By Rebecca Green

Dean of Students and Vice President for Student Affairs, Janice Kassman arrived at Colby 29 years ago for a one-year position as acting assistant dean and hasn't looked back.

It's hard to predict what a day will hold for a dean of students. In the 29 years she has spent at Colby, Janice Kassman, dean of students and vice president for student affairs, has done everything from reading difficult names at commencement to teaching etiquette to literally extinguishing fires. Her sense of adventure and eagerness to be seen as an ordinary person have led her to take cameo roles in the Broadway Musical Revue (she had a bit part in an Oklahoma number this fall) and she gets roped into judging the Mr. Colby Pageant, but she also is the person Colby students and their families turn to in times of turmoil and tragedy.

Dean of students since 1982, Kassman was named vice president for student affairs--the College's first--in 2001, reflecting expanded administrative duties and her role as a member of the president's senior administrative staff.

For her efforts she has endured humiliating caricatures in Echo cartoons, blame for all sorts of policies she is expected to enforce, tears and verbal broadsides from students she's had to discipline. But she also has developed a wide-ranging, diverse and loyal network of friends--students and former students who know her as a mentor and value the extraordinary dedication that the diminutive dean brings to her work.

It's not unlike a family, she says; there are good times and bad.

It doesn't get worse than it did last May. It was a week after graduation and she was called away from a celebratory retirement dinner after a student was reported missing and presumed drowned in a powerful squall that struck Messalonskee Lake.

Kyawswar Win '05, a brilliant and beloved student from Myanmar, had drowned and Kassman's first duty was to his cold, frightened, stunned companions.

Later that evening would come the duty that deans dread most. Beginning with a phone call across a cultural divide and 11 time zones, Kassman told Win's parents and brothers of the accident. She would stay in contact with the family in Myanmar every other day for weeks, lining up visas and helping them make crucial arrangements including ordering a tombstone.

When Win's father and brother came to Maine for a memorial service in June and visited the lake with her, they gave Kassman a ring and made her an honorary member of their family for the extraordinary kindness and humanity she had shown.

"I have no children of my own," Kassman said later, "so when something happens to a Colby student, I feel like it happens to someone in my family."

Clearly devoted to Colby students, Kassman still loves her job after amost three decades, despite the painful moments. "I can't imagine a better job for me," she said. When she arrived on a one-year position as acting assistant dean of students for housing and residential life, she was only slightly older than the students. Though she now identifies much more with the parents, Kassman feels like she's "in an 18- to 22-year-old time warp . . . I think I go to Colby." She describes her job as firefighter, soothsayer, naysayer, booster. And parent, when the parent can't get there.

F. Celeste Branham, dean of students at Bates, admires Kassman's "sound instincts" and composure under pressure. She describes Kassman's style as "hands-on." Handholding is a hallmark of Kassman's M.O.

When she was promoted to vice president two years ago, President Bro Adams said, "Janice's leadership has helped Colby achieve a breadth and depth of student services that is extraordinary, not only for their variety but also for the level of personal attention to individual students."

Adams said, "Between any dean of students and the student body there is a rich, varied and interesting relationship. It is remarkable how many of our alumni cite Janice as a mentor, friend and an important influence during their college years."

Her predecessor and now retired Dean of the College Earl Smith says that, in addition to the tragedies that everyone hears about, there is somebody in crisis on a daily basis. "It's more private, but for them it's just as bad," he said. Kassman encourages students to e-mail her with news, bad as well as good. As a result, her mailbox might contain anything from "I aced my test" to "My mother's having emergency surgery and I have to leave Colby immediately."

Kassman's is not an unfamiliar face in area hospital emergency rooms, and not just because her M.D. husband, Larry Kassman '69, is an ER physician. She is often at hand, supporting students who end up there and sometimes their parents if it is serious. She has learned some arcane facts in the course of her job. She knows, for example, that elevator shafts have an extra one-foot space at the bottom. That saved the life of one student who fell down a shaft and was trapped there when the elevator descended.

"Every situation is unique, has its own challenges and nuances," she said.

Kassman is aware how swiftly everyday college life can be turned upside down for individuals or larger groups of students. "I feel like I should have a map of the world with climatic conditions, political situations and nuclear disasters, because we had students outside Chernobyl, we had students in China near Tiananmen Square and in Cuernavaca, Mexico, when an earthquake hit." And she worried about them all.

Last summer Kassman got a taste of parenting when she looked after her young niece and nephew for a week. When she balked at her 7-year-old niece's proposal to swim to the middle of the lake, her niece was puzzled. "Aunt Janice, if you get so nervous, how can you be dean?" the little girl asked.

Reflecting for a moment, Kassman replied, "I get paid for being nervous."