When you walk into Charles Zelden’s office, professor in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, you walk into his laboratory. No, there are no microscopes, beakers or scales. There are books — his form of equipment.
“My office is no different from the guys in the labs across the hall with their thousands of dollars worth of equipment. I’ve spent over a thousand dollars on these books—the equipment that I use. This is where the information is that I need,” he said.
Zelden also said owning hundreds of books is part of the job. He said you don’t become a historian if you don’t love books and he has loved history books since he was young. In middle school, he was the student who had his history textbook read by the end of the third week of class.
“I went to college knowing I was going to be a history major. It was a given. It’s the thing I loved the most,” he said.
Though he knew he wanted to major in history, he did not predict he would be a historian. Zelden planned on attending law school. He later decided it was history he loved so he pursued legal history as a compromise between law and history. He applied for dual admit programs, but Rice University, where he got his Ph.D., did not have a law school. Luckily for Zelden, he found a job — not an easy thing for a legal historian with only a Ph.D. — at NSU.
Zelden arrived at NSU in the summer of 1993 (and yes, the freshmen he teaches were born around the same time he came here). He enjoys teaching at NSU because he has the freedom to teach what he wants and enjoys being a part of an interdisciplinary division. He has also been able to watch the evolution of the school.
Zelden said, “Seeing the growth and evolution of the university has made it a great place to be. When I first came here there were 300 day and about 1,000 night undergraduate students for the whole university. Look where we are now. It’s been fun to watch. The merger with Southeastern [in 1994] took us off into a new and good direction.”
He also enjoys the small class sizes and small programs because he gets to have many repeat students. He said he can see in his students’ eyes if they’re grasping the coursework or not.
“In a big lecture hall it’s a one man show. I can give entertaining lectures, but that’s not teaching. Teaching is interactive. I try to teach as many of my classes as interactive as possible. It makes for a fun learning process. The whole idea is to have fun at this,” he said.
Zelden teaches courses about American legal history, the judicial process and voting rights. He believes history is important because it’s the story of us.
“It’s the world’s greatest soap opera. It’s how we came to be the way we are. We are the sum total of our past actions — as individuals, as a people, as a community and as a world. If you don’t understand that, you’ll have trouble understanding who we are today,” he said.
However, Zelden is not only an educator for students, but the South Florida community as well. Since 2000, many local news stations, like NBC 6 and CBS 4, have Zelden on the show as an expert in politics. He enjoys it because it’s an outgrowth of what he does in a classroom.
“When I’m on camera, I’m trying to educate people about the topic and explain how it’s working, how it’s supposed to work and explain the structure of it. That’s what I do in class. I also like the challenge of educating people who I can’t see,” he said.
Zelden still has no idea how he became an expert on politics, appearing on news stations and giving quotes to the Sun-Sentinel, but he enjoys it. He enjoys analyzing what is going on and communicating that to a larger audience.
He said, “NBC has had me on live for the past couple of election nights. I enjoy it. They call and I make myself as available as I can. It’s one of those things that just sort of happened.”
