The current edition of the Providence Phoenix has a front page article celebrating the paper’s 30th year entitled, “30 Interviews with 30 Local Luminaries.”  One of these luminaries is Rhode Island College’s own adjunct professor of English, Richard Walton.   The Anchor set out to interview him before finding out about this.   A little redundancy is ok in this instance: Everybody should know Richard Walton.

Imagine being a rookie journalist and having to interview a graduate of first Brown University and then the Columbia School of Journalism who went on to be a practicing journalist for over 20 years and who has taught writing at the college level for more than 20 more.  Further imagine, after interviewing this man for nearly and hour and recording the conversation on your digital voice recorder, having to re-approach this same fellow and tell him that somehow you had inadvertently erased the conversation and would he mind spending a little time going over the same ground.  This was the situation which The Anchor found itself in last Friday.  Fortunately, the fellow whose interview had been erased was the aforementioned Professor Walton who was compassionate for two reasons: first of all, he is an extraordinarily compassionate man and, secondly, Professor Walton had once recorded an interview that he had done with Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the first President of Nigeria—known as the “Golden Voice of Africa.”  When the President requested to hear a snippet of the conversation at the end of the session, a red faced Walton turned on the recorder and heard nothing—his engineer had screwed up (How I wish I had an engineer).  Professor Walton, recalls that the President kindly acquiesced to a do-over.  Mr. Walton understood my problem perfectly and graciously assented to a second chance for me as well.

Richard Walton is the gentleman you might see in Craig-Lee in the English Department’s adjunct office or in front of Adams Library during free period the last Wednesday of every month protesting the War in Iraq.   He is easy to spot; he is a dead ringer for Walt Whitman! (Pick up a copy of Leaves of Grass and look for a photo; let me know if I’m wrong.)  Professor Walton became my hero when he told me that “he has not had a full time job since 1967.”  He was 40!  Please do not labor under the assumption that Walton has been sleeping until noon every day.  Without the impediment of full time work, Professor Walton devoted much of his time to writing, social activism and teaching.  He told the Phoenix that he had had “dozen books published and countless articles for publications ranging from the New York Times, the Nation, and the Washington Post to Playboy and Cosmopolitan.  And I’ve written for the Village Voice, the NewPaper, the Phoenix, and the Providence Journal.”  He has been active at the local homeless shelter and soup kitchen Amos House for 25 years still spends one night per week volunteering there.  Walton continues to serve (as he has for years) on the board of the George Wiley Center, for many years R.I.’s leading advocacy group for the poor.  He was a founder, first president, and long time emcee for Stone Soup Coffee House, one of the state’s first (and sometimes only) venue for folk music.  Since the mid-80s, he has made numerous trips, sometimes for as long as a month to Nicaragua and Guatemala on humanitarian missions.

Politically, Walton has been a hard working liberal since 1952 when he campaigned and cast his first vote for the former Democratic Governor of Illinois, Adelaide Stephenson in his doomed campaign against Dwight Eisenhower.  He was once a candidate for high office himself (one with even less chance of success than Stephenson).  He ran for vice president as the nominee of the Citizens Party in 1984 as the running mate of radical feminist Sonia Johnson.  Mr. Walton has found himself in opposition to pretty much every war his country has waged since Vietnam (I forgot to ask about Korea).   He is as unreconstructed a lefty as you are likely to meet.

Professor Walton has been teaching first History and Political Science (he says they needed somebody on the left to balance off what they had—imagine) and then writing here for 22 years.  He does not think the college has changed much over the years.  He likes teaching at RIC, which he thinks of as an “entryway into the wider world with so many first generation college students.”  If you believe Walton (and you’d be a fool not to on this point), he finds some students here “who can hold their own anywhere.”  (Hey, he could mean you.)    

Right now, Mr. Walton is engaged in the efforts of the adjuncts from the various academic departments to improve their pay and working conditions.  As part of the newly formed union’s negotiating team, he sits across from the College’s team as both sides seek a mutually acceptable agreement (the college has offered peanuts, but the adjuncts are holding out for salted).  If I were an adjunct professor, I would be happy to have him on my side; just as, as part of the RIC community, I am proud to have him on my campus.