Faculty members to retire by end of school year
Several instructors with an accumulated 27 years of experience move on
Four faculty members with nearly three decades of combined experience will be leaving UCC by the end of this school year: Pete Anderson, Ross Tomlin, Sandy Hendy and Rebecca Ford Kapoor.
Anderson and Tomlin shared their thoughts about leaving with the following words. Hendy was unavailable due to a trip to Haiti, and Kapoor has already moved back to Australia.
Pete Anderson, Literature Instructor:
Q: How long have you been working at UCC?
Anderson: I think since 1986, full-time since 1986.
Q: What was your reason for leaving?
Anderson: I think I’ll let some younger person have a shot at it. There’s other things I want to do. I am also a painter, and I’m going to have a show here at the gallery in April. You can’t do a lot of painting as a full time instructor.
Q: What are the things that you are proud to contribute here?
Anderson: I feel best about the literature offerings. We’ve managed to keep a good variety of literature offerings. Students I’ve spoken to who went on to four-year institutions, who continued on, said they were well prepared. I think we do more with less.
Q: What have you found to be the most challenging while working with the Oregon Education System?
Anderson: “The good part about [teaching higher education in the state of Oregon] is the variety of students, the cross section of students. If you’re at say, U of O, or you’re dealing with a freshmen [class], they’re usually about the same age and the same background, and here it’s everybody. So that certainly is a challenge and, of course, I learn a lot, too. It goes both ways. It keeps your mind alive if you’re doing it right. If you’re open, it’s certainly a two-way exchange. We are not all-knowing and all-seeing; we are very human. We’re like the actors in Ashland, the good ones. If they miss a line, you don’t even notice it.”
Q: If you had a million dollars to contribute to UCC, where would you donate it?
Anderson: In Fine Arts and Humanities; I think they get short-changed. They’re not a priority. If I had resources, I’d definitely do that.
Family Status: Married to Jill Michell; three kids
Hometown: Chatham, New York
Favorite UCC Memory: Trips to Ashland with Jim O’Neill, Bob McMoncis and students.
Retirement town: The North Umpqua River
Retirement sport: Fly-fishing
Retirement contact info: Jill Michell
Retirement occupation: Painting, gardening
Retirement daily routine in five words or less: painting, gardening, and fishing: sometimes order will change
Ross Tomlin, Vice President of Instruction:
Q: How long have you been working at UCC?
Tomlin: Three years.
Q: What is your reason for leaving?
Tomlin: I obtained a presidency at another community college.
Q: What are the things that you are proud to contribute here?
Tomlin: I think we made a lot of strides in the last few years in instruction with revising our curriculum and programs and putting in place a lot of consistent procedures for how we approve curriculum and how we develop new programs. [In] a lot of different ways [we are] making things more consistent and probably a little more efficient.
Q: What did you find most challenging about the Oregon Education Program?
Tomlin: I think one of the challenges in Oregon is that all 17 community colleges are very independent. So getting things to where we agree on them between the 17 colleges is pretty difficult. Probably that’s, I think, the biggest challenge Oregon has, is trying to find that balance between being too regulated and too overseen by one office at the state level and then being too independent to where we are making it more difficult on students. You just have got to find that balance, and Oregon has got that challenge, I think, ahead of them.
Q: If you had a million dollars to donate to UCC, how would you invest it?
Tomlin: That’d be a lot of bus passes or scholarships. But I would want the money to go to students directly so that they would have the ability to get scholarships and help with other expenses and help with their traveling to and from school. I would funnel that through the foundation to help students directly.
Family status: Married to Joanne, special education teacher; three grown kids, two grand kids
Hometown: Temple, TX
New town: Danielson, CT
Favorite sport: Hiking
Next contact info: Quinebaug Valley Community College, Danielson, CT.
Next occupation: President of Quinebaug Valley Community College.
Chris Lake, director of the Southern Oregon Wine Institute, explained Rebecca Ford Kapoor’s situation. “Rebecca had a visa and was able to work. The college was able to engage with immigration department and accomplish getting a visa for her to work. Her husband, being a citizen of New Zealand, also had a more difficult time finding work because he would have to negotiate his own visa and find a position in the industry,” explains Chris Lake, head of the technology center. “We found that Rebecca contributed greatly to our program here; she was the high-ranking candidate of the pool of candidates.”
A committee of UCC faculty members has been formed to fill Kapoor’s vacant position. “We’ve formed a committee, expect to interview candidates, probably early March, and look to see if we can find another candidate who would be as well-suited as Rebecca was to teach in this position. So far, so good. We’re hopeful; we had good luck finding [Rebecca] and we expect that we’ll find somebody else as competent as she was and ready to stay with us,” says Lake.
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