Fond Memories of Teaching in Extension

Keynote Address at the HEAA Banquet

by Professor John D. Spengler, 25-year Honorand

John D. Spengler

For 28 years I have had the privilege of teaching courses on the environment at the Extension School. From the awakening of our nation's environmental consciousness at the first Earth Day, there has been a persistent interest in environmental education. From a single offering nearly 30 years ago we now have many courses relevant to environmental sciences and management. Since I began teaching a course on environmental quality here in 1975, the number of environmental studies courses has increased. We now have a certificate program, five courses offered online, and we are working on a master's program in environmental management.

The Division of Continuing Education (DCE) supported us five years ago when we undertook our distance learning efforts and the expansion of the curriculum. In last year's Environmental Management I course we had students joining us from five continents. We had a student signing in from internet cafes as she traveled around Europe. We had a student from the United Nations' environment program in Kenya, Africa, and a naval officer on board a ship in Tokyo Bay. The power of the Internet to reach so many more students throughout the world is important for our global environment. The challenge of resource use and contamination of our air, oceans, beaches, drinking water, and food is staggering. To date, we estimate that through the Extension School we have helped 4,000 people gain a better appreciation of their environment. But our goal is to increase this a thousandfold. We need an environmentally literate populace willing to make a difference in their own lives, through their jobs, families, neighborhoods, and politics.

The fact that Extension School students actually select our courses is a testament of their commitment. And over the years, George Buckley and I have had the good fortune to become friends with many of our students and influence their lives. In a few days, Sonja Ramstrom will be defending her thesis at the Harvard School of Public Health. Ten years ago, she was a bright and enthusiastic student at the Extension School. She had recently graduated from Wellesley College and was working at a local company. In this way, she was typical of many of our students who come to work in Boston and are having a great time with the 20-something crowd when they suddenly realize that a real career involves more education. They find their way to our Extension School courses because they always had an interest in the environment. George and I enjoy counseling these students and launching them toward environmental careers. As it turns out, Sonja's dissertation on air toxic exposures for inner-city teenagers was a collaboration with Patrick (Pat) Kinney who is a professor at Columbia School of Public Health. In the late '70s, Pat was a student in our night class who went on for a doctorate degree at Harvard and then faculty positions at New York University and now Columbia University.

There are many such stories that were scripted through our classes. Sue Ludwig, a flight attendant, conducted an ozone exposure study on her flights across the Pacific. Over 100 flights have been monitored and we are working together on a manuscript. Recently she has been asked to lead the health and safety efforts for her union. Talking about union leadership, Robert (Bob) Burns may have been the only Teamster ever to take our environmental courses. And, he not only took all the offerings but is now a TA for the Environmental Ethics course. Bob is a wonderful example of how the Harvard Extension School can make a profound difference in someone's life. Bob was a long-haul truck driver who never lost his love of knowledge. After an undergraduate and master's degree in Extension studies, Bob became the health and safety officer for his company. He has been a strong supporter and participant of university activities in the environment.

Zachary Zevitas, George Buckley's high school student in Watertown, took our Extension School course and now serves as our TA and webmaster. He has created a wonderful interactive website for two of our courses.

There are so many more fond memories of people I've met through the Extension School. I'll conclude with just a few more stories. Sue Briggs and Tom Dumyahn were working on their degrees when they took our course in the mid '70s. At the time we had a large scale prospective air pollution health study in six cities across the US. I hired both Tom and Sue to work on the study. Sue eventually moved to Long Island where she leads the safety and quality assurance office for Brookhaven National Laboratory. Tom worked for Harvard for 22 years, participating in studies in Russia, Poland, Taiwan, Colombia, and across North America. Along the way, he assisted us as a TA, guiding graduate student air pollution monitoring projects in the MBTA stations or in the smoky bars of Cambridge and Somerville.

Perhaps my fondest story is that of John McCarthy, who approached me after my first air pollution lecture in Dade Moeller's Extension class. It was about 1973 and I was a young assistant professor just a few years older than John. He had graduated from Boston College with a biology degree and was working for a blood testing lab. I remember our discussion about environmental careers. Thus began a lifelong friendship. John went on to earn a master's at the Harvard School of Public Health and worked on aerosol toxicology research at MIT for eight years before returning for a doctorate degree. When he graduated in 1989 he turned down offers to return to MIT or move on to NYU so that we could form a company together. Now the company, Environmental Health and Engineering, has been in business for 15 years, providing consulting services to businesses, universities, hospitals, and towns across the country. It all started with an after-class chat in Emerson Hall.

My co-instructor George Buckley and I share many humorous stories accumulated across years of classes, many, many fieldtrips, and holiday class parties. We all know as teachers and students how serious the Extension School is about course evaluations. Well, I experienced an evaluation unlike any I had known. One Halloween night I was in full costume at a party in Watertown. Someone at work had invited me. Since four guys shared a house, the party was rocking with a collection of people having various connections to the hosts. I was in the kitchen sipping my beer through my gorilla mask talking with a young woman in fairy princess regalia. "How did you get here, who do you know, what do you do" kind of banter was the scripted dialogue for much of the evening. This conversation suddenly got interesting when she said she was taking an environmental course at the Harvard Extension School. It turned out to be the course George Buckley and I were teaching. Being masked and mumbling through latex, she had no inkling that I was her instructor. I hesitated for a moment but recognized that such an opportunity was not likely to ever occur again. I probed for more information: What did she really think about environmental management and the faculty? All I can say is that my ego is intact and we went on to offer the course, as well as expand the curriculum, for another 15 years.

Let me offer a suggestion to Dean Shinagel and staff: You should organize an annual Halloween party. Make faculty attendance mandatory and have them dress as their alter egos. Let us see if their egos will be altered.

Seriously, I thank the Dean, his administration, and, especially, Len Evenchik, Mark Lax, and Mary Higgins who have, at times, endured our somewhat improvisational style. But after all, it has been the Extension School that has led the University with many innovations in teaching. We are pleased to be part of the electronic age of distance education. Of course, the students who have selected our environmental courses have reinforced our optimism that we can learn the importance of our ecosystem and that each and every one of us can be instruments of change.