by Deanna Reyes
Staff Writer
After teaching at the University of La Verne for six years, Deborah Burris-Kitchen, professor of sociology and criminology, will be leaving to teach at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tenn.
She said she has mixed emotions about her move, some days she is excited for a new challenge, but others she is sad about leaving California and the people she has met.
Burris-Kitchen graduated in 1995 from Western Michigan University with her doctorate in sociology and criminology. From Michigan she moved to California, basically because she was “looking for a warm place to live.” Once she arrived at ULV, she said she fell in love with the campus for its size and diversity.
“I think there may be some faculty members that are thrilled to see me go, but I think the majority of them probably hate to see me go,” she said. “I’m sure it’s the same feeling with students. Not everyone is always going to like you.”
Burris-Kitchen said students have come up to her expressing sadness regarding her move. She said they are sorry she is going and wish that she was not moving to Tennessee.
“That’s always nice and affirming,” she said regarding students’ feelings. “It makes you feel good.”
Burris-Kitchen said she has been contemplating a move for the last three years, and that the offer to teach at Tennessee State University was the only offer that had truly appealed to her.
She is also looking to live closer to her family, who lives in Indianapolis.
Burris-Kitchen has high hopes for her new job in Tennessee. She said she hopes it will be a place where she can feel the freedom to be who she is. She said that because ULV is such a small university, everyone always seems to know everything about everyone and always gets involved in everyone else’s business.
“I hope I can make an impact on the classroom and impact a lot more students because it is a bigger university,” Burris-Kitchen said. “But then I also hope I can exist as a wall flower, somewhere in my corner office and not get involved in all the politics and play the games that I think sometimes have to be played here because it is small.”
Tennessee State University is a historically African-American university, according to Burris-Kitchen. She said she hopes to defy any presumptions they may have of her, since she is a Caucasian woman, and let them find out who she really is.
“I hope to help them articulate through new knowledge their own forms of repression because of racism in a white male-dominated society,” she said. “And I hope they can use that information and knowledge about white male patriarchy to better their lives and the lives of future generations of African Americans.”
Burris-Kitchen said teaching at first might be a challenge because of her appearance.
“We do have so many racial barriers in our society and people do see each other in brown, black and white,” she said. “But once people get to know you, they realize that you’re genuinely a good person.”
She said people will realize she is there because she wants to pass on knowledge and that she has no hidden agenda to be a part of the white structure that has been “dominating and oppressing African Americans for centuries in this country.”
Burris-Kitchen, reflecting on her time here at ULV, felt she made some notable contributions. She said she helped regenerate the cheerleading program when she first came to ULV. She also said she added diversity in the classroom as far as critically evaluating the country’s political and economic structure.
“I tried to incorporate perspectives that are not traditionally white male dominated,” she said.
“I hope that I’ve made an impact, but I think that life will go on without me,” she said. “I just exist and I do the best that I can.”
