Faculty Spotlight
Jeff Galle
Director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Oxford College of Emory
Jeff Galle joined Oxford in June 2008 after nineteen years as a professor of English and an administrator at the University of Louisiana in Monroe. He earned his BA and MA at Louisiana Tech University, and his PhD at Louisiana State University. His awards for teaching include the Scott Professorship for Teaching Excellence, Outstanding Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Liberal Arts Teaching Award, and the English Department Outstanding Professor Award. He has been nominated to “Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers” four times by different graduating honors seniors.
The following is a condensed version of an interview with Professor Galle from December 14, 2009:
What appealed to you about Oxford?
It’s palpably different from a lot of places I interviewed. There’s a kind of ethos that asks questions like “If we’re going to do such and such, what’s the best in the nation? What is the standard? Who is the best scholar in this area? What sets the standards and how can we approximate or achieve those?”
The community is high octane, too, and engages in the highest order in its kind of examination and scrutiny. There’s a question in the air all the time: what is the best way to teach this? Everybody has that in their eyes, but no one has the comfort that they have the answer. There’s a lot of good tension out there and no complacency.
What sense have you developed about two-year colleges since joining Oxford?
Everyone has been writing about the first-year experience because they know the shift from senior year in high school to first year in college is a huge jump. Molly Schaller at the University of Dayton focused on the second year, and a lot of light bulbs are coming on because a lot of people dedicate a lot of energy to getting students into a college. But then you’re here, we’ve given you all these programs, and you think that now you should be OK. She’s found that the highest dropout rate, change of majors, loss of GPA, and other declines occur in that second year. The sophomore slump is not just folkloric, it’s real. I called her and asked if she’d like to study us. She had never heard of Oxford, and she spent three days here last semester and said we have inverted the pattern that universities have. All the resources of major schools are focused on the graduates, junior and senior disciplines, and graduating fantastic law students or BA/BS students. Our energy is in general education.
There are two to three thousand two-year schools that don’t have an exemplary model to which to compare themselves. I can see Oxford providing Emory a model of a relationship between the first two years and the rest of the school, and Oxford as an exemplary model to the other two-year schools that are looking for best practices: how do we make our freshmen strong and keep our sophomores from that slump?
Why did you become a teacher?
I was a good student; my father was a military chaplain and I knew I wasn’t going to go that way. We had moved so many times and I didn’t have roots in one community. I didn’t have a hometown, so my home became the schools. Professors my first few years began to tell me I was pretty good at writing. I had some good teachers and some of the things they said made me think about teaching. It just evolved from graduate school into the classroom.
Do you have a philosophy of teaching?
I wasn’t thinking about how to perform as a teacher until I was actually teaching. A teaching philosophy is something that develops over time. It is superficial unless it comes from lived experience. For me, the philosophy comes down to what one or two values have come out of twenty years of teaching.
Now I think I have a philosophy, but it developed over many years and errors and mistakes. It comes down to service; it’s not just knowledge transfer. I love Renaissance drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jacobean drama, and literary criticism. I thought when I got into the classroom if I could spark a student’s imagination by giving him or her everything I had as if it were merely a knowledge transfer, then that was what teaching was all about. I think a lot of people still think that way. That perspective was hard for me to give up or modify. Some of the teachers I remember most clearly were content teachers.
Beyond content, I think the best teachers are those who go into the room without a pre-decided way of teaching. I pay attention to the personalities and facial expressions and emails and tone – the way students are saying things. So teaching’s got to be eclectic and adaptable. But eclecticism and adaptability are simply adjectives that describe service. If I were just the person who came with all the knowledge and said, “I’m going to give you what I have,” then that could be a huge service too. But service in the way I’m thinking of it is being more solicitous of students and their needs, and what they will actually be able to do in their careers with what they have. It’s not about me or what I do, as Professor Cloud said.
Is your approach still evolving?
I’m more comfortable now, but there’s always the sneaking suspicion or doubt in the back of my mind about comfort and complacency and being static. I can’t really rest or say there is any resting point. If the talking head was the primary model for nineteenth-century education, and the late twentieth-century has moved the entire model from a teaching model to a learning model, what’s going to be the next iteration of that? Will there be some kind of integration or transmutation to where the classroom is almost like a dialogue of some sort? I can’t even imagine.
Who has most influenced your approach to teaching?
Josephine Roberts at LSU, who directed my dissertation. She had discovered a fairly unknown woman writer, Lady Mary Roth. Because of her work the writer became known and a much more central figure of the Renaissance. Josephine had these wonderful achievements, and in her classes she was one of the first who said “This isn’t about my achievements, but about your response to Lady Mary Roth’s writing.” In addition to her stellar achievements, she said “I’m first and foremost a teacher.”
What advice would you give to a new professor?
People on the tenure track are dedicated and very disciplined and knowledgeable in a particular area, and they generally care deeply about that area. I would say to them love everything that you love, but be open to broadening out and deepening in other ways, because for every specialist in Jacobean drama there is a specialist in the Restoration, in the eighteenth century, in British theatre of the ‘60s. That’s just one sliver of the academic world. The nature of the game is to have to study an ever-diminishing part of the terrain and to mine that deeply, but that approach means students don’t get to see the subject within a broader context.
How do you view the current state of literature within academics, and what might the future hold?
I think it’s crucial. Technology has changed things. The way cultures interconnect and integrate has changed things, as has global thinking, global literature, and multicultural literature. People are moving and adopting values cross-culturally. This globalization of culture, and of life, has a lot to do with an opportunity for literary studies and for humanities, because it’s about communication. Being able to see things from multiple points of view, close readings and understanding of the lived experience of another person who may be way apart from you ideologically, religiously, theologically – that’s a set of useful opportunities for humanities and literature down the road.
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