So Long to a Real One

Tribute to Bob Harrison

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

I can see Bob sitting there, one row over from me toward the back of the room, leaning back in his chair, listening to a report on the annual budget from our division chair, Jean Ellen Forrester, with a wry smile. Would he get that new gadget he wanted for his computer science classes?

Probably not, but maybe. We were always fighting over the scraps left over from the money required to support the big money programs in Health Sciences.

We were still pretty new then. Historically, our division—General Education--provided the required courses that students needed to complete their associate’s degrees, whether they were going to be nurses, law enforcement officers, cosmetologists, graphic designers, auto mechanics, or were in any number of other programs we offered.

But now we were trying to get a college transfer program off the ground so that students could complete their first two years of college with us at Southwestern Community College before transferring to their university of choice to finish their degrees. The first semester, we had twelve students in the program.

I was hired to teach English just as this program was born, but Bob had already been at SCC for a while. He had what I would call a healthy skepticism that in my early days I sometimes misread as cynicism. For a year or two, I think we were a little wary of one another, the grizzled veteran and the young idealist, but I admired his fervor and could see right away that students loved him, some of them hanging around after class and following him to his office, still animated and gesturing excitedly as they debated whatever the subject of the day was all the way down the hall.

Bob’s “Critical Thinking” classes were always packed, among the most popular courses that we offered. He had his students learning through playing elaborate games, or solving mysteries, or engaged in vigorous debates. He had a finely developed sense of play that made his classes both entertaining and educational for his students, so much so that I sometimes joked with him about the “cult of Bob” that developed around him every year and with every crop of new students.

He also had a fascination with and aptitude for technology, teaching computer science classes to students and more informally to those of us in the faculty who didn’t know a mouse from a modem, back in the days when everyone was astonished that you could download photographs, even if it took two hours to download just one.

We all turned to Bob anytime we needed guidance on anything related to our computers, which often baffled and frustrated us, especially as they became more integral to the running of the college and as the piles of paperwork to which we were accustomed gradually disappeared, which on one hand was gratifying but on the other hand mystifying.

A thousand “what if” apocalyptic scenarios dominated faculty meetings, but Bob helped us through it, reassuring us while also providing thrilling previews of technological advances to come. One day, students would be able to write all of their papers online—no more lugging a stack of rough drafts all over the place, no more need to buy boxes of red pens at the beginning of every semester.

Yeah, sure, Bob. Of course, it all came to pass.

It also came to pass that Bob and I became friends. We had regular conversations over the sorry state of the Carolina Panthers. We had more or less the same political leanings. We would dissect movies and television shows that we enjoyed for hours, debating whether Tombstone was a great movie or just an average movie that contained a great performance (by Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, we agreed).

We went fishing together, along with fellow division members Terry Tolle and Owen Gibby. We went to conferences together, trying to suppress laughter or caustic remarks during some of the sillier presentations (which students were bluebirds and which were cardinals, which were sparrows and which were crows).

We sat through a thousand meetings together, large and small, and every fall we saddled up for another year with that excitement that maybe only teachers can understand, that moment when you enter a classroom for the first time, walk to the front of the room, turn and confront a brand new group of people, some wide-eyed and excited, others still sleepy and reluctant, trying to shake off the cobwebs of another summer lost or the expectations of anxious parents.

It was all up to us, to make something of it, to make it meaningful for them, to make ourselves understood, to honor the mission of the college and to live up to the sacred, secret oath that kept us going year after year. What we do here matters, teaching people how to think, rather than what to think. Kindling a little fire that might grow into a bigger one. Changing lives.

Bob understood this. For decades, he lived it. Decades later, students who had his classes still remember and talk about him. Here is a post from Facebook that Bob made a few years ago that sums it up quite well:

“I always loved graduation night; it was my favorite time of the year, not because I was about to get some time off, but because of all the joy and good feelings in the air. After we marched in all solemn-like and dignified, the faculty and staff, along with the audience, sat and the ceremony began. After some praying and some speechifying, we got to the meat of the night – when the students all walked across the stage, received their diplomas and degrees, and became graduates. That's when most of the faculty also lost its dignity. I admit I was one of the worst offenders. We would scream and whistle and clap loudly for our students as they received their diplomas, making for a fairly rowdy scene.”

It was a fairly rowdy scene indeed, but also one filled with love and celebration. After the ceremony, everywhere you looked, students were getting their pictures made with their favorite faculty members, the students in their blue gowns and the faculty in their black ones. Bob was in a lot of those pictures.

Maybe it is somehow fitting that when I received the news of his passing a few days ago, I was with a group of friends participating in trivia game at a local pub. Bob would have loved that. No doubt, he cooked up a prototype of this now popular pastime his Critical Thinking class thirty years ago. He always loved games. He always loved to play, to match wits, to test what he knew against what you knew.

I miss those days, when graduation ceremonies were rowdier, when the college was more like a family, one that might fuss and fight but ultimately remembered what was important and prevailed because of it.

I will miss Bob, his wit, his healthy skepticism, his willingness to weigh in on issues, his insights on pop culture, his curiosity and intelligence, his annual analysis of those Carolina Panthers.

We used to compare notes on students we had in common, especially marveling over the better ones, what they might someday become, how lucky we were to have them.

We were lucky. Maybe they were, too. As the current students might put it, Bob was a real one. I wish they could have met him.