Dr. Arthur Schmidt

Current Honors class: Settling Accounts: Latin America in an Age of Anguish

 

Dr. Art Schmidt is a Professor of History. He served as an international observer in three different contexts: in refugee camps in Honduras in 1982, 1988, and 1989; in the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran elections of 1990 and 1994 respectively; and in post-electoral settings in Mexico City and Chiapas in 1994 and 1995. In 1991 and 1993, he spent five weeks giving workshops on global economic issues to university, business, labor, and non-governmental organization audiences in El Salvador and Nicaragua for the American Friends Service Committee. Over the years, Art has spent three terms as a member of the board of review of Temple University Press, lectured as a Commonwealth Speaker for the Pennsylvania Humanities Council on historical trends in immigration and the world economy and taught courses at St. Joseph’s University, Swarthmore College, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

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History professor Arthur Schmidt has sat in the same office for almost the entirety of his 35 years teaching at Temple University. “Welcome to the beauties of Gladfelter,” Schmidt said, his arms open inside the more northerly of Temple’s two academic high rises on 13th Street. An overfilled bookcase and filing cabinets keep him warm in his eighth floor room in Gladfelter Hall, built in 1973 and situated adjacent to its partner, Anderson Hall.  

What Schmidt has over a lot of cramped professors in the intellectual skyscraper is an unmistakably impressive view southward over the rowhouses that canvas North Philadelphia and the majestic Center City skyline. “I can look out into the world,” Schmidt, an academic of Latin America who focuses on its history, said in passing.

It is just that which might define Schmidt’s academic career. As an international observer in Honduras, a touring academic throughout Mexico, and an election official in both El Salvador and Nicaragua, Schmidt looks to the world for help with his research and teaching.

“Those types of experiences do a lot because, like any institution, the academic world can develop inward perspectives, so it allows for a new awareness of things,” Schmidt said. “It allows me to connect to the subject matter and it validates an awful lot of things.”

One of his favorite courses to teach is his popular World Economy Since 1945, open to all undergraduate students. “I am undisciplined enough that I could have a 48-hour day and not be able to pursue all of my interests,” said Schmidt, while exuding an air of affable gentlemanliness as he leaned back to laugh in a worn swivel chair.

He didn’t always have ties to South America. Growing up in Massachusetts, Schmidt, without a discernable Hispanic ethnic background, was likewise without a Latin influence. It was as a senior in high school, during the Latin America-infused early 1960s, that a teacher recommended he go to college and study Spanish and the more southern America. “I might be the only person who ever actually listened to a teacher,” said Schmidt who is fluent in Spanish. “But then, my wife is from Mexico, so I guess I married into Latin America, too.” 

  

Though his interests vary, there is no questioning that his focus is in Latin America. During conversation, Schmidt can lean back and reconnect with any number of his personal experiences with South America. He had just such a particularly poignant moment at a check point in Honduras during the 1980s.

“I was greeted by a boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen, dressed in the latest Honduran military uniform, paid for by the American government.” Schmidt said. “After he took my [government] papers, he looked at them [upside down]; he was illiterate. It shows disconnect, something I can know beyond research.”

All of Schmidt’s teachings seem to come from a place of experience.

“I can talk about poverty and study its causes and consequences,” Schmidt said. “But perhaps more meaningfully, I can still feel the ribs of a woman I met at a church service in Nicaragua… she was frail from a heritage of poverty.”

Fortunately, we are blessed with those that are willing to not only read about but touch the problems of this world. Arthur Schmidt may be just such a blessing.

-- Profile by Honor Student Christopher Wink '08