The Making of Lecturer Lee Teitel

Posted January 8, 2017
By Lee Teitel

It’s clear, looking back at the career of Lee Teitel, Ed.D.’88, that Teitel has never shied away from challenges. As a kid, when his teacher was out sick, he took over the lectures in his classroom. Years later, when he became restless in college, he turned to carpentry, his ancestors’ trade. And when he started teaching in higher ed, he took on a tough subject that many academics steer clear of: racism and other forms of oppression.

1953 I was born in Brooklyn to children of Eastern European immigrants. My father learned English in elementary school; my mother was the first in her family to go to college. Both earned advanced degrees and became public school teachers in New York City. Their clear message to me: Being a teacher is the best way to contribute to the world.

1962 I was a big reader as a kid but not much of a talker. The whole family remembers the first time I spoke at the dinner table. I corrected a historical fact about Andrew Jackson. Everyone stopped talking and looked at me.

1964 My sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Becker, who gave us weekly lectures on history, had to be out on medical leave. He asked me to give the lecture on the origins of World War I. I loved it. I was only 11.

1967 I went to a “desegregated” public high school, but the school itself was deeply divided. I didn’t realize how much I was in a bubble of whiteness until I joined a community center in another part of Brooklyn that was consciously, racially, and economically mixed. Being in a place that emphasized
the “richness of difference” changed my life.

1970 At Harvard College, my roommates were black, and when we would go to meals separately, I’d sit at the white tables, they at the black ones. When we went to the dining hall together, we’d create a new space — our own table, to which an assortment of students, white and black, would eventually drift.

1974 I was restless at Harvard, not sure what I wanted to do. I had a strong hands-on side that wasn’t being nurtured. I almost dropped out to work as a carpenter, the trade of my immigrant grandfather and the avocation of my father.

1976 I began my career teaching high school industrial arts and then shifted to Roxbury Community College in Boston, where I started the state’s first computer-assisted drafting program. We developed partner-ships with computer companies and design firms, which provided jobs for the mostly black and Latino students at the school. In the early 1980s, I started my doctoral work and my interest in these partnerships became the subject of my dissertation and scholarship.

1988 I got offered an appointment to teach school principals at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. I lived out my biggest fear about teaching about race. Even though I knew it was important, I was afraid to and didn’t really know how. I touched on it lightly and started dancing away when the doctoral cohort — about half students of color, many with years of anti-bias experience — stopped me. They pushed me to teach about race, and I stumbled through it with plenty of amazing support from them, and lots of humility.

1999 I got invited to teach a course (part time) in organizational leadership at HGSE. Excited, humbled, and nervous, I decided to stay true to my new commitment to teach about race and built in a case about the history of student protests about race at the Ed School and how the school had responded (or not). I was glad to teach the case, although I realized doing so might be seen as a bit edgy for a new adjunct faculty member. I was relieved to be asked to return to teach the next semester.

2011 In my third year of directing the School Leadership Program, I brainstormed with students about what they would need to be transformative leaders around equity and diversity. We identified a set of competencies and designed programming. Two years later, the Dean’s Advisory Committee on Equity and Diversity adapted the competencies and made them schoolwide.

2014 I was lying on the floor of Gutman lobby for a die-in protest for the nonindictment of the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson. When a doctoral student with a megaphone asked what each of us can and will do, I thought about what I know best — leadership and school improvement — and resolved to work on getting more and better quality integrated schools. The following spring, I piloted a course, The Promise of Integrated Schools. A year later, we launched Reimagining Integration: The Diverse and Equitable Schools Project.