Faculty Retirements

Jerry Johnson
Professor of Business Administration and Economics
1983-2016

My 17-year-old son, Evan, died tragically just before Christmas 2014. His death prompted me to retire sooner than I had planned. I have continued teaching just long enough to enable my department to hire a replacement for me. As a result, I don’t really have plans beyond sitting on the Topsail Island, North Carolina beach this summer trying to figure out the next chapter in my life.

Looking back on Austin College since 1983, I have many memories. There have been many changes. The biggest physical changes, which have significantly enhanced the visual appeal of Austin College, include Wright Campus Center and the IDEA Center. Administratively, AC has gradually come to the realization that we must compete for students and as a result has put greater emphasis on infrastructure, marketing, and PR, a focus that was sorely missing in the 80s. AC has also grown to realize the critical importance of IT to the overall functioning of the college. I remember teaching in the basement of Hopkins in one of our first internet connected/projection screen classrooms. At the time it was hard for me to believe that we had made so much progress. We are still playing catch up but I am hopeful that a commitment has been made to continue to invest in this critically important resource.

Another big change in the past 32 years has been the perception of the business administration major at Austin College. In the 80s and 90s, business administration was perceived by many of my colleagues as an awkward fit for a liberal arts college, and the funding reflected that. Today business administration/economics is one of the largest, most successful departments on campus in terms of students and faculty. Our department is thriving as other departments struggle to fill classes. The majors we turn out accomplish great things, and reflect very positively on AC. My colleagues in business administration/economics are some of the most dedicated and competent professionals I have ever met. Fortunately, the naysayers of the ’80s and ’90s did not prevail, and the department has been allowed to grow and improve, and make tremendous contributions to the college.

When I started at AC I gave little thought to being involved in administration, but as it worked out, I have spent a lot of time as an administrator. After serving as department chair and being promoted to full professor, I was honored to be asked to serve as Dean of Social Sciences in the early 1990s, and then again in the 2000s. I was also honored when President Oscar Page asked me to help with the development and implementation of the Leadership Institute. I designed and taught the basic leadership courses for the first two years of the program. I believe it was 2011 when I was given a campus-wide teaching award, one of my proudest achievements. The major highlight of my career at AC, though, is the one thing that has never changed, the one thing that has kept me going all these years: the joy of teaching and working with some very interesting students. Standing in front of a group of 30 or so AC students in a classroom is the one thing I genuinely will miss when I retire. While much has changed about the context of teaching, our students are still respectful, considerate, and a pleasure to teach. I will miss them and the classroom teaching experience most of all.

The foreign language department has provided a wonderful professional and social environment for me during my 25 1/2 years here. The CML faculty and staff have been truly supportive guides and friends. I feel privileged to have worked alongside them all and to have had the opportunity to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for the French language, literature, and culture to so many students at Austin College. Though I will greatly miss teaching and the relationships with students that a liberal arts college milieu affords, I have pretty big plans for an active retirement (at least in the short term): spending more time with my adorable grandson; traveling; attacking my very long “to read” list; improving my Spanish, tennis, and stand-up paddleboard skills; and studying the birds and sea life of the Texas coast, where my husband and I will live part-time.

I hope to do some traveling post-AC through Texas, and see some National Parks elsewhere. I would say that since I taught 25 years at Sherman High School, teaching at AC was a wonderful way to finish my teaching career. I found AC students to be focused and extremely nice. This was a great experience for me. I am so thankful to have been able to teach here.

I’ve taught summer school and stayed on through the fall 2016 semester. Eventually, I’ll be relocating near Austin because our daughters, Megan and Breana who are both Austin College grads, live there along with our three granddaughters and one grandson.

When I moved from the Philadelphia area to come to Austin College, I never expected to stay for 30 years. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I had choices, and the determining factors in coming had to do with the adventure of living in an unfamiliar locale, and teaching art subjects that were outside my comfort zone (since till then I had only taught photography, and my first year saw me teaching drawing, art fundamentals, and art history, which was just the beginning). A major factor was that I was led to believe, from more than one source, that it was a college-wide trait at Austin College to be considerate and kind in every relationship—which fit in exactly with my idea of being central to the teacher-student relationship. But, that it also manifested in the top-down relations of administration to faculty was also important. This, in my experience, has largely been borne out. I had just come from a situation in which politics were rampant within, and across, departments, and manipulation existed from top levels to the faculty, so the prospect of fairness and open lines of communication really appealed to me.

I’ve found that at AC I have access to the ears of just about anyone, and that I will be heard. To me, this top-down caring has a trickle-down effect on the students: The faculty feel they are in a position to take a personal interest in students, and express that in meaningful and productive ways, and have maximum support along the way. My time with students has, by far, been the most important and satisfying experience at AC. I feel that I have been privileged to be able to do what I can to help young people find what they want to spend their lives doing. The embedded aspect of the faculty role at AC to assist students in whatever their needs happen to be, within the limits of our abilities, exactly merges with my natural tendencies.

Austin College students are a treat to be with. They are energetic, intelligent, appreciate being treated like adults, have great senses of humor, and are eager to learn. Being among people like this on a daily basis, and to know that I am having a positive effect on their development, is probably the thing I will miss the most when I retire.

I’ve also been fortunate at AC to have my professional/art making and exhibiting career supported, through psychological as well as financial support. I was prompted to construct a “career development plan” from the get-go, and this multi-page document has served (with continual updating) as the independently designed manifesto of my goals as a teacher, an artist, and a family man. Thus, the College has permitted me to express what I wish to do in these areas, and has supported it throughout. I’ve never been told what I must teach, or how I must teach it. In contrast, I’ve been supported for all of my teaching and art-making initiatives.

I have always loved to travel, also valued by Austin College. Thus, I’ve gotten support to travel all over this country, as well as several trips abroad. Travel, seeing new things, has always been central to my photography. What has turned out to be my most long-term, and continuing photo project has been what I refer to as “social landscape photographs,” which are essentially straightforward color representations of what I find interesting in the place I’m in. I’ve only recently taken this approach to Sherman, Texas, and it has been rewarding. I continue to make these photographs from all of my travels.

Since 1994, I have been intensely involved with Adobe Photoshop and have been supported in the creation of a studio/lab with up-to-date equipment. My desire to experience a variety of media and aesthetic approaches in teaching has transferred to an interest in a similar attitude toward artmaking. Thus, in addition to my “social landscapes” I’ve entered into several mixed media projects, mostly emanating from what I have seen to be suggested by the potentials of Photoshop. The notion of combining essentially 19th-century processes (cyanotype and Van Dyke printing, for example) with 21st-century digital opportunities, has led to experiments in a variety of methods and outcomes: archaic photo-processes, bookmaking, adulteration of the photograph via mechanical as well as digital means, and a variety of collage construction—again mechanical and digital. It’s been a very rich, if also frenetic, experience in course design, as well as being challenging for artists, students as well as myself.

The advent of our move into the Forster Complex has been one of the most satisfying things to have happened during my time at AC. The Art Department was engaged from the very beginning of the process, from meeting with the primary donor, Betsy Forster before any pledge had been made, and in choosing the architect, Gary Cunningham, and to include weekly meetings with his firm in communicating our needs, and responding to their plans. We were very fortunate to be supplied with the funding and attention to our desires such that every detail was supplied as we wished. One of the most difficult things about my retiring is to have to leave this amazing facility, which always seems brand new to me, even after almost eight years of working in it. It’s a continual pleasure to simply be in our buildings every day.

I’m often asked what I will be doing after I retire. Whereas my position at AC was what seems to have been the perfect job for me, the time and effort I have put in has created a backlog of things I’ve had to postpone. Even though I have been making art all along, I have plenty of ideas for new, and continued, plans for art making. They include the ancient medium of encaustic, which has intrigued me for the past couple of years, and drawing, which is a medium I enjoyed a lot as a student, but has only been pursued in irregular moments more recently. The two will most likely be combined as I also pursue more mixed media projects, which will also involve digital imaging.

Exhibiting the work is another activity that has seen my efforts reduced more and more over the years. To have one’s art seen is an important source of both closure, and of feedback for future efforts. There is no one mode of promotion, but many, and I intend to put more time into that.

I continue to love to travel, and will be able to do so at times other than summers and other time off, since all my time will be “off.” I also look forward to spending more time with friends, and family—a lot of whom are spread all over the world. I guess pursuit of travel will be useful here, too.

My wife will tell you that there are plenty of little jobs around the house that I could devote myself to. I’ll also be taking my experimental approach from art into the kitchen, hopefully getting edible results. And, I intend to continue to have a continued relationship with Austin College, the exact nature of which is yet to be determined.

On August 22, 1984, I began my career at Austin College. It also happened to be my wife’s birthday. In May of that year, just as I was finishing up my master’s degree in library science at the University of Pittsburgh, I saw an announcement for a job at a college in Sherman, Texas. It caught my attention because I knew that my wife and I would be moving to Texas where her parents lived in retirement and where we planned to make our home. I never contacted Austin College then, but typed out applications and letters to Texas A&M and UT-Austin, as well as Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches. All of them were at most but a few hours driving distance of my wife’s parents’ home in Crockett. We waited – nothing! The American Library Association was having its annual convention in Dallas, so I drove to it and there met the director of what was then the Arthur Hopkins Library, Imogene “Gene” Gibson. I came to campus, faced the usual blur of people asking questions, gave enough reasonable answers and was subsequently hired. A couple of months after beginning my job, the college hired my wife Nell Evans to be its first Systems Librarian and to work on the plans for the new library and its new computer system. The new library became the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Library Center and though the minicomputer system never happened for the library, Nell became the systems coordinator for the Bibliographic Association of the Red River, henceforth known as BARR – the libraries of Austin College and Grayson Community College, and both Sherman and Denison Public Libraries. That cooperative is still going strong. Though Mrs. Gibson passed away, Gary Paikowski at Grayson and Alvin Bailey, formerly of Denison Public Library, have been continuously involved. Hope Waller, Sherman’s director at that time is also deceased, but her able lieutenant when BARR began, Jacqueline Banfield, is now Sherman’s director.

My initial duties were to supervise interlibrary lending, which included a brand new facsimile (fax) machine that took up a whole desk, to purchase, organize and display the periodicals which were kept in the basement of Hopkins, and to serve with Dr. Helen Latham as reference librarian. Also I provided bibliographic instruction, or, as anyone else but a librarian might say, I became an instructor in how to make the best and most effective use of the library’s resources. Helen had a voice that was strained, the result of polio on her vocal chords as a young person, and though it was a challenge sometimes to hear her, what she had to say was always important and thoughtful. She was the head reference librarian from 1969 – 1989 and was also the resident expert on the library’s special collections.

From fall 1984 to summer 1986, I planned the move of the periodicals from Hopkins to Abell and had to determine a rate of growth of the existing titles so there would be enough shelves for the years of subscriptions to come. If not for the Association of Higher Education in North Texas, and the many librarians at libraries across the metroplex who offered advice and assistance, my duties would have been far more difficult and far more confusing. One person in particular gave me a model of how to keep track of the comings and goings of interlibrary loan – Alice Puro of the University of Dallas Library.

The contents of Hopkins Library were moved into the new George T. and Gladys H. Abell Library Center in July 1986. The new building had a 24-hour Extended Study Room, a computer classroom, a reference desk that looked like the bow of a ship, 20 microfilm and microfiche readers, 2 microform reader-printers, the periodicals were displayed on shelving so you could see the front of the magazine, unlike the hanging folders in the cramped quarters of Hopkins’ basement. The second floor had a media room where students could come and view videotapes or listen to audio for classes, a large classroom with a very large screen so films could be shown, and desks that students still think are pretty cool. The rare books and special collections room had a secret room behind some movable shelving. There were group study rooms and rooms for students writing honor’s theses. For anyone who thinks now that students don’t use the library, all one needs to do is go to the group study rooms which are even more heavily used now. The most consistent complaint over thirty years is about the lack of sound proofing between rooms.

The impact of technology’s rising wave had just begun. Online searching (the precursor to the Internet) used telephone lines and was one of the activities that changed in the new building. In Hopkins, the device used to connect to a remote database was a Texas Instrument mobile terminal with acoustic couplers to hold the phone. The service one used to connect to a database was called Dialog and it required the operator to know an arcane language of symbols and commands. In the new building, the TI terminal was replaced by an Apple IIe with a modem to communicate over the phone lines. A year or two later, the library had its first Macintosh. When BARR’s ambition came to pass, the four institutions were connected by phone lines to a mainframe computer at Grayson County College that ran the NOTIS library management system. We shared a catalog of what each of us had and where each item was to be found in their separate libraries. An agreement between the four, set up check out privileges which still exist today. With BARR’s mission accomplished, my wife, Nell left Austin College to work for Texas Instruments.

By this time, Mrs. Gibson had retired and the new library director, Sue Myers, appointed me to be the liaison for BARR technical meetings. With Helen Latham’s retirement, Sue decided that aside from a new reference librarian, the library needed a new systems librarian. After a failed search for the systems position, I asked Sue about taking that job. Little did I know what Sue had planned. Two librarians were hired, Dayna Williams-Capone (now Library Director at the Victoria Public Library) and Cathy Hartman (now the recently retired Associate University Librarian at the University of North Texas) and so I took over responsibilities for the few computers in Abell and the BARR equipment. Three months after Dayna and Cathy began, Sue said to me, “We need a local area network with access to a number of CD-ROM databases. You can do that, right?” Six months later, the Abell Library CD-ROM network (or ALiCe) was installed. Each computer had a small printer and all were connected with Ethernet connectors to a CD-ROM server that I babied.

Another year later and Sue decided that the shared catalog with BARR had too much downtime and too many crashes, so over the next year, I prepared and sent out a Request for Proposal for Austin College’s own library management system. Eventually, the Sirsi Company’s product was selected. While all of this was going on in the library, the college’s director of Information Technology, Alfred Essa, had been working with his team to install a network that would join the college to the Internet. By the time the library was ready to move all of its catalog data on books, periodicals and patrons to a new system, the college network was a reality. Sirsi had developed an interface to the catalog that used a web browser, rather than having an individual program on each computer. Since Sirsi was one of the first library systems companies to use web technology like this, and it came out just as Abell was installing the new library system, Austin College had one of the first web-based library catalogs in Texas. Between setting up ALiCe and starting up the new library system (1990 – 1995), my daughter, Carolyn, was born; Nell left Texas Instruments and eventually came to work for Al Essa; Sue Myers resigned to become the director of the library at the College of Santa Fe College, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Dr. Larry Hardesty became the new library director of Abell Library Center.

I participated in other areas of the college in those 10 years, serving on various committees – C/I, Jan Term, English Department advisory – and was appointed to the first sexual harassment committee whose charge was to confidentially investigate instances of sexual harassment. Kay Garner, Ilene Kendrick, and Tim Tracz also served on that committee and by the end of the 2015-16 academic year, all of us will be retired from the college. I got to know Robert “Brad” Bradshaw, Vice-President for Student Affairs, since Brad’s office was involved throughout the cases, as well as, carrying out sanctions. It was a significant blow to the college when Brad suffered a heart attack and died.

It was on another committee where I was elected as a member-at-large, the relatively new Faculty Executive Committee, that I saw a proposal of mine embraced and which has become a successful program. The Faculty Executive Committee met with President Oscar Page for breakfast once a month and it was here that he asked all of us for any ideas. Mine was the creation of a center which would help acclimate new faculty to Austin College and also provide support for tenured faculty in their teaching and research by providing opportunities for them to share their enthusiasms with their colleagues. After sharing this with George Diggs and Bernice Melvin, also on the committee, I was encouraged by them to present the proposal to Dr. Page. Under Dr. Page’s capable hands, the proposal metamorphosed into the Johnson Center. Bob Johnson, alumnus and board of trustees’ member, liked the idea and provided its funding. It would be approximately a decade later, after Bernice had become the director of the Johnson Center and I was the library’s director that we joined forces to produce a couple of significant bibliographies of faculty work at Austin College. With help from Vickie Kirby and Melanie Fountaine in Institutional Advancement, who ably handled the design, layout and printing and of Dr. Carolyn Vickrey, Coordinator of Reference and Instruction Services, who acted as the compiler of the bibliographies of faculty work, two booklets were published and are still available online through the library’s website.

Carolyn Vickrey began as a part-time reference librarian in the late 1990s and before her departure in 2014 was the Associate College Librarian. In 2000, with IT, Physical Plant, and Carolyn’s help, and funding by the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund, I installed a computer classroom on the library’s second floor. Larry Hardesty oversaw both of the TIF grants which provided us with an instructional hands-on computer space. During the time I served as the interim College Librarian after Larry left in 2004, and with help from IT and the Physical Plant, we moved a computer lab which had been located in the basement of Moody Science to the library’s Extended Study Room, after additional electrical work made it possible.

As a member of a Technology Taskforce, chaired by E. Don Williams, one important recommendation of the Technology Taskforce was that the college would not forsake innovation, but not extend itself to the “bleeding edge”, not even the leading edge, but would rather take a step or so back to use proven technology. In 2005, I negotiated with the library’s integrated service provider, SirsiDynix, to move from aging hardware and limiting software that had reached the end of its usefulness to the “cloud”, that is, to software as a service (SAAS). In this way, our vendor maintained, backed-up, and upgraded our system without our intervention since it was on a server they maintained.

Also, in 2004, I was approached by Mark Monroe, art professor, and a student, Rachel McIntyre concerning an aging sculpture located behind the library. Monroe had been an apprentice for the artist, James Surls, when Austin College acquired the piece in the late 1980s. Rachel had developed a plan to restore the work, but the next problem was where it could be placed to prevent its deterioration all over again. After much preliminary work, the project went into abeyance as Rachel went overseas to study. A few years later, I had a conversation with James Surls’ himself, and Mr. Surls agreed to restore the sculpture, “From the Center” so that it could reside in the library’s atrium. Several more years went by due to Surls’ commitments, but when it was returned, members of the Physical Plant guided by Surls’ assistant Tai Pomaro, got it into the library down corridors and around corners to set it up where it resides today. Mr. Surls came to campus a few months later to give a lecture and see his work in place. The view of it from the library’s second floor, was a sight he’d never had the opportunity to see before and he agreed “From the Center” now had a home. From 2004 on, the library purchased and had been given art to display, much of it student work, but also work done by the college’s art faculty. For instance, there are three wooden sculptures by the late Dr. Richard Neidhardt, professor of art, which show off his mordant wit.

Note: A college library is both a physical location and an intellectual construct and it has always been so. Libraries needed physical space both because the containers used to keep the gathered ideas, thoughts, knowledge, wisdom, drolleries, and foolishness of humanity – printed books – required physical space. The intellectual construct of how all of this stuff is organized so that people can find information sought for is what librarians do. We can check it out to you, but first we select to make a collection, organize it so like items are together and so other facets of connectivity – described by keywords or subject headings – can help the reader to the work, make reference to where we librarians think what it is the reader wants/needs can be found, and then because Abell Library Center is part of Austin College, we educate others in this system we have, helping them to understand the need and importance of a system. In this brave new world of digital objects, someone has to describe those objects in a way so they can be found.

There have been other changes to the library space, and all such changes are so that students and faculty continue to have a sanctuary from residences, classrooms, colleagues, and friends, so that they can interact with the material in whatever form or format and so they can think and meditate upon their common and their separate educational experiences.

I have so many people to thank who’ve made my own time at AC a great experience and my great fear is that in listing some, I will leave out someone else, so what follows only serves as a representative sample. My wife, Nell, and my daughter, Carolyn, and to Peter Lucchesi, Jerry Lincecum and Peggy Redshaw, Bernice Melvin, Light and Vickie Cummins, Tim and Tingey Tracz, Kay Garner, Diggs, Higgs, Bucher, Anderson, Platizky, Caylor, Miles, Parsons, Milam, Turk, Bradshaw, Duhaime, Norman and Norman, Tanner, White and White, Nelson, Jordan, E. Don, Piñeres and also to friends and colleagues and mentors no longer with us – Wingerter, Manley, de Vega, Ware, Knowlton, Melugin, Lawson and Carlson. To a wonderful staff which I bequeath to my successor. And to the Deuce Game, Baby, Tennis and Social Club, who saved my life by keeping me physically active and mentally aware, as they were never just lobbing tennis balls at me–Patrick, Terry and Jesus.