A Professor's Tale
Chau Nguyen
Issue date: 2/9/09 Section: Feature
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No professor has been at Miami as long as Harwood, who began teaching here in 1964, making him the school's most veteran professor.
After graduating from Hamilton College in New York, the New Jersey native worked at a newspaper for a year before realizing he "couldn't make a living out of it."
From there, Harwood moved on to teaching at a small country high school in Lyndonville, New York for two years before doing graduate work at the State University of New York-Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo), where he was encouraged to pursue a Ph.D and was awarded a three-year fellowship from SUNY-Buffalo.
"It was very generous," Harwood remembers. "When I was done with [the fellowship], I wasn't done with my Ph.D, but I had a long leg up on it."
He taught at Miami for six years before receiving his Ph.D, an opportunity he thinks is rare now.
"In those days, it was a seller's market, meaning there was a shortage of teachers in higher education and there wasn't a supply of people ready to take the job," Harwood says. "I was able to get this job without ever interviewing for it. I never even talked to anyone on the phone until after the offer was being made."
Despite 18 other job offers, Harwood chose Miami to be his first and only collegiate post, lured by the campus' aesthetics.
"[Miami] came highly recommended, but the aerial picture gave me the push," Harwood says. "The sundial was lined up with the flag pole in front of Roudebush and it really gave the sense of rationality. This campus is remarkable from the air, but I also think it's remarkable on the ground, too."
Although Harwood came to Miami for its beauty, what keeps him here is the educational environment.
"If you don't do well [at Miami], it will be to a large extent your fault, because the encouragement is here and the resources are here," he says. "It's a good place to work as a teacher and as a researcher."
Besides the teaching environment, Harwood has stayed for the community itself.
"By [the mid-70s], I had 5 children and it was a good place to raise [them]," he says. "I had friends here and I find it very hard to move and tear myself away from friends. There's a cliché to move where you are planted and that's what I tried to do."
Harwood thinks Miami's quality of instruction and education has improved since his arrival, with a more visible presence of diversity on campus.
"The rise in standards has inevitably produced a more productive faculty as far as the research goes," he says. "We have a more challenging faculty, in part because of its diversity."
Harwood thinks the quality of students has improved, too.
"When I first came here, I had the impression that [the students] started better than they finished," Harwood says. "I had fine first-year students, but in the advanced classes, my impression was that the university had worn them down, taken the edge off of them. But [now,] I have uniformly good students and [Miami] in many ways has become much more sophisticated."
Harwood hasn't simply seen changes at Miami, he's made substantial contributions and changes to the university himself. As the English department chair in the early 1980s, he implemented a reduced teaching load for new English faculty to allow time to conduct research and publish during their pre-tenure time at Miami. Kerry Powell, current department chair, identifies this as one of Harwood's lasting legacies at Miami.
"It immediately helped [Miami] become nationally competitive in the recruitment of new faculty, for the best people in the country coming out with Ph.Ds in English," Powell says. "It really transformed the English department at Miami from a good English department known for the high quality of its teaching and dedication of its faculty into a department that was a serious nationally player."
What Harwood enjoys most about teaching is having class discussions leaving him a bit tired, but still buoyant and exhilarated. From talking to students, Harwood realizes why he became a teacher in the first place.
"[What makes] some classes good is that something is actually discovered in the classroom, that in the course of trying to figure something out, trying to answer a student's question, I come away with an idea I didn't have before I went to class," Harwood says. "Many times, students have suggested things … where my grasp of the book has been indescribably and inevitably improved by what I've learned from [them]."
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Miami senior Kelly Tehan took Harwood's Chaucer course and remembers him getting emotional during class.
"The first time he got so emotional it made some people uncomfortable, but we came to understand that he was so deeply invested in the text that he couldn't help but express his emotions," she says. "It really made people sit up and read into the tragedy of the love stories and the plot twists."
In nearly five decades of teaching, one class stands out to Harwood the most, a senior level seminar in the 70s on literary genres, including tragedy.
"Tragedy takes a low view of marriage," he says. "There were 11 students and eight of them married each other. I've never decided if that seminar was a great failure or a great success [because most of the students married one another]."
Even though he's been eligible for retirement for five years, Harwood has no plans to stop teaching anytime soon. The academy is his natural habitat.
"What's desirable is to be paid for doing something you would like to do and something you would do anyway, which is the case for me so why would I stop doing it?" he says. "[When it gets to] the point where I feel used up, someone tells me I'm not doing my share or I have a sense that I'm not pulling my weight, then I'll retire."
Powell says Harwood's "unique brilliance, great eloquence and spellbinding ways," have made him a tremendous resource and joy to have in the department, making the prospect of his retirement daunting.
"It's hard for me to imagine the department without Brit and it may be hard for him to imagine that too," Powell says. "He's poured himself so much into the life of the department and the university that it's hard to imagine one without the other."
Although Miami has inevitably changed during his 45 years of teaching, upon reflection, Harwood says being at Miami has changed him as well. After a long pause, his eyes begin to redden and his voice cracks.
"It's one of the reasons - my family would be the other - why I can look back and think that I've had a useful life, so that if I knew it was going to end very soon, I would not be bitter."
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