Thursday, November 5, 2009
Former chancellor Robert Hemenway spent 14 years meeting with provosts, overseeing budgets and setting goals for the University. Since retiring in June, he now gets to spend his days doing research.
Dr. Robert Hemenway sits at his desk in The Hall Center for Humanities. Hemenway is researching information for an intercollegiate sports book.
Between his time as chancellor and his planned job as a professor next fall, he is taking a sabbatical to do research for a book he plans to write about intercollegiate athletics. Hemenway previously taught in the English department.
“People who’ve written about this agree that there’s a real tension with commercialism that has become more prominent in intercollegiate athletics,” Hemenway said. “People who are involved in athletics have to look to the future and ask themselves: ‘what’s going to be the relationship between the student athletes and the games they participate in and the way universities both benefit and provide benefits?’”
He now keeps an office in the Hall Center for the Humanities building on 900 Sunnyside Ave., making it his day-to-day corner on campus.
Victor Bailey, director of the Hall Center, said he first began working closely with Hemenway when $7 million from the Hall Family Foundation was donated to build the facility in 2001. Hemenway is on the foundation’s board of directors. Bailey said that during the building of the facility, he found that Hemenway, who was also on the building committee, was easy to work with. He said it was helpful Hemenway had a background in humanities.
“For the last few years, once we’ve been in this building, he has continued to help us occasionally with programming,” Bailey said. “Therefore, I think it wasn’t a difficult decision for me when, having announced he was stepping down, he requested being a research fellow in the Hall Center, for one, possibly two years.
Bailey said the center had helped with Hemenway’s transition from chancellor to faculty.
“It gives him a chance, I think, to re-engage with the faculty, with graduate students and with the research programs of those people,” Bailey said.
Hemenway said the Hall Center had very rich programs on subjects such as African literature and his field of study, African-American literature.
“It’s a very good place to work,” Hemenway said. “There’s a lot of intellectual activity at the Hall Center. I feel very honored to be a part of it.”
Hemenway said he planned to meet with the English and American studies departments when he returned to the University next fall. He said he could teach courses such as American literature or intercollegiate athletics.
— Edited by Alicia Banister
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