by Ashleigh Bonina and Kaylie Yaceczko
Coming into Humans of UA as a course, we didn’t know quite what to expect. We knew we’d be researching in the archives, looking for undertold stories. At first, we thought we’d found two unrelated stories but we realized that they had a great deal in common. While Kaylie researched student literary groups and Ashleigh concentrated on an individual, we came to see that both had great influence on campus without getting any recognition — at least not now. We came to see our mission as bringing their stories back into circulation.
Ashleigh and the Untold Story of Caroline Pardee
As I began this blog I was originally going to focus on women students at The University of Akron and their studies. I was interested in how their education had evolved over time — what areas of study they were interested in, what classes they focused on, enrollment and graduation rates and so much more. However, as I progressed through this assignment, I began to follow another path when I stumbled across the name Caroline Pardee. Caroline Pardee came up on a google search when I was searching for academic scholarships offered to women at The University of Akron. I came to find that she had established and funded several academic scholarships, had a long, successful career at The University of Akron, completed many years of education at various prestigious institutions and was the editor for at least one, if not more, editions of The Buchtelite.
Stumbling on Caroline Pardee completely transformed my project. When I discovered her I thought she was more important and more interesting than my original idea because she was overlooked for so long. I mean how had I not heard of her? Considering everything she donated, established and influenced, I find that I just learned about her appalling. She wasn’t awarded nearly enough recognition for her contributions. Someone should have written about her long ago and made all of these aspects of her life publicly available. You could consider her the backbone of the University. No one was talking about her, not now and not thirty years ago. You would have thought that, given her leadership positions, she would have had more public appreciation. Instead, her contributions were tucked away in the basement of the University of Akron Archives. There are thirty boxes of information about her, but unless people know it, she vanishes. However, once I began asking about her, people came out of the woodwork and had a lot to say about her.
Kaylie on the Careys and the Crows
As I was looking through the Archives, I was surprised by both how much and how little I was able to find about the literary societies and the literary magazines at the University. The societies had a rather large influence on campus life at the beginning of UA’s history, with speaking contests and publishing poetry in newspapers and yearbooks, but I found little information on what their day-to-day looked like as organizations. The same went for the literary magazines. Most of the information I found came from the first few pages of each edition and even a couple of advertisements from early editions of the Buchtelite but not much else. I found myself asking questions about the dynamics of the societies, what meetings looked like, and what their process was to get to the final product of the magazines, but I realized that I was in a similar position as a leader in the Upstart Crows, a writing organization on campus and modern day literary society, and for AshBelt, the undergraduate literary magazine.
This blog has shown me the importance of not only documenting and archiving the final product, such as the printed edition of a journal or just photographs from events, but to also document the smaller moments. While it may be cliche to say, there is just as much value in the process of a project as there is in where it ends up. Moving forward, I want to be more assertive in documenting what the Upstart Crows have been doing, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, because of how influential the organization has been for me and for the other members in order to preserve its legacy. With that being said, below is a photograph from one of the Crows many workshops, where they would share the earliest drafts of their writing with one another and give each other feedback.
Together, our website brings a needed attention to these overlooked members of the University community. We loved the opportunity to dive into the archives, but now we know that there are hundreds of other boxes where the stories of marginalized voices wait to be heard. You just need to go look for them — tell John we sent you.