2008 Woodie Awards
Remember When: Dr. Ralph McKenna
Ethan Moore
Issue date: 3/31/06 Section: News
It was the year of the first Macintosh computer, Jimmy Carter was president, the winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo - 22 years ago now, early in 1984, before most current seniors were born. I loved hard bop jazz, impressionism, the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but in truth I'd never had a liberal arts education. Robert Frost wrote about New England stonewalls, birch trees, and forest roads not taken only in a literal sense. I devoted my college exclusively to psychology, while I extolled the virtues of the liberal arts to my advisees; the hypocrisy was apparent.
Then a transitional event occurred which set me on Frost's other road (and that has made all the difference). Four of our faculty - Rosemary Henenberg (Theater Arts), the late Hal Allen (German), Don Marr (Art), and John Churchill (our young Dean) - initiated summer faculty development workshops which produced an amazing new interdisciplinary course. Master Works would be staffed by the eight workshop faculty and attract academically adventurous Hendrix seniors, who would read, write, and discuss with faculty in a seminar setting.
With some trepidation I applied for this new course. The workshop faculty brainstormed possible works and listed them on a blackboard, selected those which worked well together, and handed out teaching assignments. Hence, it was altogether possible to find yourself teaching a work you never proposed (in 1983-84 Don, Zeev Barel, and I were assigned Hofstadter's challenging Gödel, Escher, Bach) and that summer I became the default Bach expert. Two summers later, work selection occurred when workshop participant President Joe B. Hatcher was away. We assigned him D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," a work that had been banned in this country until about 1960. Good sport and literature lover that he was, Hatcher accepted the challenge and taught "Lady Chatterley" (though Lawrence's lusty gardener was somewhat subdued, and the dreaded but eagerly anticipated "F" word never made its appearance).
Then a transitional event occurred which set me on Frost's other road (and that has made all the difference). Four of our faculty - Rosemary Henenberg (Theater Arts), the late Hal Allen (German), Don Marr (Art), and John Churchill (our young Dean) - initiated summer faculty development workshops which produced an amazing new interdisciplinary course. Master Works would be staffed by the eight workshop faculty and attract academically adventurous Hendrix seniors, who would read, write, and discuss with faculty in a seminar setting.
With some trepidation I applied for this new course. The workshop faculty brainstormed possible works and listed them on a blackboard, selected those which worked well together, and handed out teaching assignments. Hence, it was altogether possible to find yourself teaching a work you never proposed (in 1983-84 Don, Zeev Barel, and I were assigned Hofstadter's challenging Gödel, Escher, Bach) and that summer I became the default Bach expert. Two summers later, work selection occurred when workshop participant President Joe B. Hatcher was away. We assigned him D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," a work that had been banned in this country until about 1960. Good sport and literature lover that he was, Hatcher accepted the challenge and taught "Lady Chatterley" (though Lawrence's lusty gardener was somewhat subdued, and the dreaded but eagerly anticipated "F" word never made its appearance).