Norman Yetman is one of the few – if not the only – faculty members at Kansas University who can say he sued the university before he ever stepped foot in a classroom.

“That was one of the highlights,” the longtime professor said with a laugh Monday as he looked back on his 40-year career at KU.

Yetman, Chancellors Club teaching professor in sociology and American studies, has served as mentor, teacher and department chairman. He helped develop KU’s American studies department. He has led inquiries into new academic areas, helped change the focus of American studies and received numerous awards.

And he started it all, uniquely, as a litigant.

Fresh out of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, Yetman in 1966 made plans to teach at KU. The university sent him a McCarthy-era oath, asking him to vow that he did not sympathize with communist causes.

A card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Yetman said he was appalled.

“It was a clear violation of academic freedom,” he said.

Yetman joined a suit originated by a KU faculty member and physician who had the income to make the case. The oath later was declared unconstitutional.

Norm Yetman, a longtime Kansas University professor, is retiring after 40 years. Yetman has gained respect for his efforts in mentoring students.

Now he’s retiring. This time, though, no legal action is required.

Mentoring, teaching

Yetman said he has had a charmed life. The son of a Methodist minister, he was born too late to serve in the Korean War and too early for Vietnam. He began his academic career at a time when the “buddy system” was common and when there was a plethora of jobs.

“I was an affirmative action baby,” he said. “I fit the preferences of the time.”

But he hasn’t enjoyed the benefits of a being a white Anglo-Saxon male with blinders on.

Yetman’s scholarship has focused on slavery and race relations.

In the early 1970s, Yetman was among the first academics nationally to teach on the sociology of sport, breaking down the beloved pastimes to reveal the cultures of racism within them.

Many recent students know him for his course on the Brown v. Board of Education case. He’s the author of “Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life,” and has compiled slave narratives for other books.

He has always pressed for the American studies discipline to incorporate a more global perspective. And, he said, he still hopes to see at KU a center for global studies and a global studies scholars program, similar to the honors program.

David Katzman, fellow faculty member, said Yetman was one of the best mentors for students in KU history.

“I don’t think advising is one of the best things that large universities do,” Katzman said. “He has been a model for how advising and work with students can be done within a large university.”

Deanell Reece Tacha, a KU graduate and chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, said Yetman advised her and many others in her family.

“I credit him with catapulting me into the world of ideas,” Tacha said. “I remember even the very first time that I went to meet with him, he became a friend – both an intellectual friend and a personal friend.”

Tacha’s niece, Marynell Jones, took Yetman’s course last semester. She said Yetman wasn’t an easy teacher.

“He has the reputation of being a really hard teacher, but also, at the same time, a really good teacher,” Jones said.