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A NEW NAMES PROJECT Making sure of memory at UMass

By Julius Lester

THE DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARDS installation, a design class project unveiled in 1999 in the Campus Center concourse. Photo by Ben Barnhart. I AM GROWING OLD AT UMass. At a recent gathering of faculty from across campus we were asked to raise our hands if we had been at the university five, 10, 15, 20 or more years. Most hands went up at five and 10 years, fewer at 15 –at 20 or more, only mine and two others. I was in a room of young faces, none of whom I recognized. They were a younger generation of teachers with wonderful energy, new ideas, and suddenly, I felt old. When I began here, in 1971, I remember being awed when someone said he’d been here 25 years. A quarter-century he had walked around this campus, stood before classes, endured governors, legislatures, chancellors, provosts, deans, chairs, and God knew how many long-range plans! Now, I am in his place, and recognize that I have something that comes only with longevity: institutional memory. Last winter saw the deaths of professors Andy Anderson of sociology and David Van Blerkom of physics and astronomy. Andy and I shared a passion for teaching; he used to say he could teach statistics to a rock. With David I shared a love for ancient Egypt and hieroglyphs, which he sometimes taught and which I make futile attempts to learn. Thinking about Andy and David, I began remembering others who have died – David Booth of political science, Michlene Dufau of French & Italian, Sylvia Forman of anthropology, Jules Piccus of Spanish, Sidney Kaplan of English. Each of them (and others whom I did not know or sadly, have forgotten) made important contributions to the culture of this university, but younger faculty, through no fault of their own, may not even know their names. Several years ago, at the unveiling in the Campus Center of an installation on which the names of Distinguished Teaching Award recipients are displayed, Provost Cora Marrett spoke of "this important step in creating an institutional memory." I understood her to mean that one way we create such memory is by passing on the essence and spirit of one generation of faculty and administrators to the next. INTSTITUTIONAL MEMORY CANNOT BE CREATED with a single act. It grows slowly from countless small ones. The wall in the Campus Center is wonderful beginning that should be extended. Two modest suggestions: Among the odder but more compelling experiences on the World Wide Web are those web sites where people post photographs and memories of departed loved ones. Perhaps a site could be established where faculty, students and alumni could send memories of UMass professors. New faculty, especially, could be encouraged to visit the web site and learn about some of those who were here before them. The other suggestion involves the rooms in which exceptional professors taught. Individual classrooms could be named for eminent retired and deceased faculty; in the larger lecture halls and auditoriums, wall plaques could list the names, years, and courses of those who taught there. And 50 years from now, when a new faculty member walks into one of those rooms for the first time – and the rooms will all be here, because the legislature will still not have allocated sufficient funds for infrastructure – she will read the name above the door or those on the plaque inside and know that she is joining a broad gathering of men and women who devoted themselves to the grand adventures of teaching, research, and writing. Thirty years pass quickly when your love and passion for what you teach and whom you teach do not diminish. Yes, you get older and the students seem to get younger. But as long as you bring a glimmer of maturity into their eyes and they keep a glint of youth in yours, then maybe one day your name will be above a classroom door or on a plaque in an auditorium as one whose spirit continues to animate the life of this university.

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A new names project

NEW NAMES: larger image