Now, armed with a master’s degree from Oxford and a doctorate from Berkeley, he gets to teach literature, a job that equates to pure pleasure for him. He also relishes his role as an educator and an encourager to his students, many of whom come from small towns similar to Hydro. He says Oklahomans seem to have an inborn self-deprecating nature that keeps them admirably humble, but may hold them back. One day in class, his students laughed at him when he suggested they could do work on par with elite students at Ivy League schools. “Coming back, for me, confirmed what I had been telling people for a long time about OSU — that the students here are just as good as the students anywhere. They have the ability to achieve on the same level as the top students from the Ivy League schools or any of those sorts of places. That’s the line that I’ve been giving everybody for years and years.” Greteman’s desk could be a metaphor for his numerous responsibilities. Paintings from his son Finn hang over it. A tape recorder for his freelancing work with the magazine Ode sets next to the phone. Books are marked and dog-eared. A cell phone rings several times. Discussion continues from his days in London as a TIME journalist covering events leading up to the Iraq war to the British relationship between government and the media. In League with the Best Blaine Greteman becomes animated when he talks about literature, history, politics or his poor wife and four kids temporarily crammed into their Stillwater apartment. No matter the subject, he fidgets, squirms and adjusts the sport coat on the back of his chair as he talks, raising his voice for emphasis inside his office, perched in a dark corner of Morrill Hall’s third floor. His love of literature, he says, started when he was a kid growing up in Hydro, a town of about 1,000 along Route 66 in western Oklahoma. “One of the first books that I really fell in love with was The Grapes of Wrath. One of the towns the Joads go through is Hydro,” he says. “Often, you sort of discover yourself and your history in a book like that … that’s an amazing experience.” Greteman, who won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1998, also loves his alma mater and its staff, who gave him a scholarship that allowed him to study without student loans. After graduating in 1998, he became the youngest to be named a Distinguished Alumnus of the College of Arts and Sciences, a fact which astounds him today because, he says, he knows of many peers who were better students than he. He marvels at how he ended up back at OSU, even though he’s leaving in the fall for a position at the University of Iowa, where he’ll be teaching students from the renowned Writers’ Workshop. “Oklahoma is home and it always has a way of bringing you back,” Greteman says. He came to OSU after finishing his doctoral degree in 2008. He had left TIME some years before to be policy director for Oklahoma senatorial candidate Brad Carson. Leaving OSU for Iowa was a difficult decision for him, but he realizes he does his best work under duress in new foreign places that ratchet up his stimulation and observational skills. He says that’s part of what OSU did for him when he was an undergraduate. “Also, I think part of me realizes I just have this kind of wanderlust,” Greteman says. Matt Elliott Photo by Gary Lawson Oklahoma State university 9 Blaine Greteman Distinguished Alumnus 1998 ’98 English alumni
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