The guard changes

Editor's note: Some years the faculty changes in small increments, one or two veteran professors retiring, one or two new faculty arriving. This spring four venerable faculty members taught their last Colby class. They took a few minutes to talk to Colby about their careers at the College and their take on its future.

Brad Mundy

Brad Mundy's chemistry students wanted him to do something weird in his last Colby class. "They said, 'What are they going to do? Fire you?'" Mundy said after the class ended. So what did he do?

"I taught," Mundy said. "You don't want to waste an hour of good teaching time."

He didn't waste many hours in his decade at Colby, a mid-career change of venue from Montana State University. Mundy arrived with research interests and projects in hand and immediately put Colby [students] to work. "I don't separate my research from what my students do," he said. "If it's a good program, students will add to the intellectual process and growth."

They have, working this year to synthesize a compound sent out by a particular type of fungus as it breaks down cellulose. The project, undertaken at the request of University of Maine wood-science researchers, was completed this semester. "The students had one of those grins from ear to ear," Mundy said.

He has kept students working and learning--and grinning. He arrived with graduate-school level expectations and wasn't disappointed. "Intellectual questions that are being asked are high-level questions, for all my colleagues," he said. "These kids aren't getting shortchanged on the quality of work at all. This is really good stuff."

He posted no set office hours but told students he'd be in the office or lab from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. If they caught him, they had him. As a 10-year resident of the dorms with his wife, Margaret, Mundy answered e-mails from students into the evening. "Some of them I send more messages than their parents do," he said.

Every Sunday night the Mundys opened their apartment to students. Margaret, who also headed the Quilting Club, prepared cookies and snacks. If students were having a party, they warned the Mundys and told them to knock if music was too loud. "I think they're afraid they'll give us a heart attack," Mundy said.

The Mundys had been weighing staying in Maine or moving back to Bozeman. But at the annual trustee-faculty dinner before commencement, a spontaneous cheer erupted when Mundy announced, "Last night Margaret called our daughter [in Montana] and said 'sell the furniture, then sell the house.'" Mundy has several textbooks under contract but also was considering trying a fiction-writing course.

One thing he is not going to do, he said, is direct the Chemistry Department from retirement. He did have one piece of parting advice: "A department isn't good because it has every bell and whistle. A department is good because it's got good people. If you lose track of the people, you lose track of the game."

Bruce Fowles

As he read the last 34 exams of his teaching career, Associate Professor of Biology Bruce Fowles estimated that he'd graded more than 15,000 tests during his 34 years at Colby.

"They're doing an honest effort to show what they know," he said of his students in Biology of Vascular Plants. "I tell them, 'You can do science. I'll tell you how to succeed.' It's my job to get it across."

It's been Fowles's job since 1967, when Colby's Biology Department had five faculty members. The department has grown to four plant and seven animal biologists and several teaching associates who help with labs. But not much has changed in the process of teaching biology, says Fowles, who taught the introductory course for 16 years as well as Plant Physiology, Plant Taxonomy, Biology of Fungi, Algae and Mosses, and Heredity and Evolution, a course he instituted for non-majors. The material has changed, however, as knowledge in plant physiology doubled every two-and-a-half years.

"What we know today is completely different from what was taught thirty years ago," Fowles said. "DNA work was just coming along when I was an undergrad. That's changed things."

Biology now involves computers and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Dependence on technology is a model of every other change on the campus, he says. Fowles used to stand in line in the basement of Lovejoy to work at a computer; today, the Mac on his desk is more powerful than the first computer at the College.

But Fowles says he's always been comfortable with chalk and a blackboard.

"I just hope we don't lose the art of good lectures," he said. "Kids come here to learn. Anything that gets people away from teaching isn't good, whether it's research or publication or community service. You've got to know who your students are."

Pat Brancaccio

When Patrick Brancaccio, the John and Caroline Zacamy Professor of English, looked back over 39 years in Colby's English Department, he said, "The thing that I'm proudest of is having a role in developing the black studies program and heading it up for the first twelve years." But Brancaccio might have made plenty of other choices, as he also played roles in the development of performing arts as an independent department and creative writing as a minor and directed or chaired a half dozen academic programs, departments and divisions.

Even at that his work wasn't limited to Mayflower Hill. He spent a year at the University of Madagascar as a Fulbright lecturer, directed Colby in London for four years, spent sabbatical years in Italy.

Brancaccio's intellectual pursuits are as wide-ranging as his work experience--from the quintessentially American (he was a founding member of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society) to a subspecialty in the literature of Africa. And as he retires from teaching, the first project on his to-do list is completion of an Italian-to-English translation of essays and film reviews called "Love Letters to the Cinema."

Brancaccio acknowledges that he was an unlikely African-American studies pioneer. As a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers in the early 1960s, he couldn't make ends meet as a teaching assistant so he augmented his income substitute teaching. In the public schools of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York he got to know African-American students and talked literature with the young African-American teachers. He learned about black authors who had not drawn the attention of mainstream American letters--Malcolm X before he published his autobiography, for example.

He also learned about teaching. "I learned survival techniques--not to be a tough guy, but to teach," he said. "Everyone wants to learn."

At Colby his interest in black literature was the tinder, and his first encounter with the late history professor Jack Foner provided the spark. "This was one of the great things of my life," he said.. Together the pair offered one of the richest programs in African-American studies in the country at the time, and their friendship endured for three decades, until Foner's death two [wasn't it more than two?] years ago.

With one last batch of finals to grade, Brancaccio was asked if he had regrets. "Not really regrets," he said, "It's [just] that there are a lot of exciting things that are going on here." And he's had a hand in those, too, serving as a member of the President's Planning Group that steered the Strategic Plan for Colby. "It's satisfying to have been a part of it," he said.

Tom Longstaff

Crawford Family Professor of Religious Studies Thomas Longstaff, a Biblical scholar and archeologist, thinks the current emphasis on academic research is good for both faculty and students. And he has this to say about those who disagree: "They would have been one of the really great minds of the nineteenth century."

Longstaff's progressive attitude might seem at odds with his background in things archaic, but he chaired the committee on academic computing and his research interests include new technology use in his fields. Faculty research "was desirable when I came here. It is necessary now," said Longstaff, who arrived at Colby in 1969 and closed out his teaching career in May. "Some people think that's too harsh. I'm not one of them."

No ivory tower academic himself, Longstaff serves as associate director of archeological excavations at Sepphoris, Israel, in addition to his classroom teaching and Biblical research. "I want among my colleagues people who care about being good at what they do and who are willing to expose their ideas to the criticism of others and to make contributions to their field," he said.

As Colby's faculty has evolved over the past three administrations to reflect new educational ideals, so has the student body, Longstaff said. Students arrive at Colby knowing a whole lot more about the world, the sciences and languages [than their predecessors did]. Still, Longstaff wants students to realize there is more to life than grade point averages. "The best students are the ones who have a life," he said.

While Longstaff does not agree with every decision Colby has made during his tenure ("Who has?" he said), he believes the College ultimately has progressed in the right directions. The biggest and most important challenges Longstaff still sees are diversifying the student body and faculty to make Colby a more welcoming environment for minorities and dealing with social problems like alcohol abuse that threaten educational ideals.

However, he does not succumb to the temptation to offer unsolicited counsel to his peers. "I've heard a lot of people reach my stage and have advice for their colleagues," said Longstaff. "I think the best thing I would want to say is 'I trust you.'"

Frances Parker

"The thing about libraries," said Frances Parker, is that "people think of them as historical holding tanks. That's one function. But you have to have the modern materials. It's essential to keep the library up to date."

From 1974 until her retirement in May as assistant director of public services, Parker kept up with technological advances that boosted Miller Library rung after rung.

In the 1980s she advocated adoption of CD-ROMs, which expedited indexing. In 1989 she chaired the committee that championed replacing the card catalogue with an automated system for acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation and reserve books. And she labored long on the Colby, Bates and Bowdoin shared online catalog that evolved in the '90s, giving library users access to the holdings of all three schools. When she learned to write Web pages in 1994, she was, she said, one of three or four people "in on the beginning of the Web at Colby."

For the library, the Web was a tool to get at information. And getting at information, Parker says, is more interesting and challenging now than it was 28 years ago.

"The whole point is, where do you go to find it," she said. Turning up a particular fact may be hard because it's not where you think it should be.

"Good students were absolutely determined to find what they were looking for," she said. As a reference librarian‹her favorite part of the job‹she helped students formulate "a lot of weird but wonderful questions" to end up with one question that had an answer. "They wouldn't believe that something didn't exist. They're go-getters. They made us stretch," she said. "You learn a lot, and it keeps you in touch with how students are actually doing things."

In terms of growth and change, Colby's library is right where it needs to be, Parker says. She urges her colleagues to just keep learning and changing.

"If librarians did everything today as they did in 1974, we wouldn't have Internet information, we'd still be going through the Readers' Guide," she said. "It's been a remarkable time to be a librarian."