Kent Shifferd: An appreciation

Aside from my Dad, the person who influenced me and mentored me more than any other human is the late Kent Shifferd, a peace historian and educator. I heard Dr. Shifferd give a talk at a small regional peace conference he organized at a college about 75 miles from where I was living on a pretty 40-acre forested site in my solar cabin with a lovely little river--a tributary to the St. Croix river, which itself was a tributary to the mighty Mississippi river. I was moving from there to Hayward, Wisconsin because my son wanted to live in a town, not in the woods, and I was working as a community organizer for Waging Peace, a collective of three of us--a former national AFSC organizer--Madge Cyrus--and a pastor's wife, Jeanne Larson. 

Hearing Kent planted a seed. Within a couple of years I sold my home in Hayward and moved to Ashland, Wisconsin, and started taking classes from him. His teaching content and style were revelatory, extremely engaged and engaging. His Ph.D. was in History so his Peace & Conflict Studies degree was history-centered but much more along the lines of those historians who bring the lessons of history straight into the news of the day. 

Kent also introduced me to the synthesis of peace and environmentalism, something I had come to on my own in a generalized fashion as an activist, but he turned it toward an academic melding of cause and effect for many of us. I recall one of my brilliant peace classmates (and my girlfriend for those years), Nikki Goldstein (now Nikki Main) writing a leaflet that we copied and handed out that she titled, Can you be a militarist and an environmentalist? It was before many were thinking about that connection and, in our case, it was an outgrowth of some of Kent's talks. He was even gracious enough to invite me to be a co-presenter of a workshop on exactly that at an academic conference when I was just a lowly undergraduate. 

Kent thought in structural, systemic terms and helped all of his students begin to do the same. Indeed, after he retired he wrote a great book that did all that exceedingly well, From War to Peace (Shifferd, 2011). I used it for several years in my Peace Studies class. 

Kent fired up the thirst for knowledge in his students--it certainly did so for me. I graduated from college top of my class, summa cum laude (back before there was Latin status inflation, so I was the only one of them in my graduating class). This was despite graduating in the bottom half of my high school graduating class and was largely due to Kent and his intellectual inspiration. 

Remarkably, Kent continued to boost my future even after. He co-created a blockbuster course, Dilemmas of War and Peace, offered through the University of Wisconsin Extension--distance learning in the pre-digital age. He succeeded in getting them to hire me to teach it as I was earning my masters degree, which broke a lot of rules and yet he did it. It furthered my education as I read the mammoth texts right along with students. Teaching an upper-division course with only a bachelor's degree was only possible because Kent created that opportunity for me. 

He didn't stop there in his profound effects on my life. When my resistance partner, the late Donna Howard and I did a Plowshares action of direct disarmament, Kent testified at our trial and set it up so the jury of 12 northwoods citizens understood how much I knew about the thermonuclear command center that we partially dismantled. The jury acquitted us on the major charge--Sabotage--thus obviating the potential for an extra decade in prison. The lesser charge, Destruction of Property, had no defense, we were convicted, and went to prison on a three-year sentence. 

So being part of our defense that succeeded in keeping us out of a long sentence was still not the end of Kent's powerful effects on my life. When I got out of prison, still on parole and wearing an ankle monitor, Kent called and said he was going to take a fall term sabbatical to do some writing and would I like to teach his Peace Studies course. Wow! Hells-yeah! I was super-excited and super-prepped because of not only taking that course from him but from teaching the amazing Dilemmas of War & Peace class he co-created.

So, one underpaid term as an adjunct--it was so enriching, so validating, so in line with what I wanted, but just temporary. Then, right in the middle of the fall term, my one and only semester, the college offered senior faculty a one-time early retirement payout and both Kent and Pat, his wife and Sociologist, took it. Kent called again, told me, and said he recommended to the Dean that I be hired on an ongoing basis until a national search could replace me. The Dean agreed and Kent basically handed me the Peace and Conflict Studies major and minor that he had created years before--the first one in Wisconsin.

Yes, my father shaped me most of all, but Kent was a close second. And, like my father, Kent kept friends on all sides of all questions except those that dealt with basic human rights. He modeled that for all his students, and it was no wonder that former military were avid peace students of his. 

Kent Shifferd, Ph.D., lived an examined life, standing up for peace, for people, and for the Earth. 

Shifferd, Kent D. (2011). From war to peace: A guide to the next hundred years. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.