DePauw Stories

We asked Louis Smogor, DePauw’s longest-serving, full-time faculty member, to ruminate on his experiences as a young mathematics professor who started at DePauw in 1969 and has taught an estimated 5,000 students over nearly 50 years in the profession.

I wasn’t much older than my students when I arrived on campus. I had been drafted but high blood pressure classified me 4-F, exempting me from service at the height of the war. Anti-war protests were raging across the country and at DePauw, but with mathematics students being what they are, the protests did not permeate our department’s walls. Some of us in the department were unhappy about that. We felt that mathematics students should not be so divorced from current events – because they were really divorced – and that they should have been more intellectually involved. One math student, however, took things too far when he and another student tried on May 1, 1970, to burn down the Quonset hut that served as the campus ROTC headquarters.

As one might imagine, a lot has changed since then. When I told my students in the 1980s that I wanted them to read the material before class, there was near rebellion. Today’s students are more sophisticated about learning and they understand my reasons for that approach. They also appreciate our small-group activities – something that never would have happened in the 1970s – because they expose them to the kind of teamwork they are likely to experience in the workplace.

Indeed, rather than a war halfway around the world, the defining moment for students today seems to be the 2008 recession. In conversations that simply never occurred early in my career, my advisees express concerns about their futures, sometimes lamenting that they’d prefer to take more mathematics classes – presumably to be better prepared for jobs – rather than the general education requirements. I remind them that it’s exceedingly unlikely that, 10 years after graduation, they’ll still be working in the same job they get right out of school. You’re going to change jobs, I tell them, and to do that, you’re going to have to learn new stuff. And there isn’t going to be anybody to teach you. You’re going to have to absorb it yourself. That’s what you’re learning to do. All these other classes are teaching you how to think.