University of New England

by Steve Price

As a young man on a lark, Samuel McReynolds slipped quietly across the border from Honduras into El Salvador. The time was 1981, and he heard there was a war going on. He had been doing contract work in Honduras, evaluating rural development projects. But he wanted to see the war in El Salvador. So he sneaked into the country without a passport or visa. He was quickly arrested by the military on a trumped-up charge of taking illegal photographs. The possibility of being shot was quite real. When he was released, he figured he’d never go back to El Salvador. But he did, and his experiences there forever changed his life and his teaching.

Today Sam McReynolds is an associate professor and chair of the Sociology Department. An accomplished academic who has spent a fair part of his life with his nose in a book, he also has seen brutal poverty first hand, seen bellies extended from hunger, seen bodies lying dead in the street. In El Salvador he was robbed at gun point on Thanksgiving Day, had a $25,000 vehicle stolen from him, saw five of his field jeeps firebombed while having lunch, and - the topper- barely missed being assassinated, the fate of one of his assistants.
 Lest you start imagining a UNE version of Indiana Jones, know that Sam McReynolds is a serious teacher, writer and scholar who values experiential learning and brings vivid stories and a distinctive international flavor to his classes, along with a healthy dose of real-world expertise.
 
"My experiences bring an emphasis in my teaching, that this ‘ain’t no party,’ this is real, real stuff," he says. "I think it brings a color and immediacy to the classroom, but it also brings a value system that I think we have an obligation to help people."
 McReynolds’ eye-opening adventures firmly fixed his commitment to give something back, in his teaching and in sharing his extraordinary experiences.

International Study Bug
He got the international bug early. His family moved to southern Florida when he was in the second grade. The following year the first Cuban émigrés started to move into his community, fleeing the Castro revolution. For a year his school taught Spanish. "This triggered me to have some interests beyond the borders of my community," he observes.
 His early interest in Russian history, especially the 1917 revolution and the land reforms of 1862, set him on a winding academic path. While Russian studies were virtually wiped out during the Reagan era, land reform remained a focal interest and would ultimately connect many of the threads of his career.

In the early 1980s, armed with degrees in government and history, he took a job with the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont. For six years he did applied research, implementing and assessing rural development projects in that state. It was this job that led to contract work in Honduras, which led him, at first surreptitiously, to El Salvador.

Despite his arrest and near-execution a few years earlier, McReynolds returned to El Salvador in the fall of 1986 as a technical consultant, dovetailing with his plans to earn a doctorate in rural sociology from Cornell University. This would begin a five-year relationship with the country. When not doing graduate work, he worked on a variety of projects, including an agricultural census of El Salvador that involved interviewing 6,000 farmers. The country, embroiled in civil war, was also attempting a dramatic experiment in land reform. At the time, one percent of the population controlled 50 percent of the land. McReynolds, who now had a chance to improve upon his one year of third-grade Spanish, designed a field study and oversaw the collection and analysis of vast amounts of data. He would later write his Ph.D. dissertation, three scholarly articles, a book chapter, and a book-in-progress on the social, economic and environmental impacts of this massive redistribution of the land.The early signs were hopeful, he notes. His research demonstrated that El Salvador’s land reform had real economic impacts: more stability, increased income, better lives. And, less tangible but perhaps more importantly, enhanced the status of the new land owners.

"It’s a real issue that permeates all of Latin America," McReynolds explains. "Land is fundamental to the psychological and social status of people there. Access to land is critical to these folks’ sense of well being."

Experiment Faltered
Ultimately, the experiment faltered because, in McReynold’s opinion, it didn’t go far enough. Major agrarian reforms stopped in El Salvador following the Peace Accord of 1992. "The real irony is that it was a 12-year war that both sides lost," he says ruefully. The post-war reforms, while ironically bringing the right-wing national police and the leftist revolutionaries together in a strange coalition to secure their land rights, have suffered from the collapse of cash crops, particularly coffee, too few agricultural subsidies and the economic power of regional markets.

McReynolds returned to El Salvador in 2000 to follow up on his research and monitor the elections. What he found was "more of a war zone now than it was during the war." Many Salvadorians immigrated to large cities in the U.S., where they learned about gangs and drug trafficking. When these gangs moved back to their own country, they took control of the rural areas and started another kind of internecine warfare fueled by the illegal drug trade and old hatreds.

Sam McReynolds claims he learned 99 percent of what he knows through direct experience. So he likes to emphasize experiential learning in his classes. "I have a commitment to teach that way, because that’s how I learned," he says. "UNE is good in this respect."
  "I take it seriously in my class," he continues, "so sometimes I go beyond the textual material we are learning. This is life - not just some esoteric policy we’re talking about. Life. You can see what this policy is going to do to somebody. This approach makes my students perk up. It’s real, it’s not an abstraction. I think in general our faculty bring that to the classroom."

Obligation to Learn
McReynolds believes we have an obligation to learn. "Learning how to learn - that’s the most important thing I can help our students do. Because then they can solve the complicated problems they will face in life, like high taxes in Maine, the war in Iraq, terrorists. Part of what I try to tell my students is that it’s not that easy - you have to think. You have to solve problems, in all their complexity. The are few simple answers to today’s problems," he says.

McReynolds also contributes to many students’ learning experiences as the director of internships, the sponsor of UNE’s primary study abroad program, and as a coordinator of the core curriculum’s fourth-year Citizenship Program.  
 
"Everything I’ve done," he relates, "has brought a thirst for me to continue learning, and I hope the students see that."

His continuous approach to learning has taken him more recently to Brazil, a powerful South American country that always fascinated him for a variety of reasons, including its on-going process of land reform. He met his wife, Vanessa Andrade, there, who owns a Brazilian shop recently opened in Portland.

"One of the reasons I pushed on with my studies in Brazil is because I want to see more perspectives. The more I can learn from other countries, the more I understand my life here," he concludes.