Throughout his four-year battle with prostate cancer, John Katich, an associate professor of journalism, continued to teach courses he'd always offered at the University of Kansas.
He would take chemotherapy treatments on Monday and come in Tuesday morning to teach class. His job was one of the few things he had to look forward to, a chance to get away from the disease that would ultimately take his life at age 51. His escape didn't last long. This past spring, he found that he couldn't finish the semester. He was back in the classroom this fall, but once again had to stop.
He died in October, leaving colleagues such as Max R. Utsler, an associate professor of journalism at the university, to deal with one of the hardest parts of their grief: "Seeing that office door closed every day, knowing it's not going to open again." Knowing that whoever takes his friend's job "will be a great teacher, but just won't be John."
The death of a faculty member, understandably, takes an emotional and psychological toll on an academic department. And the loss is especially traumatizing if the professor was relatively young or died unexpectedly. But if the death occurs during the semester, department chairmen and faculty members -- in addition to mourning -- are faced with the task of finding someone who can teach the professor's courses and take over his or her orphaned advisees. They must clean out their colleague's office and sift through his papers. And they must tell students that their professor is dead.
Two years ago, Dean R. Snow delivered such news moments before a final exam. Mr. Snow, a professor and chairman of the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, told the students that their professor, James W. Hatch, an associate professor of anthropology, had died of heart problems brought on by Hodgkin's disease.
Alisa N. Strauss, one of Mr. Hatch's doctoral students, was in the classroom when Mr. Snow made his announcement. The death of someone with whom she'd worked so closely hit her hard. She decided not to choose another adviser because she was so close to graduating, and wound up earning her Ph.D. in May 2000, five months after her adviser's death. Still, Ms. Strauss, who is now an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at both the University of Cincinnati and the Middleton campus of Miami University in Ohio, laments that her adviser wasn't there to help her publish her work. She remains unpublished today. "No one has a vested interest in me anymore," she says.
Mr. Snow, who took Mr. Hatch's place on Ms. Strauss's dissertation committee, recalls that he had his hands full that year. He not only inherited Mr. Hatch's five advisees, all in various stages of completing their dissertations, but he was also worried about another faculty member who underwent a bone-marrow transplant at the time but has since recovered and is now back in the classroom.
As head of the department, he says, "It doesn't matter how well you plan, there are unexpected things that happen all the time. You just have to be able to roll with it."
And then move on. So he cleaned out Mr. Hatch's office, after his wife had removed his personal effects. Then in the spring semester after Mr. Hatch's death, Mr. Snow met with some of Mr. Hatch's former graduate students to take an inventory of the professor's laboratory. In it, he had kept roughly 50 boxes filled with hundreds of archaeological artifacts amassed over 20 years. The students decided who would be responsible for which artifacts: writing reports about them and ensuring they found a home in museums in the parts of the country from which they had originated. Mr. Snow and the students are just now finishing the project.
"Archaeologists are honor bound to preserve artifacts," Mr. Snow says. "You don't just throw stuff away."
The effort to honor Mr. Hatch didn't end with his artifacts. Mr. Snow created a memorial fund in his name, and when it reaches $10,000, it will become an endowment used to send students to archaeological dig sites and other institutions. Proceeds from the hundreds of books the department sold from Mr. Hatch's library went to the fund. His colleagues also named a seminar room for him in the department's Matson Museum of Anthropology, of which Mr. Hatch had been in charge.
Six months after Mr. Hatch died, Mr. Snow began the search for his replacement. Lee A. Newsom will join the department in January as an associate professor.
Unlike Penn State's anthropology department, which was lucky enough to see one of its two ailing professors recover, the journalism department at Kansas lost two faculty members in less than a year. Nine months before Mr. Katich died of prostate cancer, John Ginn, a professor of journalism, died of lung cancer in January 2000. Like Mr. Katich, he worked despite his illness, teaching until two days before his death.
"We never put them on leave because this is what they wanted to do," says James K. Gentry, dean of the school of journalism and mass communications at Kansas. But as their energy waned, the school significantly reduced their courseload and paired them with adjuncts and other faculty members, who ended up doing the bulk of the teaching.
Even the reduced load became too much for Mr. Katich, recalls his colleague, Mr. Utsler. "He had back-to-back classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He came in between classes and sat down and threw his head back and looked tired. He said, 'I can't do this anymore.' That's when I knew things were getting bad. He had never complained every step of the way and had been very determined to see it through."
The department is moving on, searching now for a professional journalist to fill Mr. Ginn's endowed chair, and planning to search for Mr. Katich's successor, at the assistant-professor level, next fall.
Mr. Gentry says the recent deaths have reminded professors in the department that "we've got to start getting younger quickly." In the last couple of years, he says, the school has been hiring associate professors between 35 and 45 years old and assistant professors in their late 20s to mid-30s.
The English and communication department at the State University of New York College at Potsdam has been doing the same. Three faculty members have died in the last three years.
Harold "Pete" D. Baker Jr., a 64-year-old associate professor of English, told his department chair the first week of the fall semester in 1999 that he had pancreatic cancer. He died that December. The day after Christmas last year, Roberta Hooks Schreyer, a 47-year-old associate professor of English, was hit by a car and killed while crossing the street in front of her house, as she was leaving to go to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Judith A. Weise, 58, a professor of English, had excruciating pains in her foot at the beginning of this semester. She had had lupus for 20 years and had seen doctors constantly. They initially thought she had pneumonia. On September 28, they diagnosed her with bone and lung cancer. Two days later, she died.
"I feel jinxed," says Anthony Tyler, chairman of the department. "In each case, all three [deaths] happened during the school year, so it's a tremendous shock to colleagues and to students. It causes a lot of dislocation in the program."
Ms. Weise, who specialized in medieval literature, was to have taught three or four classes this semester. "Fortunately, a recent retiree from the department was able to step in and teach her classes," Mr. Tyler says. "But there were students who took the class because she was teaching it but dropped it because they only wanted to take it from her."
Two assistant professors in their 30s were hired to replace Mr. Baker and Ms. Schreyer. A search to fill Ms. Weise's position is under way. Her death, Mr. Tyler says, "sort of makes of us more aware of our mortality. It's been hard on colleagues more her age who've been with her the whole time she's been here." Mr. Tyler has been in the department for 32 years.
While deaths demoralize departments, faculty members cope by working to ensure that a colleague's work is carried on, that his or her students continue to learn, and that advisees are advised. Sometimes, however, all the extra work does little to diminish the pain of such a loss. "I feel I'm lucky to have tremendous faculty," says Mr. Gentry of Kansas. "But you know, you do miss these people."
