“For me, teaching is a privilege…”

History professor Hayden Schilling's attention to students over the last four decades earns him national recognition as Outstanding Baccalaureate College Professor of the Year

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The open door leads to an office that is not always a model of neatness and organization. Jeff Todd '83 remembers going to see Schilling to discuss the final draft of his junior Independent Study.

"He started looking around, hunting in one pile of papers after another, and finally asked me if I had another copy of it. I didn't. 'Well, I probably just left it at home,' he said. I remember being in an absolute panic. I thought he'd lost it. Finally, late that evening, he called and said, 'It's taken an incredible search, but lucky for you I have a wonderful spouse who was able to find it for me.'"

Schilling and his wife, Joan, have welcomed students into their home and their lives for as long as they have been at Wooster. "They were probably my first true cross-generational friendship," Morris says. "They became role models for my husband and me. I could go a decade without seeing them and still feel very comfortable just dropping in at their house."

One evening last fall, about a month before the professor of the year award was announced, the Schillings invited Hayden's fifteen first-year seminar students - including Wyatt Shimeall '09, Courter's younger brother - over for lasagna, cider, apple pie, and ice cream, and a screening of the British comedy series, "Blackadder Goes Forth."

The students arrived in something approaching their Sunday best: the young women in skirts, dress pants, and sweaters; the young men in collared shirts, sport coats, even a tie or two. The atmosphere was relaxed, the conversation easy and full of laughter. At the end of the evening one of the students asked if she could take a picture of the group. They clustered around their beaming professor and Joan Schilling snapped the photo.

Schilling has advised more than two hundred senior I.S. projects on subjects as varied as the Scottish Reformation, the role of women in the U.S. military, and the development of British detective fiction.

"Weekly discussions, submissions of chapter outlines and drafts, and a finished thesis followed by an oral defense of one's work is to me one of the purest and most meaningful forms of undergraduate education, a one-to-one relationship between teacher and student in a setting in which, inevitably, both are really learners," he says.

Michael Ruttinger '05, who introduced Schilling at the award luncheon in Washington, recalled their weekly meetings to review his progress on his I.S. on the H.M.S. Bounty mutiny and its aftermath. The meetings were leavened with Schilling's quick, dry wit.

"It seemed appropriate that while I discussed the verbal abuse Captain Bligh poured upon his men, I took a similar dose of good natured sarcasm. 'Michael,' Prof. Schilling would begin, 'I like your project. It's you I don't care for.'"

Schilling's sense of humor has never permitted him to take himself too seriously. "If you take on this magisterial air - you know, 'I've been here forty years and I know everything' - you're headed for trouble, because you don't know everything, you've forgotten some things, and you never knew others."

He may not know everything, but he has worn an impressive array of hats in his four decades at Wooster: Robert Critchfield Professor of English History, men's tennis coach for twenty-five years, history department chair (twice), dean of admissions (twice), and acting vice president for academic affairs (twice). He also founded, directs, and teaches in a program that identifies promising, at-risk eighth graders about to enter Youngstown's Chaney High School, and provides support throughout their high school years to prepare them for college.

"In my thirty-seven years of teaching and administration," says Wooster President R. Stanton Hales, "I have never encountered a colleague more passionately devoted to student success than Hayden Schilling."

When he returned to Wooster from Washington, Schilling discovered that his history department colleagues had filled his office (at least the part not already crowded with books and papers) with balloons. His first-year seminar students brought doughnuts from his favorite bakery to class. And he found himself reflecting.

"This has made me go back and think about what this institution is all about," he said. "It really is a community. Like any family, you have your ups and downs, even profound differences. The debates can be fierce, but you say good morning to one another the next day...

"For me, teaching is a privilege. It's a privilege to work with the young, to see them move from often bewildered, first-year students to eminently confident seniors and successful alumni. I have enjoyed every minute of it, especially at a college like Wooster, whose focus is entirely on undergraduates in the context of the liberal arts and sciences.

"From my winning baccalaureate professor of the year, Stan Hales has extrapolated that Wooster must be the baccalaureate college of the year, and in a way that's how I feel. So many of my colleagues at Wooster are equally deserving of this honor. It is genuinely a community award."

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