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Thursday, May 01, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Basement Files: Learning to love...by degrees

The first of a two-part series

3,000 Miles Apart

In late May 1996, Chris Haselton stood before a mirror in his black gown and mortar board. In less than a hour, Haselton's four years of hard work at Brown University would be rewarded with a bachelor of arts in English. As he prematurely moved the tassel to the left side of his cap, Haselton felt a sudden surge of pride at all he had accomplished. And then, just as suddenly, a creeping wave of fear. For Haselton was now wondering, as all young graduates must, "What's next?"

"The academic life really appealed to me," Haselton says now, remembering those days of limitless possibility. "I knew I wanted to stay in school. I thought about pursuing a master's in French literature, with an emphasis on the Symbolists. But my faculty adviser said I'd probably need to learn French, which doesn't really play to my strengths. I think learning a foreign language is a lot like surfing...you have to start early or you're never really gonna get it. So I just decided to take some time off and figure things out."

That same day, almost 3,000 miles away, UNLV's James Frey was trying to straighten his legs beneath the tiny desk of a North Las Vegas elementary school. Frey, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, was there observing the first-grade class as part of the college's community outreach program. It was a largely perfunctory visit, but what Frey saw next would change him and UNLV forever.

"A bell rang and the children stood to gather at the door," Frey remembers. "I thought it was recess time. But instead, they reassembled themselves into small groups for what the teacher called `self-esteem lessons.' And it just suddenly hit me. Universities grant doctorates in every subject an elementary schoolchild can learn. Math and English, art and music. But nobody offers a Ph.D. in self-esteem. Why, I wondered. I know it sound pretentious to call it an epiphany, but I left there knowing I'd found a new idea, a new passion and a brand new discipline."

Assembling the Dream

No one knows better than Frey the glacial pace of educational reform, but he spent the summer and fall of '96 trying to sell colleagues on his vision for the nation's first graduate program in self-esteem. Frey met with departmental chairs, the Faculty Senate, even the Board of Regents, in the hopes of turning his dream into reality. In March 1997, with the university's permission and a generous endowment from Steve Wynn (who Frey now refers to as "both the patron saint and poster child of self-esteem"), Frey set about assembling his dream faculty.

Frey's first coup would be the hiring of Loraine Simmons, a third-grade Homeroom Studies teacher from Everett, Wash. Less than a year before, Simmons had published "Good for You, Tommy!" a groundbreaking work that would become the definitive text of the burgeoning self-esteem movement. And now she was coming to UNLV to design, organize and chair an academic department without precedent.

A Rising Star

Though barely out of her 20s, Simmons was academia's fastest-rising star. Years before, she had advanced a daring theory...that children responded well to extravagant, almost baseless praise. Working alone and almost unnoticed in the real-world laboratory of her third-grade classroom, Simmons had shaped and refined the theory until it shook the foundations of modern education. In the course of just three years, her inquisitive mind would invent a subject, mold its curriculum and even design the sparkly gold star stickers that would serve as the movement's icon.

"I don't think it's overstating it to call Loraine the Michel Foucault of self-esteem theory," Frey said at the time. "She's revolutionized the way we think, even the way we talk, about self-esteem."

In July 1997, Simmons arrived on campus. And she brought with her the wealth of ideas and experience that would inform her grueling graduate seminar "Positive Feedback." All she needed now was a student.

Two Paths Converge

A year after college, Chris Haselton was still trying to figure things out. He'd left Providence and wandered west toward Colorado. In July 1997, he was waiting tables at Aspen's tony Kachina Grill and still wondering what might be next.

"I was having a good time, partying a lot, but I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere," Haselton recalls. "Basically, I was just bored out of my mind. I mean, here I had this incredible gift and I was just frittering it away. I'd dabble at stuff, but nothing ever came of it."

"I started a novel, sort of a Dave Eggers kind of thing, but I found the whole narrative thing really confining. Same with poetry. I mean, all these Old World rules about meter and shit. I don't know, it just seemed like everything had been done before."

Then one morning Haselton spotted a story about UNLV's self-esteem program in the Denver Post. "It was this sneering editorial about the end of academic standards," Haselton acknowledges, "but it really spoke to me. It was something new, something no one had tried, and that's the challenge I needed."

The next day, Haselton was on the phone with Loraine Simmons. "I told her about my undergrad work and what I'd been doing since," he remembers. "After like 30 seconds, she's telling me how brave I am for calling. What a smart and special boy I am. And then she said something I'll never forget. She said, `You know what, I think you're going to be the best graduate student ever.' That's all it took. I knew right then I was gonna be UNLV's first doctoral candidate in self-esteem."

Next week: A difficult transition, a new paradigm of scholarship and a groundbreaking dissertation.