Calm and collected, Melinda Negron-Gonzales strides into room 265 every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon prepared to teach a class about terrorism.
I happen to be one of the lucky students in her terrorism class, and one of twelve in her class about the US and World Affairs. Both classes are engaging, informative, and extremely motivating, not to mention fun and funny, if you consider talking about zombies and setting boats on fire during class to be funny.
Professor Negron-Gonzales has a great sense of humor, as I have witnessed every week since the beginning of the semester. Alongside her wit and understanding, she also has a vast knowledge of most things involving the Middle East, which is particularly helpful as the daily headlines include something about Iraq, Syria, Israel, or another state in the Middle East.
So why did she come to UNH Manchester? “I liked that this program is interdisciplinary because my own background is pretty interdisciplinary,” Professor Negron-Gonzales said in an interview. Her bachelor’s degree is in anthropology with a minor in religious studies. Her master’s degree is in international relations, and her PhD is in comparative politics. She laughed, “I’m kind of all over the place.”
While talking to her, Professor Negron-Gonzales mentioned her career ideas shifted as she continued her education. “I thought I was going to be a journalist. I wanted to be a Middle East correspondent,” But she realized that she wanted to do more than condense a complicated environment into sixty seconds. Hence academia, where she now has a full semester instead of a minute.
Melinda didn’t always want to study politics, though. “I wanted to be a marine biologist in high school but then I realized I wasn’t very good at science. I was good at science in middle school, and then chemistry killed me and it was over.” She loved biology. “I was happy dissecting frogs,” she said simply.
Going from dissecting living creatures to dissecting why people kill each other is quite a jump. Death and destruction are quite a bit heavier than frogs. It’s also not just in a classroom -- it’s everywhere, all the time, especially recently.
Professor Negron-Gonzales said in class one day that she takes a day every week to not look at the headlines and not watch the news. “You have to, because it’s depressing. It’s really frustrating. And I guess what’s more frustrating is knowing all this and not being able to really do anything to change the course of events on the ground,” she laments. “You kind of immerse yourself in all of this information and it’s depressing, and it kind of leaves you unsettled, and there’s no closure.”
That being said, she still loves being a professor. In her vision of what happens when she or any educator teaches, “students take that knowledge, they become informed citizens, and they perhaps do something that contributes to the national discussion about these things… [It’s] incredibly gratifying, just knowing that people know what’s going on.”
Speaking of educators, Professor Negron-Gonzales’s husband is a high school history teacher, and when they’re not inundated with grading and books, they discuss the issues within the educational system regarding civic education. Melinda has noticed in her years of teaching that students will come into an American foreign policy class with virtually no knowledge about the last century of American history. She remarked, “I don’t understand why this stuff isn’t covered more in high school.”
Comparing comprehensive knowledge of recent American history to that of knowledge of Greek history and mythology, Professor Negron-Gonzales noted, “It just seems a little bit bizarre that if I say ‘Zeus,’ everybody in the class always knows who you’re talking about. If I say ‘Henry Kissinger,’ I get blank stares. That bothers me.” Not that she is diminishing the importance of the humanities, she simply is observing the imbalance, “that students don’t receive enough information about stuff that is pertinent to today’s world.”
Oftentimes, the extent of public education in terms of foreign policy is limited to World War II. “It’s because,” Melinda said, “it’s the ‘good war.’ It’s the clear black-and-white war. We were doing the right thing there, and nobody says otherwise.” Talking about other conflicts in which the United States was involved in later in the 1900s, she reasoned, “It’s harder to talk about what the US did during the Cold War because we weren’t always the good guys doing the right thing.”
The general lack of civic education isn’t just in my generation; Melinda was also “clueless” when she began college. “I didn’t learn this stuff in high school,” she remarked.
To cure the lack of awareness in the general public, I asked what she, as a professor, would recommend to those ordinary citizens who wish to be more informed.
“If you want to learn about current events, Foreign Policy magazine, I would say, is probably the best thing for the lay person to read, if they’re interested in learning about foreign policy or just international affairs in general, not just American foreign policy. And it’s funny.”
“I haven’t told the class about this yet, but I will at some point because I’m obsessed with Putin, but they have this thing: Fourteen hairless cats that look like Putin. They’ve put pictures of Putin in various poses, real pictures of him. Sometimes he’s trying to spear a fish in the river. Sometimes he’s in the middle of the Antarctic on an expedition to find a polar bear, whatever, and then they’ve taken hairless cats, and sometimes they dress them like Putin in the picture; other times they’re not dressed, it’s just a close-up of his face and a close-up of a hairless cat, and they look a lot alike. It’s hilarious. And Foreign Policy magazine had that.”
Professor Negron-Gonzales’s knowledge and experiences are valuable assets, and we are lucky to have her here.
And for those who are interested, here are the Putin cats.
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