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Faculty Profile
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Q:
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Which faculty member dreamed of becoming the statistician for the Washington Senators baseball team?
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A:
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Psychology Professor Dr. Michael Morris
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Few are Safe from the Piercing Gaze
Of this Humorist, Writer and Activist
Social activism devoid of humor can be dull. Who hasn’t sat through a lecture that sought to move the audience, but drove them to sleep instead?
Dr. Michael Morris has failed to fall victim to such risky behavior. A professor of Psychology at the University for almost 30 years, his motto on his blog, sixcense.blogspot.com, speaks volumes about his take on behavior and life.
“I grin, therefore I am,” it reads.
A rabble rouser who has tried to keep the University administration on its proverbial toes, he is editor of the University of New Haven’s forum “Reflections,” a hard-copy publication that roams from topics as diverse as merit pay and early retirement to average petroleum use per household and grammar and punctuation. Nothing is safe from Dr. Morris, who has happily skewered administrative policy on all manner of issues. He knows the power of words, to elicit a laugh, to provoke a thought.
Born in Washington, D.C. to a father who worked for the post office repairing damaged parcels (“he lost an arm in World War II and when he came back they trained him to do that,” Dr. Morris says) and a stay-at-home mother, he is the product of Catholic schools all the way through to his Ph.D. from Boston College. His childhood dream: to be the statistician for the Washington Senators baseball team.
His dream became a corpse when he encountered calculus in freshman year at Boston College. “After the final exam, I went to my dorm room, pulled out my wastebasket, and burned my calculus book page by page,” he says.
Freshman year, fortunately, introduced him to another love, psychology. Coming from a multiracial background of Caucasian, Native American and African-American, Dr. Morris couldn’t help but notice the behavior of individuals of a certain persuasion when in a room with other individuals they thought were of the same persuasion. “For example, when you are around white people who think they are in the presence of what they think are only white people, their behavior is fascinating,” he says.
After falling for psychology, he fell even harder for teaching psychology. He took a job at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, then joined the University of New Haven in 1978.
“What keeps me tied to the place is that I love my job,” he says. “I love teaching, I love meeting new students, I love the freedom associated with being a professor in terms of charting my own schedule. And by and large, I really like the people I interact with at UNH.”
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