University of Colorado at Boulder Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
______________________________________________________________________________
1560 30th Street
450 UCB
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0450
(303) 492-6387
FAX: (303) 492-6388
January 13th 2011
Professor William Wagner
Dean of Faculty
Williams College
Williamstown, MA 01267
Dear Dean Wagner,
I am writing this letter on behalf of Professor Sheafe Satterthwaite. I have heard through a set of Williams alumni that his contract is not going to be renewed, and write to express my dismay. As a Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado, I understand well the complexity of personnel decisions. There are rules to follow. And there are situations in which we must acknowledge the uniqueness of particular situations. Of course I have no knowledge of the particulars that might bring the leadership of Williams to this decision, but hope through this missive to provide evidence of Sheafe’s impact on my own education at Williams – and through extension to his impact on more than a generation of Williams students. I would second the thoughts of others that we all expected to see Sheafe retire on his own terms, and I would hope that this could indeed happen. I also acknowledge how unusual it is for you to receive an unsolicited letter of this sort in a personnel case, and hope that you will see how I could not refuse to write.
Let me tell you the story of my interactions with Sheafe. I learned a bit about Sheafe through casual conversations with other students as I made my way through a Geology major at Williams, graduating in ’74. I took no course from him. But in the next couple years, while I was completing a Masters in geology at Stanford, I was around those who had indeed been deeply influenced and inspired by this professor. When I returned to Williamstown for a year (1977-78) and found work with physics professor Jay Shelton in the CES, who was then studying the efficiency of woodstoves, I was intent on seeking him out. Sheafe caught wind that I was around and that I had a Masters in Geology, and pushed me to join him in offering a course in soils. Pushed is the key word. But one cannot refuse to engage in conversations with such a broad-thinking man, and if co-teaching allowed that to happen, then so be it. We indeed taught, and the course was eye-poppingly different from any that I had ever taken. It was a ride I will never forget. We (he, mostly) somehow touched upon the history of settlement of the American West, how lands were and are divvied up, how the invention of fertilizer altered the course of settlement in the nation, why the mining of guano from islands off Peru mattered. And so on. He treated soils as an excuse to touch upon a beautifully tangled fabric of topics, with a warp of natural science and a weft of human history. His mentor/hero J.B. Jackson, who famously rode his motorcycle across the country to shuttle between teaching posts in Berkeley and Harvard, where he taught classes titled something like “Gas Stations”, could have done no better. These teachers are not lightweights. These are giants, absolutely unique individuals who make their own molds that can seldom be emulated. I can well understand that reactions of those in his classes have been mixed through the years. He is so different that if you come into his class expecting more of the same you will not only be disappointed, you may even be threatened. But for those who engage, who see him for the imaginative, truly interdisciplinary intellect that he is, and who accept the deep challenge that he lays out, the courses are diamonds.
My interactions with Sheafe continued as winter study approached, through conversations I will not forget in his office with wall-to-wall books and boxes and boxes and boxes of slides. He challenged me to come up with a geographically oriented , interdisciplinary winter study. I decided upon a course titled The Great Plains, and had eight takers. Sheafe was there as support and encouragement, as I rummaged through history, anthropology, and natural history to find material for lectures, and began to organize a fieldtrip – basing most of this activity out of his office in CES. Only Sheafe would encourage such a field trip. Late January, in the middle of the continent in the snow and cold? We were in his office one afternoon talking about the early human occupation of the Great Plains (you can talk about ANYTHING with Sheafe). After I had read a paper by one of the experts in the field, whom he happened to know from down in Princeton, Sheafe suggested that I talk with him. Hint: don’t just read; you learn most efficiently through conversation. Sheafe disappeared into his little office while I filed that thought away, knowing it was unlikely I would follow through. In about 3 minutes, Sheafe called from his office: “Robert, I have him on the phone…” and handed me the receiver with a bemused expression. Sheafe knew enough about me to know I needed to be pushed, and must have had some inkling that I would respond.
Sheafe takes on topics that others don’t even consider intellectually fertile. At the time I was around him in the late 1970s he was interested in abandonment, from the stories of technological history that it revealed, to the aesthetic appeal of rusted metal. My work as a semi-professional photographer through the years has been highly influenced by Sheafe, who taught me to watch, and to ask questions of everything. Everything. And to take the person or the landscape or the community on its own terms. While I would like to think that I would have been as curious about the landscapes through which I travel as I now am (as a geomorphologist I study the evolution of landscapes), I know that that curiosity was honed through interactions with Sheafe. So I have one last anecdote. I went to UWashington in Seattle for my PhD, and studied glaciers, among other things. Out of the blue, Sheafe called me one day having driven into Seattle in the early summer and said “Robert, I need to see a glacier. Can you take me to a glacier?” We drove down to Mt Rainier in his Pugeot, and in the drenching rain walked out onto the Carbon Glacier. Once again, though, I was the winner. The day-long conversation reminded me of the uniqueness of this human being; we touched upon topics ranging from the explosion of Mt St Helens (how do volcanoes work anyway?) to the copper mines of Butte Montana, to the socioeconomic issues associated with timber industry in the Pacific NW. How well do you remember a conversation from 25 years ago? Those with Sheafe, as a student and as another citizen of Earth, are unforgettable.
More than any specific knowledge, though, I attribute to Sheafe the nurturing of a lifelong curiosity. He teaches you to ask questions, to be curious, in short to live to learn. And through this I know I gained confidence in being myself; I have my own flavor of questions. I am not shy to be different, to revel in the patterns of wrinkled and cracked old paint or dead bulldozers. I have been greatly influenced by Sheafe, and I didn’t even take a class from him! I remain envious of those who discovered him early enough to have taken his classes through their Williams careers.
I therefore urge you to examine this case closely, and would hope that the decision about renewal of Sheafe’s contract could indeed be reversed. He deserves the dignity of retiring on his own terms, after what he has given to Williams. I am happy to help in any way that I can.
With cheer,
Robert S. Anderson, Williams ‘74
303-735-8169
P.S. Sheafe of course does not know of my writing of this letter.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.