By Grace Arenas
Elm Staff Writer
After more than 30 years at Washington College, what does Humanities Department chairman and English professor Richard Gillin still get out of teaching?
“It sounds phony but it isn’t- I enjoy the classroom, I enjoy the students,” he said.
Gillin began his career at WC in 1973, despite job offers from many other universities.
“I had never heard of Washington College,” he said, but “my advisor told me it was a place you could actually teach.” Adjusting to living in the somewhat “claustrophobic” Chestertown took a long time, but WC “felt like a good fit” and Gillin found the enthusiasm of then-English chair Norman James “contagious.”
“Students here are willing to take courses not offered or popular in other places,” says Gillin. His classes in 18th century literature, he notes, have seen “a remarkable number of remarkable students.”
Gillin has seen the college transform over the years from an even smaller school where “you literally knew everybody” to the WC of today. Major changes he cites are the movement to expand the size of the college and more options for students in terms of academics and other activities. But no matter what the physical changes have been, Gillin says the school “has maintained a good sense of itself. It’s open-hearted.”
“Most importantly, is our expansion out into the world,” he said. The increased opportunities for study abroad, as well as the periodic influxes of international students, has helped WC have a greater understanding and appreciation of the world at large.
Part of this venture into the international community comes through the Kiplin Hall Summer Program, which Gillin and his wife direct. The program, now in wife direct. The program, now in its fourteenth year, is a three week course during which students visit the sites that inspired historic literary figures, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Brontë sisters.
“Early on [in the program’s existence] we had some wild groups,” said Gillin, “but something in their wildness was valuable, or at the least entertaining.”
Though the core mission of Kiplin Hall, to connect literature to the landscape, has not changed, “we do vary from year to year, still searching for more ways to connect, more places to visit.”
Expanding his students horizons, and his own, is something Gillin makes a point of doing. This year marks the first year of his “Ireland and Irishness in Film” course, the first film class he has taught. He said that his students “have been tolerating [him] well” with the new class and its various technological demands, but the point in creating the course was to “open up a new vista for myself and my students, and take me out of my comfort zone.”
Aside from tedious administrative paperwork Gillin genuinely loves teaching. When running into past students, he’s amazed to “see how something I may have forgotten about that we talked about in class has had an impact on them.” But that, he says, is the value of a liberal arts education.
“We make people think and have something to think about.”
March 11, 2011
Volume LXXXI Issue 18