Extension School's 25-Year Honorands

This year, the Extension School has seven 25-year honorands in addition to John D. Spengler. They are James Chisholm, Raymond Comeau, Arthur Dyck, Dodge Fernald, Wayne Ishikawa, Raymond Lum, and Cynthia Verba. They have instructed students in everything from studio arts to foreign languages and have enriched the academic life of the Extension School not only through teaching, but through years of combined life experience and academic accomplishment. The Extension School community is proud to honor these dedicated teachers for their longevity in service. Below are brief biographies of each honorand.

Since 1977, James Chisholm has been an instructor of beginning and intermediate drawing at the Extension School in one of the few off-campus teaching venues: a drawing studio on the third floor of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). Chisholm also teaches drawing and painting for the MFA Museum Learning and Public Programs Department and he teaches drawing and composition classes each Saturday morning for teens. He is Assistant Professor of Art History, Drawing, and Visual Design Theory at North Shore Community College in Danvers.

In addition to teaching, Chisholm is a plein air landscape painter and presently has an exhibition of watercolors at the Bravos Gallery in Georgetown, Massachusetts. He also belongs to the North Shore Writer's Workshop in Rockport and is completing a series of poems based on watercolors of Topsfield done near and around the former estate of William Coolidge.

"Because of the seriousness of purpose that my Extension School students bring to me," Chisholm says, "teaching for the Extension School has truly been a rich and very satisfying experience that has enabled me to bring to all my teaching venues an extra dimension of excellence."

Raymond Comeau is Assistant Dean of University Extension and Director of Foreign Language Instruction for Continuing Education. He directs the Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management (CSS) Program and foreign language programs at Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School. As Lecturer in Extension he teaches courses on French language, literature, and culture, as well as courses in French creative writing.

In addition to his publications in the field of teaching, he has co-authored seven French textbooks for college students, including the popular Ensemble series now in its sixth edition.

In 1990, Comeau was the inaugural recipient of the Extension School's Carmen S. Bonanno Prize for Excellence in Foreign Language Teaching, and in 1992 he was named Officer in the Order of the Academic Palms by the French Ministry of Education in recognition of his contribution to French studies in the United States.

Arthur Dyck began teaching at the Harvard Divinity School in 1965, and he is currently on the faculties of the Divinity School and the School of Public Health. He is also a member of the Harvard Center for Development and Population Studies. Dyck's main concentration is in ethical theory, with special application to questions of moral knowledge, human rights, and issues in bioethics. With Georgetown University Press, he is revising Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities, originally published in 1994, which reflects his extensive work in moral knowledge and ethical theory. His book on physician-assisted suicide, When Killing is Wrong, was released April 2001 by Pilgrim Press. Dyck also plans to revise the anthology Ethics in Medicine and to publish a book on moral knowledge. Drawing upon his teaching and research, and other courses throughout the University, he continues to coordinate a concentration in bioethics.

Courses he has recently taught at the Extension School include Ethics in Medical Practice, Human Community and Human Rights, and Introduction to Ethics.

When Dodge Fernald went on his first interview for his first position, he had a background in clinical psychology and was looking for a position in his field. His interviewer was looking for someone in the field of experimental psychology but, by the end of their conversation, Fernald was offered the job anyway, and he accepted. "Bowdoin was a wonderful place to begin," Fernald declared. "In that way, I became a generalist in psychology--working both sides of the street."

Since then Fernald has been on the faculty at Cornell University and Wellesley College. He held a Fulbright fellowship for two years at the University of Madrid. His first appointment at Harvard was in social medicine at the School of Public Health. Since then he has taught at the Summer School and the Extension School, where he was also Director of the Master of Liberal Arts (ALM) Program and Assistant Dean of University Extension.

Currently, he is Senior Lecturer on Psychology at Harvard College. Fernald also teaches the beginning psychology course, which he has taught for many years, at the Extension School, and he continues to revise the textbook he authored, Introduction to Psychology, now in its fourth edition.

Wayne Ishikawa, Lecturer in Extension, is also the Planning and Special Projects Officer for the Division of Continuing Education and Associate Editor for the Continuing Higher Education Review. A graduate of the University of Hawaii, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees in French, he traveled to the other side of the country to earn a doctorate in French from Harvard University.

Ishikawa has taught courses in beginning, intermediate, and conversational French at the Extension School since 1977 and he also teaches in the Summer School, where he was formerly Dean of Students. He left Harvard for a time to serve as Assistant Professor at Simmons College, where he taught courses in French literature and language, but returned and since has held positions as Director of the Institute for Learning in Retirement and Personnel Officer at the Division of Continuing Education. In recent years, he has been a student as well as an instructor at the Extension School, taking courses in Spanish.

Raymond Lum (MA '73, PhD '85) entered the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1971 after serving for more than two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. Earlier, he had studied and taught in Taiwan while still an undergraduate. A native of Chicago's Chinatown, he has long had a deep interest in Asia, and through teaching Chinese in the Extension School for more than a quarter of a century has been able to share that interest with hundreds of students while encouraging them to learn more about Asia.

For almost three decades, Lum has been Asian Bibliographer in Harvard's Widener Library and Librarian for Western Languages in the Harvard-Yenching Library. He travels frequently to Asia in search of new publications to add to the library collections and to consult on library issues and on historical photographs of Asia.

In 1999, he received the Harvard Extension School's Carmen S. Bonanno Excellence in Foreign Language Teaching Award. When he is not at the University he serves as Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Old Schwamb Mill Preservation Trust, which maintains a working nineteenth-century mill in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Cynthia Verba is Director of Fellowships in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and is also a research scholar in the field of musicology. As Lecturer in Extension she teaches survey courses on developments in Western music, from the Medieval period through the modern era.

Verba's research specialties are French baroque opera and musical thought of the French Enlightenment. Her book on the latter topic, published by Oxford Clarendon Press in 1993, is titled Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–1765. She has a forthcoming chapter in a book titled The Enlightenment World to be published by Routledge Press. She has also published several articles and reviews on the French composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau in numerous journals. Currently, she is working on a book about Rameau's tragedies.

In her position as Director of Fellowships she has published a booklet titled Scholarly Pursuits: A Practical Guide to Academe (an in-house publication) and annual fellowship guides for predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships. She has been a Fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and a recipient of a grant from the National Foundation for the Humanities.