Dr. Solomon Iyasere spent a distinguished 44-year career at CSUB. He joined the CSUB faculty in the fall of 1972, having just earned a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. He earned an MS in Education from SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, New York in 1968 just one year after earning a BA with honors in English from SUNY. Solomon was hired as an assistant professor to teach Shakespeare and literary criticism at a fledgling, two-year-old “CSB” campus. Two years later in 1974, he received early tenure and promotion to associate professor and became a full professor in 1978. He received the Millie Ablin Excellence Award in Teaching in 1985-86; the Exceptional Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching in numerous years; was a Wang Award nominee; a Professor of the Year award nominee; and was one of 50 professors selected nationwide by the American Association for Higher Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for extraordinary leadership in teaching, scholarship, and service.
Solomon developed and taught more than 35 different courses here at CSUB. In addition to Shakespeare and literary criticism, his areas of specialization included creative writing, world literature, non-western literature, African literature, and African-American literature. He wrote extensively on the oral tradition in African and African American literature, which encompasses the use of proverbs, folk tales, myths, fables, and repetition. He was widely known as a scholar of African literature, a rhetorical critic, and essayist who distinguished Eurocentric and Afrocentric forms of literary criticism and the importance of employing both, “cultural formalism,” an analytical approach he pioneered, to validly analyze African and African-American literature. Of this need for cultural sensitivity he wrote, “To assess a work by foreign standards leads to a mutilation of the message and robs the communication of its vitality.”
His scholarship included literary critical analyses of Othello and Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula (with his wife, Dr. Marla Iyasere, CSUB’s Founding Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of English Emerita). His essay, “Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart,” has been reprinted four times and is considered a definitive analysis of the most widely read and studied English language African novel. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Shakespeare in Africa. His conference presentations included “Racial Issues in Shakespeare’s Othello”; “Race Matters: Approaches to Shakespeare’s Othello”; “Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello to a Group of Multi-Racial Students”; and “Pardon Me, Professor, Why Do I have to Read Othello?”
In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Solomon’s record of service to the University is extensive. As the founding Director of Diversity Services (1988-92), he laid the groundwork for inclusive excellence, one of the core values that guides us and a pillar of our vision statement. He collaborated to establish effective diversity policies and strategic guidelines resulting in the hiring of diverse faculty and staff. He helped revise the GE curriculum to include multicultural and international dimensions, and designed the English Single Subject Teacher Preparation program to incorporate multiculturalism. He developed the MA in Teaching of English, which is now the cornerstone for educating community college writing teachers in the CSUB service region. He served as Chair of the Department of English and Communications (1992-97), co-founded the Career Beginnings Program and the Ernest Williams, Jr. Scholarship Fund, and served on numerous departmental and university-wide committees.
Solomon’s legacy includes his founding of Orpheus, the annual student literary journal. Since its establishment in 1973, the journal has published the work of more than 2,500 students, several of whom have become national award-winning writers and playwrights. The journal invites the submission of short stories, poems, paintings, and other creative works for publication in the 2015/2016 edition.
(from President Horace Mitchell's Memorandum to the Campus Community)
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