Three words could describe Betty Jean Craige’s legacy at the University: students, community and holism.

Craige, who will retire Aug. 1, 2011, has been teaching at the University for 38 years. She came to the University soon after completing her Ph.D. in comparative literature, with a focus in Spanish literature, at the University of Washington in 1974.

“I wanted to be a University professor,” she said. “I wanted to be a scholar, and that involved teaching. At first, I was very shy in the classroom. I overcame it quickly, but I didn’t realize when I was in graduate school how much I would love to teach.”

Betty Jean Craige, director of the Willson Center for Humanities and professor at the University, brings her parrot Cosmo to her ecocriticism class. Craige said she will miss her students when she retires next year. PHOTO BY WES BLANKENSHIP

She has been the director of the Willson Center for Humanities at University for 18 years and has spent nearly a decade teaching a course on ecocriticism. In 1996, she, along with Gary Bertsch, received a nearly $1 million grant to found the Delta Prize for Global Understanding which has been presented to people such as Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

During her time at the University, Craige has authored seven books, five translations, numerous essays, a humor column and even wrote and produced a documentary, which won first place at the Indie Gathering independent film festival.

Though Craige said she enjoys the research involved with academia, she will miss her students most.

“I love teaching these young people,” she said. “I have so much fun in my ecocriticism class that I wake up Tuesdays and Thursdays thinking ‘Oh boy, today’s a class day!’ And I think part of it is the way we have discussions, we have very deep discussions about the environment, philosophical ideas — even religious ideas. We also have a lot of fun. There’s a lot of humor in my classroom. Humor’s allowed.”

A professor who cares

Andrew Wills was enrolled in Craige’s ecocriticism class in spring of last year. In February, he and his family took their annual ski trip to Colorado.

“The first day we got there I got into an awful ski accident,” Wills said. “It was probably the worst ski accident the ski resort had ever seen.”

Wills had been out skiing with his little brother when he hit a patch of snow and landed head first on a rock, cracking his skull. He was immediately knocked unconscious.

Wills was found by a 12-year-old boy and his father who were also out skiing. They called the ski patrol, and within 20 minutes, 18 snowmobiles covered the mountain.

“This little boy essentially saved my life, because had he not lifted my body up out of the snow and wiped my mouth clean and called the ski patrol in the time he did, I never would have made it,” Wills said.

Wills suffered a skull fracture, a hematoma, brain swelling and a stroke in the back part of his brain. He was in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Denver for three weeks. He spent eight weeks in rehab at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, where Wills said he relearned how to walk, talk, move around and think.

While Wills was in the hospital and rehab, Craige kept in contact with him.

Craige’s parrot is the subject of her latest book. PHOTO BY WES BLANKENSHIP

“When I was in the hospital, Dr. Craige — who was a teacher I had only had for a month, for the first time — she was just really nice, called my parents, got my number and e-mail address, e-mailed my mom, just kept up with me,” Wills said. “It was just an effort she didn’t have to make, and I’ve never seen a teacher at UGA make before, and it brought UGA a lot smaller to me. It made UGA feel a little bit like a smaller school.”

Wills said Craige found out about his injury after his mother posted on the class’s eLearning Commons discussion board.

“And then he posted, or his mother posted, something on the eLearning Commons about his accident. And then, I wrote them, and sort of got involved,” Craige said.

Wills said Craige e-mailed and called him throughout his hospital stay. When he returned to the University in May, she continued to check in to see how he was doing.

Wills said, for him, being back at the University so soon after his injury was a personal triumph. He said knowing that a professor cared about his education and well-being made his journey back much easier.

“My parents have never been huge advocates of such a big school, I would say. You know, you don’t feel like you’re getting a personal education, you don’t feel like teachers really care that much about you. And for one of my professors — especially a senior professor like Dr. Craige, a tenured professor like Dr. Craige — to check on me to make sure everything’s OK, it seems like she cares about my education,” Wills said. “I know it might not seem like that big of a deal, but when you’re in the hospital and you don’t have anyone else to talk to, when your teacher e-mails you, that’s pretty cool.”

The classroom community

Students in Craige’s classes get to know each other very quickly.

“Everyone has to use each other’s names when discussing during class discussions, so they have to learn each other’s names,” Craige said. “And they form friendships in the class with each other, and I think that makes them enjoy the class better. The class becomes a community.”

Craige said her class is based on discussion. Every class period, two students lead the discussion.

“I get happy when I walk into class and the two students are already there, seated at the table, all excited about leading the class discussion. I think students like to do that,” Craige said.

Craige said her class also involves a lot of reading and writing. She said she encourages all her students to think of themselves as future leaders and tries to tailor her class to help students develop their thinking skills.

“I don’t know how to solve any problems. One student asked me, ‘We discuss all these problems, but we don’t discuss, we don’t find out what the solution is.’ And I say, “It’s gonna be up to your generation to find solutions, but you need to understand the problems,’” she said. “And there are lots of solutions; there’s no one right way to think. Which is another reason I teach by discussion, because I believe that there’s no one right way to think.“

Craige encourages students to voice their opinions about the topics discussed in her class. Her only rule is everyone must be polite and sweet.

“I hadn’t used the word ‘community’ before [to describe my class], but that is what I think I accomplish most in the classroom,” she said. “That I turn the class into a community of environmental thinkers. Who like each other. That’s important.”

Wills said Craige tries to tailor the class to each individual student’s interests.

“For example, we have one book that we can choose to read and write a paper on at the end of the semester. She sort of helps people pick books that relate to what they’re studying, that also relate to environmental criticism,” Wills said. “That’s a pretty cool thing to do. She’s very passionate about students’ education.”

Life of a scholar

Craige said her research has been influenced and benefited from her time at the University, getting to interact with faculty from other departments.

“That has enriched my life immensely. And that is one of the wonderful aspects of being faculty at a large university,” she said. “You can get to know people who do all kinds of things different from you.”

Craige’s books vary in topic from Eugene Odom to the emerging holistic way of thinking in topics such as civil rights, feminism and patriotism to her more recent book about her pet parrot, Cosmo.

“At the time I wanted to see, and I’ve always been interested in, in learning about how individuals from other species think,” Craige said. “And you know, we’ve got studies of dolphin language and gorilla language, and I’ve always been interested in that. Cosmo has taught me lots of things, but she has a great sense of humor. I have a harder time than I expected seeing the difference between a bird’s personality and a human personality, because Cosmo’s is sort of like mine.”

Craige said the main research that has driven her in her life and that she tries to pass on to students is the idea of holism, or the interconnectivity of things.

“It’s kind of a philosophical way of looking at things. And that’s what I’ve written about most,” Craige said. “What I think I’ve accomplished there is to teach these students how to think about the world in a new way. It’s not that I’ve given them a body of knowledge — I’ve given them a way to think about nature.”

Wills said the University community will be a little less rich with the departure of Craige next year.

“She’s been teaching at UGA for almost 40 years, she made a lot of progress, she’s a great advocate for civil rights,” Wills said. “I have a lot of respect for her. She’s a strong person. I have her again this semester, starting the class back that I dropped out of last semester. And I just think she’s a great person. She’s wonderful.”