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“A bit like going home”
![Jean Halladay 53](/sites/default/files/styles/width_960/public/2019-12/jean_halladay_53.jpg?h=4f8e04a0&itok=EVAPGv4u)
Photo by Chuck Thomas
Dr. Jean Halladay ’53 looks back on a lifetime of teaching and learning.
Two wooden chairs adorn the living room of Dr. Jean Halladay’s Norfolk, VA apartment.
And, save for a couple of overflowing bookshelves, that’s it.
Halladay has always preferred substance to frills and furnishings. She has little tolerance for fussing about material things, be it home décor, fashion, or gadgets, all of which cost money that she assumes could be better spent. Such is evident not only in the modest apartment, located two miles from the campus of Old Dominion University, but also her second home, the college classroom, where she’s spent three quarters of her life.
Halladay’s simplicity and prudence are an outgrowth of her working-class roots in Little Falls, NY as well as her own undergraduate experience on Utica College’s original makeshift campus on Utica’s Oneida Square. A child of the Great Depression and a farming family, she was on the verge of being an adult before she knew she was poor. “I knew we didn’t have any money, but then I didn’t know anybody who had any money, and so it never occurred to me to worry about it very much,” recalls Halladay, associate professor emerita of English at ODU.
If not serendipity, Halladay believes it was to some level lucky circumstance that led her to UC. She graduated from Little Falls High School in 1949 at the age of 16 with her sights squarely focused on attending St. Lawrence University. (What the Halladay family lacked in riches, it made up in values, at the center of which was a strong belief in education.) Knowing the tuition cost at any college, let alone a private institution, was out of her family’s financial reach, she intended to work for a year or two before submitting her application.
In August of 1949, she received a letter from Albany notifying her that she had earned a highly competitive Regents scholarship for scoring in the top 10 among students in Herkimer County in a statewide examination earlier that spring. “I wasn’t exactly brimming over at the top of my (high school) class,” she says. “The family motto was try out for anything that comes along, and so, well, I had a fling at the exam.
“I don’t know that there’s any real correlation – I never have thought so – between being able to do well on that kind of exam (multiple choice questions) and how smart you are, but as a kid I was always real good at that kind of exam.”
With the financial means for college suddenly and unexpectedly at her disposal, Halladay hoped to enroll at St. Lawrence for the fall term. By that point, however, St. Lawrence, a residential university, had filled its freshman class. To make matters worse, the scholarship award she received stipulated that she enroll for the fall term at an in-state institution.
“Here I was with this scholarship and this wonderful opportunity and looking at not being able to use it,” Halladay recalls.
Circling the Square
To this day, Halladay has no memory of who suggested Utica College, then a three-year-old branch college operated by a university that was flush with virtue but not dollars.
She showed up to UC’s administration building with her high school transcript, met with the vice president and treasurer, Clark Laurie, and earned admission.
“There I was, scholarship in hand, decent enough grades to get in, and they said, ‘No problem about getting in’ – and they had a bed for me to sleep in,” Halladay says.
To put it kindly, UC lacked the curb appeal of her first choice, “the campus on the river.” The campus consisted of a collection of rented or purchased properties – including houses, a garage, a condemned school building, and a church – scattered around Oneida Square that were converted into academic, administrative, and residential space.
What the College could not offer in terms of amenities and prestige it made up for in the character of the learning experience as well as the student body and the quality of teaching.
“At the time that I was at Utica College as far as I was concerned the classroom experience was just about perfect for me and for a lot of people,” Halladay says. “Most of us were the first in our family to go to college. We were gasping for education. And the faculty. I don’t know that we had any Nobel laureates, but we had a lot of excellent, excellent teachers. As far as I was concerned it was just about the perfect combination.
“I was sold on the place. I gave up all thoughts of wanting to go up into the North Country for the rest of my education.”
Her learning extended outside of the classroom. She played on UC’s first women’s basketball team, and participated in a number of clubs and activities. As well, she recalls with particularly great affection and humor her experiences in the women’s residence hall at 16 Watson Place.
“It was a fun place to live,” she deadpans. “The young women who lived there, we were interested in getting an education. We were not a bunch of drags or anything like that. But we were also interested in all sorts of other things as well – the sorts of things that young women have always been interested in.”
However, it was the teaching and learning at the core of UC’s mission that nurtured in Halladay, who completed her English degree with honors in 1953, a lifelong interest in higher education.
“(Utica College) was the beginning of a great deal of learning not in quite the way that I had thought about it,” she says.
“A bit like going home”
It was a sort of eerie but most pleasant déjà vu.
After holding teaching positions at Valparaiso University in Indiana; the University of Kentucky, where she earned her Ph.D.; and High Point College in North Carolina from 1955 to 1965, Halladay was looking for an institution at which to lay roots. That search brought her to Norfolk and what was at the time Old Dominion College.
Old Dominion started life as a branch campus of the College of William and Mary. When Halladay joined the English faculty in 1965, the institution was still in the throes of branching out into a freestanding, autonomous four-year, degree-granting institution. She taught in a condemned grammar school, where classes were regularly interrupted by desks collapsing or windows crashing down. Other classes were held in prefabricated buildings left over from the second – and, in some cases, the first – World War. It was mostly a commuter college, although there were two residence halls.
In other words, Old Dominion when Halladay arrived bore a striking resemblance to Utica College – a fact that more than casually influenced her decision to make Old Dominion her academic home for what would ultimately prove to be the balance of her career.
“I had been hopping around from school to school until I got to ODU,” she says. “I think one of the things that attracted it to me and me to it was the similarities to Utica College. Not to sound too much like a recruiting poster, but I had had such a good experience there that, in a certain sense, it was a little bit like going home.”
The parallels between her experiences at the two institutions ran even deeper.
Halladay, who retired from ODU in 1997, says, “As long as I taught there, I was still running into students who got around to saying to me in a kind of shy sort of way they were the first person in their family who ever went to college. It was the same kind of experience.”
Her teaching and research interest was Victorian literature, predominantly the later-era and lesserknown writers. She published a number of articles in that area as well as bibliographical pieces on a number of American women, and in 1993 she published her crowning work, Eight Late Victorian Poets Shaping the Artistic Sensibility of an Age. Though Halladay enjoyed and took pride in her scholarship and every facet of her academic work and campus life, she never concealed nor wandered from her first passion – teaching.
“I loved library work. I loved research. I loved the kind of thing that leads to a book or a published article. I loved to sit in the library lobby or the student union and argue with people about where the world is going and what it all means,” she says.
“I loved every part of the job, but not as passionately as I loved teaching. I was always more interested in trying to see if I couldn’t get through to the person who I knew was inside the kid in front of me. Or the older man or woman – but mostly woman – who had finally worked up the courage to come back to school and was scared out of her wits that she couldn’t possibly keep up with the young people. I was always more comfortable in the classroom.”
Halladay owes her passion for the classroom to her undergraduate faculty – people like Norman Nathan, Thomas O’Donnell, and even Owen Roberts – and it was not by coincidence that her teaching reflected their individual influences as well as the teaching mission of Utica College.
“I don’t think you can avoid that, or at least I don’t think anybody with an education like mine can avoid it,” says Halladay, who was routinely recognized for her teaching and advising during her 32 years at Old Dominion.
A simple truth.
Old Dominion has seen many changes since Halladay arrived there in 1965 and in the 13 years since she retired. There has been significant expansion of campus facilities, faculty, and the student body, which now comprises more than 23,000 students.
“When I came here everybody on the faculty knew everybody else on the faculty, and we had a little faculty quorum where we socialized and read each other’s papers and
that sort of thing,” Halladay says. “Nowadays, even before I retired but in the latter years of the time that I worked there, there were dozens and dozens of faculty members
who I not only didn’t know but didn’t recognize, and so it was a very different kind of situation in that way.”
This experience provides Halladay with a unique perspective on UC’s growth over the decades since her departure. “The physical differences are the most obvious and the least important, obviously,” she says.
For Halladay, the new campus, the state-of-the-art facilities – these are mere furnishings. The heart of the matter, both at UC and at Old Dominion, will always be the teaching.
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