APPLETON, WIS. — Armed with a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in classics after graduating with honors from Lawrence University in 1963, Dan Taylor had his career sights focused on a large university to pursue his research interests.
“I had no specific aspirations to return to Lawrence,” Taylor recalled.
But eleven years later, Taylor found himself back on the campus of his alma mater, teaching Latin and Greek in the same Main Hall classroom in which he himself had studied.
Taylor, Hiram A. Jones Professor of Classics, and Franklin Doeringer, Nathan M. Pusey Professor of East Asian Studies and professor of history, with 68 years of combined teaching service between them, will be recognized with professor emeritus status Sunday, June 10 as retiring faculty at Lawrence’s 158th commencement. They each will be awarded honorary master of arts degrees, ad eundem, as part of the graduation ceremonies that begin at 10:30 a.m. on the Main Hall green. Doeringer, who recently moved to Massachusetts, will be honored in absentia.
Taylor, who spent six years teaching at the University of Illinois before being recruited back to Lawrence, discovered bigger isn’t always better.
“That was not for me,” Taylor said of his time at UI. “When an opportunity arose to return to Lawrence, I jumped at it. I learned being at a small college is preferable to being at a large university because you’re so much more a part of the entire community. You really get to know your students. Plus, I still was able to do the kind of scholarship here that I wanted to at a large institution.”
Taylor’s scholarship specialty, classical linguistics, has helped him establish a reputation as the world’s leading scholar on Marcus Terentius Varro, ancient Rome’s foremost authority on Roman language science who came to be regarded as “the most learned of all the Romans.”
A linguist as well as a classicist, Taylor takes a scientific approach to the study of language. He has written two books on Varro, including “Varro De Lingua Latina X: A New Critical Text and English Translation with Prolegomena,” that culminated nearly 20 years of research on Varro’s once-lost seminal manuscript. He also edited the book “The History of Linguistics in the Classical Period,” which has become one of the most frequently cited texts in the field of classical linguistics, and co-wrote the pamphlet “Foreign Languages at the Middle Level.”
One of Lawrence’s most honored scholars, Taylor is the only faculty member in Lawrence history ever awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, both of which sent him to Florence, Italy for a year. In 2002, he returned to Italy a third time on a Fulbright Fellowship as the first Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Linguistics at the University of Trieste.
He received Lawrence’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 and was the recipient of both the American Philological Association’s National Award for Excellence in Teaching the Classics (1983) and the Wisconsin Association of Foreign Language Teachers’ Distinguished Foreign Language Educator of the Year Award (1990).
In April, after serving as guest speaker at the annual “A Day with the Romans” event for 400 high school students at the University of Wisconsin, Taylor was surprised with a special plaque of commendation from Gov. Doyle by the Wisconsin Latin Teachers Association. Doyle’s commendation cited Taylor’s 33 years of “tireless dedication to the classics and linguistics” and for inspiring “countless students to pursue careers in the classics and many diverse professions with their classics background.”
“I’ve been fortunate enough to be honored for teaching at an institution that puts a premium on good teaching, but I also was able to produce a fair amount of reputable scholarship in my field,” said Taylor, who will leave Appleton for the ski slopes of Colorado later this summer. “I’ve thrived in this atmosphere. I’d like to think I’ve been good for Lawrence and Lawrence certainly has been good to me.”
A specialist in Chinese intellectual history and East Asian history, Doeringer arrived on the Lawrence campus from New York City in 1972 and found a much different Appleton than the one he recently left.
“There wasn’t a lot of interest in Asia at that time,” said Doeringer. “But the influx of the Vietnamese and Laotians in the early 1980s and later the Hmongs, many of whom became a permanent fixture in the community, helped change that.”
Doeringer himself helped pave the way for a heightened community awareness of Asian affairs. Always a historian at heart, his appetite for East Asia was whetted as a graduate student at Columbia University. He brought his hunger for all things Chinese with him when he joined the Lawrence faculty.
At a time when the history curriculum focused almost exclusively on U.S. and European perspectives, Doeringer began introducing courses on China and East Asia that helped create a new emphasis on world and comparative history that hadn’t previously existed.
“It was a big change at the time. It broadened the department and provided more of a global perspective,” said Doeringer, the author of two books, “The Peoples of East Asia” and the two-volume textbook “Discovering the Global Past.”
He also was instrumental in creating a new department that focused specifically on East Asia, serving as the first chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department when it was established in 1989. Working with colleagues in China, Doeringer arranged for professors from Heilongjiang University to spend a year at Lawrence teaching in the fledgling department.
“Heilongjiang University was carefully selected, in part because its winters were colder than Appleton’s,” Doeringer said with a chuckle.
Over the next dozen years, Doeringer helped raise close to $5 million for the department, which was renamed East Asian Studies in 2004, through six major grants awarded to Lawrence, including a $1.5 million grant in 2001 from the Freeman Foundation that provided scores of first-hand study and travel opportunities for students and faculty in China and Japan.
“Those grants helped pave the way and make the department a viable option,” said Doeringer.
China’s front door remained locked to most of the world during much of his early teaching career, but when it finally opened in the early 1980s Doeringer led a three-week long trip there for Lawrence alumni in 1983. Under the auspices of the Freeman Grant, he has since made at least a dozen more visits to China and Japan, leading both students and faculty colleagues on journeys of inquiry. Doeringer is hoping to make at least one more trip to the Far East. He is investigating a Fulbright opportunity in Hong Kong to serve as an advisor on general education to Chinese universities.
One of only seven faculty members in Lawrence history to be awarded both the college’s Young Teacher Award (1976) and its Award for Excellence in Teaching (1999), Doeringer admits to feeling a bit like Lawrence’s graduating seniors as he embarks on a new phase in his own life.
“I’m still trying to get the daily rhythm here,” said Doeringer, as he settles into the historically rich environs of Gloucester, Mass. “It’s going to take me a year to get my bearings and figure this all out.”
