Jim Amidon — I was pleased to attend an annual Wabash tradition: The Ides of August Friday morning. The day-long program celebrates the research and scholarly work of the Wabash faculty. The original idea, thought up by the late biologist Tom Cole, was to bring the faculty together to better understand the personal, scholarly interests of each member.
Click here to see the faculty who presented this year.
At Wabash, we tend to know the faculty only as teachers — and extraordinary teachers at that. It takes special people to teach at Wabash. The students’ needs are great and the entire culture is built around personal relationships that develop between students and teachers.
Professors at Wabash teach three or four courses per semester; many add laboratories, tutorials, or study sessions on top of that. All faculty serve on at least a couple committees; many are active, working participants on as many as five or six committees that meet regularly to conduct the business of the college.
Wabash professors mentor their students, on both academic and personal issues. It’s not uncommon for our professors to spend considerable time providing individual instruction outside the classroom. Beyond that, there are countless hours spent counseling young men on problems with their families, girlfriends, emotions, careers, and finances.
Faculty members at Wabash have families — husbands, wives, partners, children, and parents. They try to be active in community affairs, in their children’s schools, and in their churches.
Faculty at Wabash are so much more than teachers. Yet we know and honor them mostly for their teaching, which is at the heart of everything we do at Wabash. The excellence in teaching and learning is not only Wabash’s principal focus, it is nationally regarded as a model for other institutions.
So the Ides of August — a celebration of the faculty’s individual research and scholarship — was a good reminder for me and for all who attended, that while teachers first, Wabash professors are also experts in their fields.
Some of what I heard during the professors’ 20-minute talks went over my head, but not much. Most of it was presented in a way that all could understand.
Economist Joyce Burnette, for example, could have probed deeply into the complex calculations she’s had to make to dispel centuries of misinformation and guesswork in her area of study. Instead, she gave us a “user-friendly” lesson on the wages and production of women working on English farms from 1750 to 1850. While still in progress, her research is debunking a good bit of gender-related misinformation that dates to the 1800s.
One by one, 14 Wabash professors took the podium in front of their colleagues to explain in great detail the intricacies and challenges of their personal research. By the end of the day, everyone who attended had a brain’s worth of new knowledge and an intense one-day liberal arts education.
The importance of the Ides of August, though, goes far beyond the papers presented. Bill Placher noted when he began the day that Tom Cole’s vision for Ides was less a celebration of the actual research and more of a celebration of community.
Professor Cole believed that we can not really know one another well until we unlock each person’s intellectual passions. By understanding a professor’s curiosities that stretch far beyond Wabash’s classrooms we come to know the motivation that drives their teaching excellence.
For now, though, Amanda Ingram will slow her work in botany, Stephen Dyson will drop his research on British Prime Ministers, and Michelle Rhoades will temporarily close her books on the study of prostitution in France.
Wabash’s esteemed scholars are back in class doing what they do best: teaching and learning with the exceptional young men of Wabash.
