Several factors draw potential faculty to Oakland University. For Associate Professor of English, Timothy Donahue, it was always his outstanding students. What led him here is an academic and professional journey that’s a staunch representation of patience and self-discovery.
Donahue’s journey to professorship started in Chicago, in a homeless shelter. It was here, after receiving a bachelor’s in English from Xavier University, that Donahue found himself questioning his true calling.
“I had this moment where I was like, ‘Do I want to go get a master’s degree in social work?’ or ‘Do I want to go get a master’s in English,’” Donahue said. “I did the work that I was doing. You know, people need housing.”
Donahue found fulfillment in working at the homeless shelter teaching underprivileged individuals.
“We’d sit down and read newspaper articles, I also checked out all the GED textbooks from my college’s library and brought them down there,” Donahue said. “I just had this moment where I was like ‘I could see myself doing this.’”
Donahue returned to higher education, this time earning a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago. This return to Chicago led to his next job, which Donahue attributes to luck.
“I got really lucky,” Donahue said. “I got a job teaching in the City Colleges of Chicago, which is like the community college system of Chicago.”
The college he’d be assigned to was Harold Washington College, in the heart of downtown. The job came with teaching English composition and developmental classes, which were designed to help students reach college-level proficiency.
“I liked it because people [would] come out of class and be like ‘Okay, I used what we did in English 100 to write a resume and I’ve got a job,’” Donahue said. “I was like ‘That’s a win.’”
It was after Donahue’s tenure as a community college professor that he chose to pursue a doctorate, landing him in New York for the next chapter of his life.
“I read a book by Anna Brickhouse [Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere], and I thought that is kind of like the research that I [currently] do, and I remember reading it and thinking ‘I have to know how to do this,’ so I applied to the Ph.D programs,” Donahue said. “I went to grad school in New York, and it took a long time.”
Once Donahue’s doctorate was completed, he found himself at OU. He looks to stay for much longer, in part due to his students and the general student body.
“[With] Oakland students, they’re bright people, and they’ve got a lot of stuff going on, they’re a bit more worldly and experienced,” Donahue said. “People have smart things to say and that’s an exciting thing to do.”
Donahue’s dedication to contributing to a healthy democracy is what drives him to come to work every day. It was the case at Harold Washington and remains so at OU.
“This is how you build a democracy,” Donahue said. “You read hard things, you think hard about them together, you talk to people, you reflect on history.”
