Retirement Remarks

I wish to thank President Powell for sponsoring this very nice event, and his staff, for putting it together. I am so pleased that all of you are here today. It really means a lot to me. Let me introduce my family members who are here tonight………. I’ve spend the past year or so reflecting on my 35 years of professoriate life. I wish to take about 15 minutes of your time to talk about myself and the psychology program. Just this once!

In 1971, I accepted the position at MSM because of my strong desire to return to the Middle Atlantic region and to teach in an undergraduate institution similar to the one I graduated from five years earlier. But in addition, MSM was a very rare opportunity to literally develop a psychology program, which had only been on the books since 1968. I thought that there were very few schools that didn’t have a psychology major by that time: a point I later found not to be true. Msgr. Kline gave me $10,000 to start a psychology laboratory. My very first Experimental Psychology class was held on the grass, under the statue in front of Flynn Hall, since no classroom or lab was yet assigned. My first office was a park bench near the statue in front of Flynn Hall, since no office was yet assigned to me. Msgr. Kline was not known for his planning or organizational skills. The first semester, I had four preparations and 144 students. Thank goodness I still had my undergraduate notes from LaSalle to lecture from. I just threw them out in December.

I would like most to be remembered for the development of the psychology program at the Mount. The best thing I could do for my students was not to necessarily be loved in the classroom, but to develop a psychology major that will help them accomplish their goals. Within the last year or so, I coined the following epitaph for myself: “He turned the psychology program from virtually nothing into virtually something!” I will elaborate on what I mean by “virtually something” in a moment, since I don’t mean to demean the present, but only to remind the department and the college that the psychology program is always a work in progress. I am proud of the difficult and challenging development of the program over the decades. Interestingly, I think I did so with an annual department budget that seemed to decrease, in inflation-adjusted dollars, every year since my very first year. It took 19 years to get support for a four person Psychology Department. Hiring and firing in my department were always a challenge, and a couple of times, the talk of the campus. I’ve had 13 tenure track psychology colleagues over 35 years. At one point, I believed that maybe I had bad breath or something! There were many interesting, and sometimes difficult, stories to tell about psychology faculty who left. But not here! It also took 23 years into the program for only the second psychology Ph.D. to be tenured. That person, of course, was Bob Keefer, the current Department Chair. By the way, I was the first psychology Ph.D. tenured by President Dillon in his last year in the late 1970s, over the request by the recently hired Dr. Wickenheiser not to do so, since he wanted to rid the college of incompetents, and troublemakers! Later, however, the Wick was very supportive of me and my Department!

I struggled to get my earliest majors into Ph.D. programs. Not surprisingly, I got the first one into Tulane, my alma mater. Most applicants only got into terminal Master’s programs. A few of these students ultimately made it to doctoral programs. Things started to improve by the late 1980s, with several prestigious acceptances. This continued into the 1990s when our best psychology majors were getting into the very best programs in the country. In 1971, I remember having the goal of trying to get at least one graduate per year ultimately into a doctoral program. Over 35 years, my best estimate is 30 Ph.Ds and medical doctors. Not quite my goal, but to go back to my epitaph, it was “virtually something!” Here is an obscure piece of trivia. It wasn’t until the year 2000, that I adopted a textbook, which happened to cite the research of one of my former students! Are there any other faculty members crazy enough to dig this kind of information out about their alumni!? By the way, can any other major on campus claim that about 4% of its graduates became attorneys? There are slightly more attorneys than psychologists among our psychology grads! Two are here tonight. This is way before Marcia McKinley’s influence in pre-law and psychology. Isn’t this a better world now that we have more attorneys to turn problems into litigation, and more psychologists to turn problems into a lack of self-esteem? Oh my… is this one of my legacies!?

It wasn’t until the mid 1980s that lab space went beyond one room, and the 1990s, beyond two rooms. I am proud of the ability to maintain student exposure to psychological research involving animals: A pedagogy which is rapidly dying in undergraduate psychology around the country. Another “virtually something,” however, is the need for more sophisticated student research in our laboratory facilities. My first successful National Science Foundation Grant for additional equipment was funded in 1997. I am disappointed that I underestimated the time and energy it took to get the funded EEG and sleep lab going properly. That was another “virtual something.”

I am very proud of the senior primary research thesis requirement designed by myself and Dr. Jim Friedrich in 1984. This is the second thing for which I wish to be remembered. Undergraduate scholarly research was still a rare event in the 1980s, a point that I made in my 1988 Honors Convocation address. Undergraduate research is common now, locally and nationally. Bob Keefer took most of the burden of the senior research requirement until I negotiated research mentoring teaching credit for the whole department back in the early 1990s: Something that the college-wide honors program lacked the foresight to do! Also, when Mindy Korol came aboard, she strengthened our off-campus internship program as well

I am very proud of my articles, symposia, papers, and posters, particularly those championing the implementation of undergraduate psychology research around the country. Locally, my Department colleagues, Mindy, Marcia and Bob, have worked hard to improve the senior research projects into “virtually something.” My excellent replacement, Jenny Phillips, from the University of Pennsylvania, will also contribute to this task. What is still “virtual” is the need for more student presentations and publications off campus. This will continue to strengthen both the prestige of the department and the acceptances into graduate and professional schools. In 20 years of the senior research requirement, we had two students win national prizes for research excellence, and one win a regional prize. We should have more

But enough of all this. I wish Msgr. Kline and Dr. Dillon were still here, so I could thank them for the early budget, the space, and the freedom to develop a psychology program that I am very proud of. Dr. Jack Campbell, former VP for Academic Affairs, is not here tonight, and he was instrumental in support of psychology program development in the crazy 1980s. Jack, thanks for your support.

Once, again, thanks for a life well lived here at the Mount.