University of Texas at Austin
1. INTRODUCTION
From September 1991
though June, 1994, the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureship Program was
administered from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to becoming
Director in 1991, I had interacted with the Program somewhat as an
undergraduate,
a college instructor, and later, as a lecturer. During my Directorship,
I found the Program to be a challenging but rewarding experience.
Seventy-five visits were made in the 1991-2 Program and 64 in the 1992-3
Program. Recognizing that the Shapley Endowment Fund was not being
increased at a rate which allowed for inflation and increasing travel expenses,
cost cutting measures were instituted in 1993 and extensive efforts were
made to stabilize the situation. As a result, in 1993-4, only
twenty-seven
visits occurred but were paid from funds allocated for just twenty.
In addition to performing administrative duties, I made several visits
both during and after my Directorship that illustrate the varied roles
of a Visiting Lecturer.
2. BEFORE DIRECTING THE PROGRAM
My first encounter with the AAS Visiting Lectureship Program was in the mid 1960s, when I was an undergraduate physics major at a small women's college, Notre Dame of Ohio in Cleveland. J. J. Nassau came from Case Institute of Technology to give a lecture and to talk to the non-major's astronomy class in which I was enrolled. I don't remember the name of his talk, or even how interesting it may have been, but I do remember his kindness to me when I later approached him concerning my emerging interest in astronomy. He arranged for me to audit a course by Victor Blanco the following semester at Case.
My next encounter with the Program was 1970; I was a physics instructor at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. Bart Bok came as the Shapley Visitor; although my appointment was only a temporary one, he was personally encouraging about a career in teaching. During his visit, he also met with university personnel to urge them to add an astronomy course to the curriculum.
Twenty years later, following my nomination as Education Officer of the AAS -- which included the Directorship of the Shapley Program -- Charles Tolbert invited me to become a Shapley Lecturer. In 1991, I made my first Shapley Visit, Northern Nevada Community College in Elko, Nevada.
Although my host and I had carefully timed my visit to Nevada for April, so as to miss the snows, we did not succeed. I flew into a snowy Salt Lake City and transferred to a tiny commuter airplane. We flew through a snow storm -- over what I later learned was two mountain ranges. My hosts booked me in an inexpensive hotel in downtown Elko, where gambling and smoking occur all night and the walls are paper thin. It was a bit of a culture shock to walk past occupied bars at 8 AM as I sought the donut shop that I had heard about the previous evening. During the first day, I visited the college and met some of its administrators; we discussed astronomy as part of the community college curriculum. That night, I was nervous despite being prepared for my first lecture. The talk was to be given in the local museum which had a spacious room with good audio-visual facilities. All during that day I had received hints that perhaps the audience might not be very large. Including my host and the projectionist, there were seven people in attendance. It seems my lecture had been scheduled for the same night as the only performance of the high school play. The next morning, Saturday, I presented a three hour workshop for over twenty local teachers. This was exceptionally well received; in fact, several asked me to continue for the afternoon and wanted to know if I was planning any local lectures! However, we finished, as planned, at noon. I left on an early plane on Sunday (since a Saturday night stay was required for the lower airfare), had a clear view of the mountain ranges I had missed on Thursday's flight, and imagined being trapped there on a plane downed by a snowstorm. I found it interesting that two years later, in 1993, Newsweek magazine listed Elko as the best small town in the US...and wondered if the bars still stayed open all night. Northern Nevada Community College had previously had Shapley speakers in 85/6 and 89/90.
3. ASSUMING THE DIRECTORSHIP
In the summer of 1991, I visited Charles Tolbert where he spent a day going over the intricacies of the program and the filing system. Returning to Austin, I went out and immediately purchased two new file cabinets and waited for his boxes to arrive.
My first year as Director was a learning experience. I organized the files, mailed out the brochures, added to the mailing list to include more minority and women's colleges, received 87 applications and arranged 75 visits. It was interesting to talk to some of the college representatives on the phone, to help them chose the best match for their needs, but it the real joy was to talk to the various Lecturers. I learned that the key to the Program was the volunteer spirit of the Lecturers and their devotion to the program. Unfortunately, I have since passed all the records along and can't consult them to find some of the more interesting examples of travels. Several colleges built up and maintained a relationship with their lecturer. For example, Dave Crawford visited Morehead State University and began a dialog about telescopes with them. Several years later, they invited him back at their expense to give some talks on the occasion of their new observatory's dedication in September 1992.
The crisis of my tenure as Shapley Director came in the second year as I noted the intersection of higher airplane fares and decreasing return on the endowment income due to falling interest rates. The expenses of average visits went up while the income did not. Also, over the years, no one had noticed that each year the entire income was being taken from the endowment to support expenses. It was not adjusted to allow for inflation. The result was that the "buying power" of the endowment was decreasing annually. In addition, since I had added some traditionally underfunded institutions to the mailing list; many more requests were arriving from colleges wanting their fee waived. During this period, in response to frequent requests for a female Lecturer, I also added many more female astronomers to the speakers' list, more than doubling the previous number.
My first effort to stabilize the situation was to talk with representatives from several foundations who might be interested enough in the Program to increase the endowment (it really needed to be doubled in size). The fact that the endowment was already "named" meant that no one was interested in this. The second effort came as a result of my attending the NSF "Workshop on the Role of Professional Societies in Two-Year College Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education." The aims of the workshop were:
B. To form networks among two-year college leaders from varied scientific, engineering, and mathematics organizations.
C. To promote two-year faculty leadership in professional organizations.
D. To increase professional societies' services to enhance lower division education, particularly those directed to two-year faculty.
E. To enlarge professional societies' roles in developing initiatives to increase the number and improve the quality of proposals to NSF, and other funding agencies, from two-year college faculty.
My final effort at locating additional funds for the endowment was to convince the AAS Council to allow an appeal to go out with the membership dues statements at the end of 1993. This did produce several thousand dollars, but the general fund donations went down (though the total of both was larger than the donation total for the previous year). Meanwhile, the Council, having been alerted to this financial crisis, voted to drastically decrease the number of lectures to be presented in 1993-4. For comparison, seventy-five [selected from 87 applications] visits were made in the 1991-2 program; sixty-four visits [selected from 91 applications] were made in 1992-3; and twenty-seven visits [selected from 42 requests] were scheduled for 1993-4 using the budget approved by AAS Council for twenty visits.
4. EXPERIENCES AS A LECTURER
Meanwhile, I continued to participate as a Lecturer. My lecture in 1992 was at West Liberty State College, West Liberty, West Virginia in March. Three things stand out concerning the visit: the lecture itself was very well attended. My only surprise was that they waited until I got there to ask permission to tape it for later use. I gave the permission to tape my Hubble Space Telescope talk -- which included an entire tray of slides -- and then found that they meant "audio tape" for use on radio! I never did find out whether or not any of the talk made it on the air...but I did describe a number of the images in more detail than one would normally do. I met with a round of administrators and encouraged them to consider an astronomer as their next "hire" in the science department, pointing out the versatility of astronomers in their ability to teach more than one subject. I was also a guest speaker at the West Liberty Elementary School. I had requested a school visit, partly based on how well my workshop had been received the previous year; the local school was reluctantly participating in fulfilling this request. I was told to only take 20 minutes with the children, but at the end of 20, they asked if I could stay another 20 minutes. When I finished, all the children, who had been sitting on the floor of the school library, were encouraged by the librarian to come find a book to check out on astronomy. She had listened to my talk and then gone around and gathered up appropriate items for the students. I was the first Shapley Visitor on record to visit West Liberty.
The following April found me at Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia. There, in addition to my public talk, I worked with the astronomy class through a laboratory session and became the outside examiner for the senior project presentations in a variety of sciences. I also had a long discussion with the vice-president for academic affairs about their plans to install an observatory on campus, including possible locations, the inadvisability of converting a farm silo to an observatory, and costs. Dating back to 1971, Hollins had had ten Shapley visits.
In October, 1993, my annual visit was to Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. Their only astronomy course was taught in the Fall semester, and since it was difficult to find someone willing to do a visit early in the school year, I did it myself. Coming from Texas, where the seasonal change is usually limited to leaves going from green to brown in a drought, it was wonderful to be in Ohio in the Fall while the leaves changed colors. This small private liberal arts college enjoyed having a Shapley speaker in alternate years to enhance students' interest in astronomy. In addition to the public talk, I presented a workshop to education majors on using astronomy in the elementary school classroom, lectured in an interdisciplinary class, talked to the Society of Physics Students, and met with administrators. Hiram College's first Shapley visitor was in 1980; I was their seventh.
5. CHANGE OF DIRECTORSHIP
Meanwhile, the responsibilities of the AAS Education Officer had expanded with the receipt of two NSF grants and the addition of other internal programs for the Society. With no funds available for additional personnel in the AAS Education Office, I discussed with Sidney Wolfe, then AAS President, the possibility of appointing a new director for the Shapley Program. Because of his prior loyalty to the Program and interest in it, I suggested A. G. Davis Philip. The Executive Officer asked him to take over the program as Director in summer, 1994 while I continued to manage and maintain all other aspects of the Education Office. Assuming only a modest amount of paperwork, Dave Philip arrived in Austin with an empty brief-case to pick up records and discuss the procedures. We ended up spending an entire day packing over six boxes of files (1.5 file cabinets) to ship to his home. He carried the computer disks back in the empty briefcase. It was Dave Philip who took on the tedious and arduous task of re-organizing the files and computerizing all the data.
6. FURTHER ADVENTURES ON THE LECTURE CIRCUIT
My next visit did not occur until April 1996. Since the endowment fund had not fully recovered from its crisis, of visits, most lecturers now provide an average of one visit every two years. I went to Metropolitan Community Colleges of Blue Springs, MO. The Metropolitan Community Colleges of Kansas City, MO has several campus - of which I visited three. The talk was arranged by Cynthia Sexton, a first year astronomy instructor at Blue Springs. At her campus, I met the physical science class. At the Independence Campus, I met with the general astronomy class. The Independence Campus also hosted the Public Lecture. I visited the Longview Campus to meet with the divisional science chairman for an hour. An extensive meeting with a roomful of administrators highlighted my visit. MCC enrolls over 17,000 students per year, many of whom plan to transfer to another institution after receiving their two year associate degree. Cynthia Sexton later reported that she felt so inspired by my visit that she extensively changed her astronomy classes to add in many more hands-on activities.
This past April, I visited Jackson, MS. Dr. Ghosh will speak later concerning how the Shapley Program has influenced Astronomy in central Mississippi. This was a more active visit than most since it involved not only the Public Lecture and talks at three colleges, but also two high school talks and a talk to the local astronomical society. One of the high schools was a two-hour drive from Jackson. The institutions included: St. Andrews School in Jackson and French Camp Academy in French Camp, Tougaloo College and Jackson State University in Jackson, Holmes Community College in Goodman, the Jackson Astronomical Association, and the Russell C. Davis Planetarium in Jackson. The MS Science Network pulls all these entities together to sponsor the Shapley Visit. The two-day visit included the formal talks, a dinner with the network, and an informal discussion with administrators. Although this was seven presentations, they were all variations of two different talks: astronomy education and SOFIA. Getting to Mississippi from Texas, even with part of the journey in a commuter aircraft, is easier than flying over two mountain ranges in a snowstorm.
7. CONCLUSION
Serving as Director of the Shapley Visiting Lecturer Program has been a privilege. It is especially gratifying to know so many astronomers who are so willing to give of themselves to travel to out-of-the way locations, often at inconvenient times, to share their excitement of astronomy with students and the general public. At some colleges, where there is only one astronomer on staff, the Shapley Lecturer is often the only other astronomer that astronomer will see on campus all year. The Lecturers have the ability to influence administrators concerning future plans to include or increase the amount of astronomy instruction at the institution. I look forward to many more years of participation as the Program enters the next century.