Circuitous Routes

Mary Michelson Haselton, Brian Willmer,
Gerard O'Doherty, and Erika Wolf: ALB Profiles

Mary Michelson Haselton, ALB '01

The Harvard Extension School is a beacon for students who have taken a nontraditional path to higher education. The Bachelor of Liberal Arts (ALB) Program, in particular, is filled with students who have some fascinating stories to tell about their atypical travels from high school to undergraduate studies. The following four June 2001 ALB graduates--a foreign service officer, a farmer, a professional ballet dancer, and a monk--share a circuitous route to their undergraduate degrees, a desire to be challenged, a love of the liberal arts, and, finally, a bit of luck or destiny that led them to the Harvard Extension School.

A Life of Service:
Our Washington Woman

This June Mary Michelson Haselton earned her ALB degree, cum laude, at the age of 81. While quite an achievement, this accolade comes at the end of a life full of challenge, adventure, and distinction.

Before coming to the Extension School, Haselton had a remarkable career with the federal government. Beginning with a secretarial appointment to the War Department in 1941, she progressed through the Civil Service, became a legislative assistant on a senatorial staff, then a foreign service officer with the Department of State, serving in Washington, Zurich, Munich, and Fiji. Her government career came to an abrupt end when love entered her life. She was forced to resign her commission due to State Department regulations, when she married fellow Foreign Service Officer George Haselton, AB '35.

When Mr. Haselton retired the following year, the couple took on another formidable challenge--team teaching foreign policy to undergraduate students at Simon's Rock College and St. Antony's College at Oxford University, England.

When the State Department amended its rules about married women, Haselton, who at the age of 54 was still looking for adventure, fought for and won reinstatement in 1974. She represented the US position on world population issues in the international arena, and in 1977-78 she served as deputy principal officer and charge d'affaires at the US Embassy in Fiji.

Looking back on her career, Haselton acknowledges, "not having a degree did prevent me from moving into higher positions, however, if you were smart, showed initiative, and did your homework, you could go far. I needed to be constantly challenged and I always did my homework."

Haselton retired in 1979 and developed a new intellectual interest intersection of philosophy and science. Upon her husband's passing, she received an invitation to join the Ann Harvard Society for Widows of Harvard graduates. She wrote to them and asked if Harvard had any courses that she could take. The Society sent her the Extension School catalogue and, as they say in Washington, the rest is history.

Haselton's next challenge? She might complete her husband's book--a science fiction novel, infusing it with her Harvard knowledge of philosophy and the history of science--and submit it for publication. This work will continue Mary and George's life-long collaboration.

A Life in Nature: Our Lincoln Farmer

Gerald O'Doherty, ALB '01, on Flint Farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts

Gerard O'Doherty is closer to 50 than 40 and has never spent a day in an office. He grew up in suburbia, but was encouraged by his father to enjoy the natural world around him. O'Doherty has memories of his father sending his seven children off into the yard with small empty sacks to collect whatever they found--acorns, maple leaves, bottle caps. In addition, he remembers lying on his back on the wet spring grass and having his Dad point out Perseus, Orion, and Cassiopeia in the night sky.

Maybe due to his father's influence, O'Doherty has always made defending our natural resources a priority and a challenge. He has spent his entire adult life learning, protesting, and teaching on their behalf. He studied natural resources at University of Massachusetts-Amherst and environmental
ethics at Goddard College in Vermont. As a child of the '60s environmental and civil rights movements, he was a participant at the Wounded Knee confrontation in South Dakota, and anti-war demonstrations in the early 70s. O'Doherty has also worked in forestry, logging, surveying, historic preservation carpentry, historic landscape restoration, timber framing, environmental education, dairy farming, and commercial and residential general contracting. O'Doherty has, by himself, built three 4,000-plus square feet homes--two of which he has also designed.

The common thread and true love for most of his adult years, however, has been environmental education. O'Doherty has worked for 8 years with two educational programs in Vermont and Massachusetts that teach fifth graders the joys of farm living and bring environmental consciousness into their lives.

Currently, O'Doherty has moved from educator to working on two preservation projects in the town of Nahant and as a herdsman. He works at the Flint Farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a beef cow farm where 30 Belted Galloway cows make their temporary home. Flint Farm is the historic home to eleven succesive generations of Flint families; Thomas Flint came to this country in 1634 and was one of the original signers of the Harvard charter. O'Doherty now adds his Extension degree to the Harvard history of the farm.

O'Doherty's workday usually begins at 6:30 am with cow breakfast preparation. He then spends midmorning repairing the early twentieth-century farm equipment, and the afternoon and early evening is filled with the joys of baling hay. This summer the Flint famly and friends will put up 8,000 bales of hay for feed and sale. O'Doherty lives on the farm full time in what he describes lovingly as a renovated chicken coop with views of beautiful green hills, corn silos, and foreboding belted cows to his left and to his right a roadway that many luxury cars speed down. The juxtaposition gives him the feeling of time travel or having one foot in each century.

The future holds more natural challenges for O'Doherty. He is investigating the possible career change into relief service worker. As always, he will use his experience and education to serve others.

A Life in Art: Our Boston Dancer

Erika Wolf, ALB '01

Erika Wolf feels that she has come full circle. "I spent the first year of my life in my father's office in Harvard's Science Center. Graduate and undergraduate students would feed and hold me, while my father, a Benjamin Pierce assistant professor of mathematics, would explain calculus or topology to his students." Twenty-two years later she found herself back at Harvard pursuing an undergraduate degree, not in math, but in her mother's chosen profession, psychology.

Like Haselton, Willmer, and O'Doherty, Wolf's was not a straight route from high school to college. After earning her high school diploma in 1994, Erika worked as a professional ballet dancer. She has danced with the Illinois Ballet, Connecticut Ballet, and Louisville Ballet. It was in Louisville that Erika began to feel that dancing alone was not enough to make her happy. "I have a passion for dance and a need to dance--when I dance, I can fly. I loved hearing 3,000 pairs of hands applauding our company's hard work. I did not,
however, feel fulfilled."

Born into a family of academics, Wolf decided to combine dancing with college work. In 1997 she moved to Boston, began Extension School coursework, and started dancing with the Boston Dance Company.

Erika felt that her courses enriched her mind and her dancing. "In my Extension School class on modern poetry, I was excited to read Yeats' poem Down by the Sally Gardens because the first pas de deux ever created for me was set to a musical adaptation of this poem. Through the professor's and my classmates' insights, I discovered more ways to interpret the poem. This affected the way I thought about the style of my dancing and my character in the ballet."

While her liberal arts education complemented her dancing, Wolf found a serious love of psychology at Harvard. She became as focused and determined with her psychology education as her dancing career, completing five psychology courses at Harvard College as a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Special Student and earning straight As in all of them. In addition, she completed a reading and research project with Harvard instructor Dr. Sharon Kramer on the relationship between proactivity and Lou Gehrig's disease progression--a personal interest given her mother's ongoing struggle with the disease. Erika graduated near the top of this year's graduating class with a 3.90 cumulative GPA and was awarded the Reginald H. Phelps Prize for academic achievement.

Comtemplating the future, Wolf says, "Dancing will always be a major part of my life, but when I retire from a dance career, I would like to be on my way towards earning a doctorate in psychology." And Wolf is well on her way. She has accepted a research technician position at the National Center for PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and will apply to PhD programs in clinical psychology this year.

A Life of Giving: Our British Monk

Brian Willmer, ALB '01

Brian Willmer earned his ALB, cum laude, this June, with a 3.70 cumulative grade point average, in sharp contrast to the 15-year-old Brian, who was secure in the knowledge that he did not want to go on to college.

Willmer spent his high school years at St. Christopher Secondary Modern in England, an institution that, he states, "would not have been out of place in a Charles Dickens novel." Knowing that he could not bear another day of higher education, he sought employment at a local barbershop. Soon he had become an accomplished hairdresser winning awards and managing his own shop.

Willmer, however, began to feel that his life was compartmentalized into four unrelated worlds--work, church, friends, and family. Overwhelmed by this fractured lifestyle and wanting his faith to move from the margins to the center of his world, he contemplated the priesthood as he searched for a way to bring meaning and wholeness to his life. Willmer had grown up in Lancashire, in the midst of monastic ruins, and through a chance (or a destined) friend-of-a-friend referral, he found himself finally at home in a seminary with an order of monks.

In 1991 Willmer traveled to Cambridge to the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, where he found himself a little intimidated by the challenging work and the higher education of his fellow brothers. However, he wasn't intimidated for long. At a fateful meeting with Harvard College Dean of Students Archie Epps, Willmer was referred to the Extension School. His plan at first was to take a few Extension courses and then apply to Harvard College, but he enjoyed his intellectually challenging and worldly Extension School classmates so much that he decided to stay and earn his ALB degree.

Willmer states that the biggest reward of the monastic life is "truly discovering who I am and through that process being available to others in a truly authentic way." He is constantly being challenged in his work, for the life of a modern-day monk requires modern-day skills, such as business management and computer programming. However, his greatest challenge and joy "is being with people who are very different from myself and showing true understanding and compassion for their lives." He feels that his liberal arts education has made this easier, for it shortens the distance between himself and others. Moreover, he has many avenues--art, literature, history, psychology--available for him to reach others.

Willmer is a lifelong learner and may return to the Extension School for additional liberal arts courses that will compliment and challenge, but not compartmentalize, his life.

While the field of adult education is dominated by the assumption that adults return to school to earn their undergraduate degrees solely for the purpose of gaining credentials to finally begin their professional careers, the staff of the Harvard Extension Undergraduate Degree Program know that this is not the whole story. It is certainly evident from these four circuitous travel stories that ALB candidates at the Extension School are living creative, challenging, and intellectually rich lives pre-ALB, during-ALB, and post-ALB.

Photo of Mary Michelson Haselton by Jeffry Pike. Other photographers unknown.