My Interview with Dr. Loeb

I interviewed psychology Professor Roger Loeb in his office at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. During my interview with Dr. Loeb, I noticed many beautiful pieces of art and souvenirs that decorated his office. I could tell Dr. Loeb loves to travel; each piece of art in his office came from a different country. He had a lamp from India, a stuffed animal parrot from Mexico, a beautiful quilt from Peru hung on his wall, and hanging from his ceiling I saw the most beautiful, colorful butterfly kite from China. I also saw many pictures of him and his family members, showing how family oriented he is. I also saw a picture of him smiling with a group of children from a different country; I could tell that he likes children. Professor Loeb is a very nice man; he smiles all the time he has a gentle, yet assertive presence. He is very knowledgeable about the field of psychology, his gray hair symbolizes his wisdom but he has very few wrinkles, he has a young spirit and is very down to earth. He is a very passionate teacher and he knows how to relate to his students and I think that is a very good quality to have as a professor.
Dr. Loeb has been a psychology professor for almost forty years but he was not as enthusiastic about teaching at the start of his career. He just sort of “fell into it”, as he describes. Even though he applied to graduate programs in psychology, his PhD is not in psychology; he actually doesn’t have any degrees in psychology. His PhD is in human development with a major in child and family psychopathology.
Through his first years of college Dr. Loeb had trouble making up his mind and what field he wanted to pursue; he studied political science at Cornell University, then discovered that he was no longer interested in being a pre-law major. He took a vocational interest test and the test suggested he be a lawyer, accountant or a social science teacher. He did not want to be a lawyer or an accountant, and at that time he did not even know what social science meant, but he figured it had something to do with sociology, so he took a sociology classes and loved it. He then decided to be a sociology/anthropology major, however, by the end of his junior year he started to prefer psychology.
When Dr. Loeb applied to the graduate program at Cornell University, he expressed that he was not interested in teaching. He wanted to work with and research emotionally disturbed children and families, but they offered him a teaching assistantship anyway; he accepted the offer because it was good pay. He was so nervous about teaching his first class, because he didn’t really want to teach. He did not prepare for his classes and did not teach by any of the readings, he changed the classes into discussion sections. “…the students started asking me questions and amazingly enough I knew the answers. Others I would turn into discussion questions, others I would say ‘that’s so important; I’ll get back to you next week’.” He said with a smirk. “The cutting edge therapies, many of which are biochemical, I barely understand and find confusing as do I think many students and I don’t think that’s really necessary in a first-time undergraduate class.”
When he noticed how engaged the student were in his class, he became excited. “They wrote everything down that I said, and they laughed at my poor jokes, and they all paid attention, and I thought ‘this is great! I love this!’” The light bulb went on, and Dr. Loeb changed his entire career plan at that point, during his second year of graduate school. He never wavered since then, he’s been teaching full time for thirty-nine years and still loves his job.
When I asked Dr. Loeb what interests him the most about psychology, he answered, “Why people behave the way they do, what it is particularly in their backgrounds that make them do these things like: want to learn or not want to learn, to be shy versus outgoing, submissive or domineering. My particular interest is parent/ child interaction, and I think that comes from my own childhood experiences; issues of control, issues of self-esteem. And I’m interested in those same topics applied to special groups.”
Dr. Loeb has done research with regular children, as well as children kids with sensory impairments, visual or hearing impairments and gifted children. He is mostly interested in gender differences; it is a variable he likes to study. “…and reflecting my sociology background, I’m also very impressed with the power of social class differences. Even within what America calls ‘broadly middle class’, the difference between lower middle class and middle to upper middle class, there are substantial differences.” Over the years Dr. Loeb has also become very interested in evaluating the impact of education. “…since I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m curious as to what educators actually accomplish. And I’m not so interested in what they accomplish intellectually or academically, but what changes they bring about in their students’ values, attitudes and approaches to life.”
Not only has Dr. Loeb been a professor for thirty-nine years, he was also a part-time practicing psychologist for a number of years. He was a therapist in graduate school, and he worked in a variety of settings. The first place he worked was in a program for dealing with mentally retarded children, he also ran parent groups for the parents of those children. Dr. Loeb ran parent groups for parents of children suffering from schizophrenia as well. In Michigan, he worked in a private clinic as a therapist for individuals, families and groups. Dr. Loeb found that the more he practiced therapy, the more he realized that he made the right choice in being a teacher. Dr. Loeb has no interest in being a therapist anymore but he does teach therapeutic assessment techniques to his students.
When I asked why he didn’t like being a therapist, Dr. Loeb answered, “A friend of mine, who is an excellent therapist, says ‘To be a good therapist, you have to be nosey.’ I think I wasn’t nosey enough. I am nosey about my friends; but people I didn’t know, I found I just wasn’t that interested. I also found it frustrating working with kids when I didn’t have access to their parents. And with adults, I found it frustrating because what seemed to happen over the months of seeing them…they didn’t seem to make a lot of progress; the same old issues kept coming up. The only thing that seemed to change is they seemed to become more dependent on me as a therapist, which was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish; and that is to make them independent. It’s very tough, I think you need a special kind of personality that I don’t have for being a good therapist.” He told me after seeing his clients, he was much happier to see his students.
Dr. Loeb started teaching at the University of Michigan- Dearborn in 1978. He teaches many courses, three every semester. The course I was mainly fond of was his Abnormal Psychology through Film class, because my paper has to do with the effects of films. Dr. Loeb created this particular class two years ago. He has been teaching normal psychology since his first year at the university and he was getting tired of doing the same course over and over. He also felt that he was a little out of date and since psychology is a rapidly changing field, he decided to teach his psychology class with a twist. Loeb also teaches a class called Psychology and Theatre; he found it to be very challenging and reinvigorating. “…Relating to theatre through film and there’s so much abnormal psychology in movies I thought it would be interesting for the students, interesting for me; I think it brings special things to the classroom…It makes it much more real than reading about it in textbooks, another thing that it brings, is that it shows the impact of the mental illness on family and friends, which you also don’t get from reading in a book. The third thing I think that some of the films do is they show the societal reaction to the person or persons with mental illness; that is how they are treated in the hospital, outside of the hospital. And those are issues of interest to me, given my interdisciplinary background. I’m very interested in societal reactions, family impact issues. And that’s something special that I can bring to the class.” The kind of movies he shows are primarily dramas, mystery and suspense; sometimes “slasher” movies but Prof. Loeb does not show many horror films because he finds them to be inappropriate for the classroom and the students react very strongly.