Welcome! We are pleased to present this special issue of Child and Youth Services, a Festschrift to Dr. Michael Leon Baizerman,”Mike” to everyone who knows him. This Festschrift has taken years to complete, interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and delayed by authors who didn’t quite know how to capture how Mike contributed, supported, and expanded their understanding of youth work, young people, evaluation and youth services. It is fitting that the Festschrift appear here, given Mike’s longstanding support of this journal and its editors over the years, as a mentor to both Dr. Doug Magnuson and Dr. Ben Anderson-Nathe, and a colleague of Dr. Grant Charles. That the Festschrift appears in the final issue edited by these collaborators and former students of Mike’s is a testament to and expression of gratitude for his contributions to fields of practice, scholarship, and teaching related to the lives of children and youth.
Mike’s legacy is vast, having influenced innumerable people through his scholarship, service, and teaching. Mike’s scholarly activity is remarkable, spanning more than four decades. He started his tenure at the University of Minnesota in 1972 and retired in 2000. Yet, his scholarship began years before he came to the University through decades of work experience in the field as a youth worker, organizer, and public health social worker. As the stories in this Festschrift illustrate, this combination created a radical reimagining of scholarship in higher education and reconceptualization of both what it means to be young and what it means for adults to see and be present with youth.
Festschrifts intentionally bring together different writings as a tribute to a scholar. Typically, the authors represent scholars and academic colleagues who have been influenced and shaped by their ideas and writing. We present a slightly different authorship, reflecting Mike’s scholarly contribution. In this volume, you will read stories and reflections from scholars. Mike’s efforts certainly shaped many scholars. What you will also read are pieces from former students–who now work in a wide range of careers and community partners. It would be impossible to honor Mike’s scholarship without these voices. Most of the pieces cross categories and roles–former students who are now scholars, community partners who became students, and colleagues who worked with Mike. All these contributions tell the story of how to co-create an intentional and impactful scholarly agenda.
Before the idea of public engaged scholarship became widespread in academia (at least the idea), Mike lived as a public engaged scholar. His research agenda always made time/space for conversations with others–from within and outside of the University. Working with Mike meant that the day would be filled with conversations–with the coffee barista in the morning, the janitor as you walked into the school for interviews, with people you met on the street, in shops, or wherever you ended up. Mike has an uncanny ability to strike up a conversation. He lived a deep curiosity of others and had the courage to say hello. Working with Mike over the last twenty-five years, the spirit he brought to scholarship remains a legacy that created pathways for many who otherwise would not have considered scholarship as part of who they are and what they do. His scholarship is relationship, and relationship is his scholarship. His students become colleagues not because of their degrees or professional trajectories, but because the relationships he cultivates are intentional, authentic, and collegial from the outset. He models relational practice in the classroom (both within and beyond the walls of the University), in his engagement, and in his activism. Put together, these relationships become his scholarship.
This Festschrift can be read simply as a tribute to Mike. In the end, we believe it is more. It also provides a history of how a scholar can radically reimagine what it means to be/to do scholarship at a major research institution, not to mention in the classroom, the community center, or even in sites of civil unrest and conflict. As you will read, Mike’s scholarship can only be described as and/both. He focused on critical problems and challenging ideas and created programs, services, and policies to change the everyday lives of young people. Writing for Mike was never enough. He wrote hundreds of articles and taught overload most of the last twenty years. He taught students and co-taught with students. He designed studies to understand youth concerns and worked with young people to design research projects on problems they cared about and wanted to act on. A remarkable legacy of his scholarship is the example it provides of how one can always be more than the role assigned–a major idea he also taught and wrote about extensively. His scholarship reflected both the questions he asked and the way he lived everyday. He created a vision of public engaged scholarship through living and doing this work over the last 48 years. This vision responded to the call by Martin Buber to create a life filled with dialogue:
Where the dialogue is fulfilled in its being, between partners who have turned toward one another in truth, who express themselves without reserve and are free of the desire for semblance, there is brought into being a memorable common fruitfulness which is to be found nowhere else. At such times, at each such time, the world arises in a substantial way between men who have been seized in their depths and opened out by the dynamic of an elemental togetherness. The interhuman opens out to what otherwise remains unopened. (Glatzer, Citation1966, 106)
Reference
- Glatzer, N.N. (1966). The way of response: Martin Buber. Selections from his writing. New York: Schocken Books.