| The Other Class of ’07: Retiring faculty look back on life at AU In addition to the hundreds of students who leave AU each spring to make their mark in the world, there’s a smaller group of faculty who say goodbye as well. This year, 12 faculty will “graduate” into retirement after years teaching and learning at the front of the classroom. Six of them spoke with American Weekly to share their recollections and future plans. School of International Service (SIS) professor Duncan Clarke has taught U.S. foreign and national security policy at AU since 1970, and is the author of several books on foreign policy and arms control and numerous journal articles. He has been named one of the university’s Ten Best Professors and chosen as Scholar-Teacher of the Year by SIS. Fondest Memory: “To hike with my students, graduate or undergraduate. Just two months ago, two SIS grad students and a roommate of one of them and I went out to the Shenandoah. In Japan, at Ritsumeikan, I’ve gone hiking with Japanese and Chinese grad students. I’ve always spent as much time [with students] out of classroom as in class or office hours. I had my honors seminar over to my house just last week . . . Sometimes we talk substantive stuff, sometimes we don’t.” Best part of the Job: “The thing I will miss more than anything are my students. Over the years I’ve had 2 or 3,000, and so many of them now are my very best friends. I’ve had children of some of them as students; both of my daughters are SIS alums; my late wife of 30 years was in my very first class; one of my daughters married one of my grad students. Even some of the members of the faculty are my former students. Really, what means most to me has been circled in and around AU.” Future Plans: “I’m taking retirement a little early because my wife got a good job with NASA in Palo Alto, Calif. I’m a hiker and outdoorsman, and schools in the Bay Area have indicated they would like to have cheap labor. I plan to mostly go out in the mountains and go hiking, and if I miss the classroom, which I probably will, I’ll do some teaching . . . As for research and writing? If I get angry, I will. And I might!” A fixture in the School of Public Affairs’ Department of Public Administration and Policy, Harvey Lieber has devoted his professional career to environmental conservation and management—and his students. Known for his love of ice cream and political cartoons, Lieber also serves as the department’s internship director, helping students interested in public service follow their own passions. Fondest memory: “Vietnam War Protests, circa 1972: Standing at Ward Circle with Bob Cleary and other professors, acting as a buffer, between protesting students who asked motorists to ‘honk your horns for peace’ and cops who were concerned about obstructing traffic and ready to pounce on any student who stepped onto the street.” Best part of the job: “Having the opportunity to meet generations of idealistic and activist students and helping them to prepare for community and public service.” Future plans: “I will still be part of the AU community by continuing to supervise graduate interns as well as encouraging students to become Presidential Management Fellows.” SIS professor Hamid Mowlana founded the International Communication program in 1968, making it one of the earliest programs of its nature in the country. He served as its director for 37 years, while winning professional honors, writing 30 books, and serving as a visiting professor at universities in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Fondest Memory: “I was given a chance to develop this program, and I’ve really seen the field emerging. During the Vietnam War, you could see so many things coming to the surface. International conflict was taking a different shape, the role of information and propaganda was changing . . . I was predicting this would happen, this information age, both in its negative and positive terms . . . Then [the other night] my students had a reception in my honor, and my students decided to make three presentations. You would never have thought, 40 years ago, that students in SIS would now be writing papers [on] new media in the Arab world, identity and anxiety among Muslim students in the U.S., and the role of intercultural communication in globalization. All of these interesting and exciting topics—if you had said 40 years ago we were going to be considering those things, they wouldn’t have believed it!” Best Part of the Job: “I now have so many students around the world who are both teachers as well as professionals. It’s so nice when you travel. I have supervised almost 150 doctoral dissertations, and close to 50 are teaching all over the world as professors—they are in Indonesia, Finland, Iran, Egypt, Sweden, Australia—some of them are deans and directors. That’s really rewarding.” Future Plans: “Scholars do not retire like other people, they just change their schedules. I’ll be doing more writing and thinking. My calendar is full for the next five years. I have invitations beginning this summer form the University of Beijing in China, the University of Pubjab in Pakistan, the Sorbonne in Paris, Australia . . . I’m going to have fun and do some writing, especially for the general publicabout my field and its implications.” College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) literature professor Kermit Moyer taught courses on creative writing and American literature for more than two decades. During his tenure at AU, Moyer was inspired by visiting writers like William Stafford and Stanley Kunitz to try his hand at his own creative writing, publishing Tumbling in 1988, which the New York Times Book Review hailed as “a work of ringing authenticity.” Fondest Memory: “In the early days of the [MFA in creative writing] program I went to all the writing workshops with every visiting writer. So I feel like I have an honorary MFA degree . . . One of my favorites was Richard Yates . . . He showed me where to start the first story I ever published, a story called ‘Compass of the Heart.’ He pointed to a sentence on page three and said that’s your beginning, and he was absolutely right. Best Part of the Job: “You always hear that you learn from teaching, but it’s not so simple as a student giving you an insight into a poem or a novel you’ve been teaching for years . . . When I’m teaching I find myself thinking about what I’m teaching all the time, and it’s not only the subject that I’m teaching, but the feeling of that particular room, the feeling of the particular people in that class. You’re all talking about this novel or this poem, which enables you to talk more deeply about your own experiences than if you were just talking about yourselves. That conversation somehow becomes a part of you, and I think it’s a great privilege to be in that position.” Future Plans: “I’ve been working on a series of short stories about a young man named Chester Patterson. He’s a lot like me in many ways, but it’s fiction. I thought I was finished with it, but I’ve gotten some feedback that maybe it should be a novel. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I’m going to revisit what I’ve written and see where it goes . . . I’m also not convinced that I won’t ever teach again. When I’m away from teaching I find ways of teaching people in my life—my wife mostly. I give her a lecture on The Great Gatsby or something. I’ve actually done that.” CAS literature professor Myra Sklarew began teaching at AU in 1970. The former president of the Yaddo artist community, she has written three chapbooks, six collections of poetry, a book of essays, and a collection of short fiction. She’s currently working on a nonfiction book exploring the fractured memories of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors tentatively titled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory. Fondest Memory: “I used to run this program on Washington for undergrads [in the mid-1970s], and we got the curator of the Smithsonian Castle, James Good, to take us out on a barge that we borrowed from the National Park Service. It was called the Wood Duck Barge, and we’d sail up and down the Potomac River at 5 o’clock in the morning as he pointed out all the buildings that use to be there. Then when we were all soaked and miserable and excited, we’d end up in Georgetown, get coffee, and go to school.” Best Part of the Job: “Of all the things I’ve worked at here—I’ve done administration, I’ve chaired the department, I’ve started programs, but that particular whatever it is, that mysterious thing that we do when we’re in the classroom can’t be duplicated in some other way, and that I will always miss. You come into a room and there are 30 strangers . . . and then little by little there’s a conversation that goes on mostly on paper and then in person. It’s just that process, which happens over and over again, how you come to one another and how they rise up in your mind and your spirit, and then it’s gone. And this time, I’ll be gone too. That’s going to be a huge loss for me. Future Plans: “I’m going to finish this book on the Holocaust, but I’m also interested in getting some kind of rescue training. People think I’m joking, but I’m not. After seeing what happened with Katrina, I have this need . . . There are lots of ways you can be useful, and I very much want to be useful. I’m interested in this process of growing old, this question of what to do with whatever time you have left. No one gives you an instruction book on how to do it. So the rest is sort of like a poem. You put a word down and see where it goes. I’m looking forward to taking that first step and seeing where it goes.”
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Wendy Swallow is a professor in the journalism division of the School of Communication. Her professional background includes time spent as a reporter and editor for business and financial news at the Washington Post. She’s a contributor to the Washingtonian, National Journal, Washington Journalism Review, Journalism Quarterly, Journalism Educator, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Parenting, and others. Fondest Memory: “My favorite memory from my years at AU was when a sophomore in my reporting class, on assignment for me, discovered that one of the candidates running for the D.C. School Board was lying about his academic credentials. The student found out and then went through a rigorous effort to confirm that the candidate did not have a PhD from George Washington University, as he was claiming, or even from any university. We vetted the story, then published it in the American Observer, our online newspaper produced by the graduate journalism students. I e-mailed editors at the Washington Post to alert them to our scoop, and they covered the story giving my student credit for the scoop and even interviewing him. The story made the nightly news and the candidate lost the election by a small percentage of the vote, which convinced me that the story probably made the difference. There are other examples of our students making a difference, but I always treasured that memory because if my student hadn’t been out there digging around, a person of little moral integrity would be sitting on the D.C. School Board today.” Best Part of the Job: “My favorite part of this job, year after year, was sitting with students one-on-one and going over the drafts of their articles. I love to talk about good writing, and the fastest way to help them improve is to work with them individually. Each student has different challenges in their writing process, and I find the coaching approach the best way to target those individual differences.” Future Plans: “My plans for the future are to refocus my energy on my own writing and reporting. I'm particularly interested in covering climate change from a land use and zoning perspective, at the local level where tough, everyday decisions are being made. I covered land use issues when I was at the Washington Post, and I'd like to get back to them, but now with a longer lens. My husband and I are going to be out west for the rest of this year, where some critical climate issues are already surfacing, so I hope to get started there—after I finish visiting Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.” |
