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Stephen Collins '74
Kerill O'Neill, the Taylor Assistant Professor of Classics, grew up in Ireland speaking English and Gaelic. He started Latin at 8 years old and Ancient Greek at 10 at the Jesuit school he attended in Dublin, and he picked up French and a bit of Spanish during the summers that he spent at a Franco enclave in Iberia. He recognized at a young age the power and intrigue of both ancient and modern languages. But it wasn't a brilliant and electrifying teacher that launched the young O'Neill down the road to becoming a classical scholar and a tenured professor at Colby. It was a teacher who didn't seem to be getting through to the class. "I felt bad for the guy," O'Neill said, "and I started memorizing declensions." It didn't take long until he started seeing systems and patterns behind all the languages, and soon he was hooked. "To some degree," he said, "classics is just a highly convoluted, complex word game." As an academic discipline it's much more than that, of course. O'Neill rattled off language, philosophy, literature, art, archeology and anthropology as some of the components of Colby's classics curriculum. And "relevance is never a problem," he said. In a Tuesday afternoon Roman Legends and Literature lecture this spring about heroes, he connected the traits of modern heroes to their classical antecedents. Pacing the stage and the aisles of Lovejoy 100, he paused, looked up and said, "One of the things about Jason [of Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame] is that he strikes me as a precursor of our James Bond. Bond constantly needs to be helped out of a bind by Ursula Andress or someone like that. In Jason's case it was Medea." When it comes to the heroic characteristic of going to the underworld and returning, dying and coming back to life, O'Neill asks, "Any of you seen The Matrix? It's really a modern hero story." With his lean frame, narrow neckties, longish hair, glasses and faint traces of the Emerald Isle in his accent, O'Neill cuts the figure of a classics professor but not the remote and purely cerebral don. He and his wife, Judy Landers, spent six years as faculty residents in The Heights, and he fondly recounts tales of student vs. faculty bowling matches and Halloween talks about ancient magic. He found the faculty-resident role overwhelmingly positive but said, "I don't think it's for everyone. You have to be a pretty heavy sleeper, for one thing." An avocation that, like the faculty-resident role, guarantees plenty of quality time with students outside the classroom probably helped with the sound sleeping. O'Neill is a long-time member of Colby's water polo team. Since it's a club sport, the team was able to petition the "league" to allow him to play as a faculty member, and he takes great pride in "regularly" beating Boston University and, one year, coming within a goal of going to the national tournament. "We're a team that other teams fear," he said, sounding like a Spartan commander praising his troops. O'Neill, who was granted tenure at the January trustees' meeting, was the only faculty member eligible this year. That's very unusual, insofar as Colby has tenured an average of eight professors annually over the past five years. Due only to the quirks of the tenuring schedule, this is the first year since 1977 that only one person was eligible, according to Lillian Levesque, assistant to the dean of faculty. The singular O'Neill clearly relishes his work-"opening new vistas to students" and getting to teach a variety of material and classes that range from 10 students or fewer to a comfortably full lecture hall. "I came into a very dynamic program," he said, crediting classics professors Hanna and Joseph Roisman for the vitality of the department that he joined and that has grown to have 25-35 majors each year. "That compares favorably with schools that have 10,000 undergraduates," he said. |
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