{"id":134124,"date":"2020-06-11T09:17:29","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T13:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=134124"},"modified":"2020-06-23T12:22:24","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T16:22:24","slug":"my-last-year-of-teaching-jane-costlows-departure-prompts-reflections-on-past-present-and-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2020\/06\/11\/my-last-year-of-teaching-jane-costlows-departure-prompts-reflections-on-past-present-and-future\/","title":{"rendered":"My Last Year of Teaching: Jane Costlow’s departure prompts reflections on past, present, and future"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was the Tuesday after Commencement, and Jane Costlow paced around her Hedge Hall office, up to her elbows in books, boxes, papers, and assorted memorabilia. The college\u2019s Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies was nearing the end of her 34-year Bates career, and the only thing left was to pack up and move out.<\/p>\n

The scene is repeated each year, of course, but more often recently with the retirement of the baby boom generation of faculty members.<\/p>\n

\"Costlow<\/a>

Costlow tosses some papers into a recycling bin outside of her Hedge Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019d seen historian Michael Jones and his wife, Judy Head, empty his Pettengill Hall office. I\u2019d listened to poet Rob Farnsworth speak of plans for his beloved books piled high in Hathorn Hall. I\u2019d learned how historians Dennis Grafflin and John Cole went door to door on their Pettengill corridor, asking colleagues to adopt tomes they themselves couldn\u2019t take home.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d said the student, who had picked up a book. \u201cYour old friends will make new friends.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I\u2019d heard how my husband, historian Hilmar Jensen, had regretfully placed 200 of his volumes in boxes labeled \u201cfree books\u201d in the lobby of Perry Atrium. All were eventually claimed. Pausing one day to unload a final armful, he remarked to an observant student, \u201cThis feels like saying goodbye to old friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d said the student, who had picked up a book. \u201cYour old friends will make new friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the generation of scholars and teachers who have painstakingly collected books by the hundreds, even thousands, the task of retiring and closing up an on-campus shop presents various emotional and practical challenges, not the least of which is, \u201cWhat do I do with all those books?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Costlow<\/a>

Costlow pauses for a moment with a stack of books she’s packing in her office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

That vexing question, along with other rites of passage faced by baby boomers emptying the scholarly bench, planted the original seed for my interest in documenting the last year of somebody \u2014 anybody\u2019s \u2014 teaching at Bates.<\/p>\n

In August 2019, Jane Costlow gamely stepped into that role. There could have been no more willing, insightful, nor patient subject.<\/p>\n

When her classroom teaching career stopped abruptly and early, in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she gracefully transitioned to remote teaching. When the semester ended (Costlow did not teach during Short Term), she spent long hours in her Hedge office, clearing the space for her replacement, a recent Ph.D. who will move in when he arrives on the Bates campus sometime this summer.<\/p>\n

Costlow met that young scholar at a symposium last year, and she knows he will teach courses on climate change and fiction; to that end, she\u2019s left an assortment of books and other materials that she hopes he\u2019ll find useful, including a folder of papers about Lewiston and Auburn.<\/p>\n

\"Costlow<\/a>

Costlow and her husband, David Das, discuss packing strategies during one of her moving sessions. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Costlow begins a yearlong sabbatical this August, after which she will officially retire in August 2021. And she leaves at a particularly difficult time as Bates \u2014 administrators, faculty, staff, and students \u2014 confront the challenges of COVID-19 and the nation\u2019s greater-than-ever awareness of systemic racism in U.S. society. \u201cI really feel for people,\u201d she said, knowing that she will no longer be an active participant in the coming struggles.<\/p>\n

The pattern of sabbaticals, she said, \u201cprovides an incredible luxury that we have as academics to take periodic time off \u2014 having a kind of Sabbath in your life. That actually gives us a little bit of practice at shifting gears, so it’s not completely unfamiliar to no longer have the demands of teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s different now, she said, is no longer being driven by a need to complete this project or fulfill that obligation or stand for promotion.<\/p>\n

Costlow began her office move-out in April by first reviewing its entire contents, deciding what to save, what to dispose of, and what to try to pass on to others. Some of her discoveries \u2014 such as two folders of correspondence \u2014 delighted her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Costlow reviews the 34 years worth of accumulated files in her office filing cabinet. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cRather than pitching those things, I actually wanted to go through them,\u201d she said. She read the approximately 100 letters, some of which she had written, others written to her.<\/p>\n

She found an initial note from a young female graduate student, Jehanne Gheith (now an associate professor at Duke), writing her dissertation at Stanford on the Russian writer Evgeniia Tur, one of a number of women writers from the 19th century whose work and significance for cultural history has been retrieved by scholars over the past three decades, says Costlow.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the only person, certainly in English, maybe in the world at that point, who had written anything about this woman writer. So Jehanne reached out to me, and we have since become very dear friends. It was cool to find the inaugural letter of our friendship.\u201d<\/p>\n

In undertaking that office audit, she rediscovered a younger version of herself: a new scholar emerging from graduate school.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other surprises included a few missives from her late colleague, French professor Dick Williamson, a \u201chugely important person in the early years of my life at Bates,\u201d and a series of thank-you notes written by two other departed faculty colleagues when they were deans, Carl Benton Straub and Jim Carignan \u201961, thanking her for moderating a panel or serving on a committee.<\/p>\n

\"Jane<\/a>

Costlow holds a grading ledger from 1999. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

In undertaking that office audit, she rediscovered a younger version of herself: a new scholar emerging from graduate school, at Yale, \u201ca really wonderful graduate program, but one with a very traditional curriculum and entirely male faculty, which had been pretty much my experience as an undergraduate, as well,\u201d she said; and then arriving at Bates \u201cinterested in questions of women’s writing, feminist criticism, and different ways of thinking about cultural legacy and whose voices are heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she looked at all the books she\u2019d acquired, all that she\u2019d read, and what she\u2019d written \u2014 unpublished and published \u2014 and conversations she\u2019d had with others, she was struck by how much had changed over four decades.<\/p>\n

In particular, she thought of the number of women who are faculty now and their positions within the academy, and the waves of various attempts to fundamentally open up and change curricula and syllabi. \u201cI found myself looking back at the examples of how I have tried to do that, and the people that I’d worked with and leaned on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Be<\/a>

“Be gone slavery of the kitchen.”\u00a0 Costlow holds a\u00a0 reproduction of a 1931 poster by Soviet painter Grigory Mikhailovich Shegal. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

She leafed through documents from a seminar she\u2019d participated in when Bates was developing courses for its new women\u2019s studies program, decades ago, her mind on the past and the present.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight at this moment, I feel just how enormous the rock is that so many different people are trying to push up the hill of fundamental change,\u201d she said \u2014 people \u201cworking to bring all kinds of diverse voices and perspectives into the classroom and the academy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou sometimes wonder: Where is the arc of the universe heading?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But then she has a troubling realization. \u201cMy high school experience in rural North Carolina was my most diverse educational experience as a student \u2014 everything got whiter (and much more male)\u201d as she went on to college (Duke) and graduate school.<\/p>\n

In high school, Costlow had African American teachers in math, and chemistry, and in homeroom. \u201cI particularly would love to be able to find out if they’re still around, to thank them for the work that they did.\u201d<\/p>\n

As her mind flashes to the past and back to present, Costlow now is on the edge of tears. \u201cIt\u2019s that moment where you’re thinking back over your career and how much has changed\u201d \u2014 and how much hasn\u2019t. \u201cYou sometimes wonder: Where is the arc of the universe heading?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Jane Costlow on changes in higher education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n