On the afternoon of April 30, five colleagues within and outside of ICAR—Kevin Avruch, Mara Schoeny, Rachael Barber, Howard Gadlin and Chris Honeyman—spoke on aspects of Warfield’s many achievements and their stories reflected many of our own experiences working with and knowing him. Avruch provided a vision of a fascinating and complicated journey that began with New York City’s Youth Board (I’ve been privileged to hear a few of his street-gang episodes and they are as colorful as one might imagine). When he left his position as the Deputy Director of the Lower West Side Community Corporation he joined the US Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service. He directed the field coordination in New York as well as the national offices. Unfortunately, when Ed Meese took over it seems Warfield was not quite of the right political persuasion and had to move on. As always, he landed on his feet continuing to make a difference as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) where he was responsible for helping federal agencies build ADR processes, and conducted trainings for government contracting offices and judges.
In 1986, Warfield was invited as a guest lecturer to Dennis Sandole’s class and the rest was history. Jim Laue, the first Lynch Professor and the Institute Director founded the Conflict Clinic in 1990 and invited Warfield (with Frank Blechman) to join ICAR; the fit was perfect. Warfield’s dedication to building ICAR as a center of excellence in the field was unstoppable. He loved academic life and over the next few decades became an accomplished reflective practitioner, trained in the area of public administration (MPA from USC) and public policy (PhD from GMU), making use of a full range of theories and a life-time of knowledge of various approaches to manage, mitigate, and resolve conflicts. In addition to his excellence in teaching, his field work involved interventions and trainings in complex, multi-party conflicts involving communities and organizations in the US, Africa, and South America.
Though the resume is extraordinary, what is just as important is what it does not say—what is in the margins. We were treated to a number of testimonials that are worthy of mention. Avruch spoke of Warfield’s extraordinary humanity, humility, and perseverance, and of how he believes people can be turned around sometimes they just need help finding their way. People can change—as evidenced by his work in divided communities over the years with police, gangs and warring factions—helping rebuild relationships, communities, and creating and sustaining “zones of peace."
Howard Gadlin, NIH Ombudsman, provided a clever pictorial history of their long friendship and colleagueship that included Warfield’s intelligence, appearance and style (of course), thoughtfulness, kindness (even as a New Yorker), competitiveness (especially on the tennis court) and capacity for mischief. Then, humor aside, he underscored Warfield’s excellent work, especially with racial and identity conflicts and his abilities to understand the complexity of situations—where there is seldom a stance that is unambiguously good or bad.
Mara Schoeny’s relationship with Warfield reflected many in the room: he was her professor, mentor, dissertation chair, sponsor, and coach, among other roles. She learned from him that “community matters”—approaching conflict in communities must be done both geographically and as a reflective practitioner. She acknowledged his bedrock foundation in community—from the streets of New York, to the political machinery of Chicago, to NGO work in Rwanda as it recovered from its genocide. Warfield lives at the intersections and considers conflict’s nested qualities, acknowledging that its interpersonal struggles do not arise in isolation but within broader social and ethical contexts. The community is where and how people live and it informs the texture of their relationships.
Rachael Barber, also a former student, took a different tactic by conducting survey research of Warfield’s colleagues, friends, and other recipients of his wisdom. Three themes emerged: the consistently high quality of teaching, the substantial influence he had on their careers and lives, and the role model he offered as a scholar practitioner. She reported that he “walked the talk,” and had “humility and patience,” treating them as “legitimate” colleagues. Warfield stressed the importance of “power, culture, structure, inequality, and being aware of who was and was not at the table.” His students learned their “3R’s: roles, rules and responsibilities” and how to use language people can hear. Many spoke of their APT experiences as their best, most profound and lasting, work at ICAR. As one student stated, “He’s a real pioneer of the field.”
Chris Honeyman considers Warfield chief of the “pracademics:” there are academics who do some practice on the side, and practitioners who do some teaching on the side, but Warfield is a third and rarer type. With twenty-five years as an activist prior to become an academic he has become a kind of “think tank” of his own. That is, the very length, variety, and depth of his practice experiences affords him unusual insight as to the kinds of questions to ask and becomes the basis of the qualities that Avruch enumerated—humanity, humility, and especially modesty.
Following the presentations, Warfield treated us to reflections of his own learning over the decades. I was moved by his story of issues of identity with gang members on street corners: that only “white people are Americans.” He learned that if you can lay your hands on people’s minds you can transform them. He learned the importance of advocacy. At CRS he learned the complexity of “social justice”—if one can create interdependency between groups then things might change. He noted that when Sandole invited him to his class it gave him permission to leave the federal government and become an academic; he then took the skills he developed from his work domestically to the international arena.
Warfield has steadfastly embraced his own plea to ICAR—to do away with the “totem” where practice is at the bottom and theory is at the top of the pole. Neither can live alone—they must inform each other. Thank you, Wallace, for the enormous impact you have had on so many people’s lives over decades of wonderful work. The good news is that you are not leaving entirely. We welcome and await the projects you intend to continue or take on over the next few years (after your second cup of coffee in the mornings).
A recording of the mini-Festschrift is available at icar.gmu.edu. Anyone wishing to view the W2 Appreciation Project on YouTube can do so by visiting http://youtube.com/w2appreciation. Anyone wishing to contribute their voice to the project can find information on how to share stories and photos, as well as instructions for adding their own video, on the ICAR Network at: http://is.gd/c6oJs Assistance with recording and uploading videos is also available by emailing [email protected] or visiting ICAR.