UCA teacher coordinated honors college

Schedler recognized needs of ‘severely gifted’ students

— CONWAY - When Norbert Schedler joined the University of Central Arkansas as a philosophy professor in 1976, he had no idea of the adventure awaiting him.

“I’m a daydreamer, and my career at UCA has been a dream come true,” Schedler, who turns 80 on March 30, has told graduates more than once over the years. “UCA was a [Christopher] Columbus discovery. I came for peace and quiet, to spend time raising my kids and devoting myself to teaching, etc., but I got a lot more. I got all of you.”

In turn, the students got the state’s first honors college in a public university - thanks to Schedler’s foresight in the early 1980s. To recognize his accomplishment, UCA’s board of trustees recently voted to name the college the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College.

UCA trustee Elizabeth Farris - daughter of the late Jeff Farris, who was president when Schedler, now a distinguished professor emeritus, broached the idea of an honors college - recalled how the subject came about during a board meeting last month.

“Dr. Schedler and Dad sat under the shade of a tree near the old Administration Building on a hot day in August of 1981,” she recalled. “Dr. Schedler - Norb - wondered aloud to Dad that if the university could offer remedial courses to students who needed them, could it not also offer a comprehensive program for what he called the ‘severely gifted.’

“In the fall of 1982, Dr. Schedler brought to campus a class of just under 60 students with an average ACT score of 26.8,” she added. “An honors center took shape … as did a four-year academic program that soon would rival features of private liberal-arts colleges - small class sizes, close faculty/student relationships, mentored research and the intense study of big-picture ideas. … By May of 1986, the honors college awarded a minor degree in honors interdisciplinary studies to its first 12 graduates.”

Today, 264 students are enrolled in the honors college, UCA spokesman Fredricka Sharkey said.

The program has reflected Schedler’s “own educational heritage,” Farris told trustees.

And that’s quite a heritage.

Schedler, whose family moved to Ohio from Vancouver, British Columbia, when he was 9, is a former Lutheran minister; his father and father-in-law also were ministers. He earned his doctorate from Princeton University.Before moving to UCA, he taught at Purdue University and was a visiting research associate at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University.

In addition to English, he speaks German and French, and reads Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

“What I’m doing now is gathering a lot of my short, little essays and putting them together on a blog,” he said, noting that he gets some technological help. Most of his writings deal with philosophy. Some are stories from his life.

“I’m a language philosopher. I’m a word philosopher,” he said.

He later shared examples of his own “zettel,” a German term for a collection of maxims or concise thoughts. One is about his encounter on an elevator with a man who had “a blank stunned look” and who had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The meeting took place the same day Schedler learned that he had Parkinson’s disease.

“We both knew there was no going back to the normal world,” Schedler wrote in one “zettel.”

Even in brief conversation, he uses words that reflect his knowledge of languages, while occasionally having trouble articulating other words because of his Parkinson’s disease.

“Coming here was a ‘kairotic’ moment,” he said, using the Greek word for pregnant, or as he put it, “a pregnant moment that … gives direction to what’s going to happen after.”

Schedler applied to teach at UCA after he saw an advertisement for a position in the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“My dream was always to be at a small university in a university town,” he said.

One of the biggest hurdles Schedler faced in starting the honors college was the view by some that it amounted to “elitism” and a fear that it would take too much money from other programs, he said.

“Actually, I started the honors college with $600,” he said.

“It was democratizing, not elitism,” he added. “A lot of those kids came out of very poor homes, and they’re getting this high-quality education at UCA” in the honors college.

Such “severely gifted” students, he said, sometimes have inferiority complexes.

“They want to be like kids who go to the good schools,” referring to exclusive and more expensive private colleges.

“For me, the joy is for people to realize how good [they] are,” he said, suggesting that he still has “a bit of the preacher” in him.

Schedler also still has an office at UCA, where he can often be spotted walking around campus.

“I still go in every day,” Schedler said. “I still hang out with students, do a lot of writing, help students … apply for graduate school and choose what programs to go into.”

Schedler still hears from many of his former students.

“I get a couple of letters a week,” he said. “I educated under the old model. I was very, very close to students and had a lot of interaction with them. … I get a lot of e-mails,” even from students he taught at Purdue in the 1960s.

Schedler’s family shares his passion for teaching. His wife, Carol, is a former English teacher.

His three children are teachers.

Looking back, Schedler said, “I thought I was going to come to a quiet, little, sleepy place, and I ended up starting an honors college that consumed my life. It’s used me up, and that’s good. I want to be all used up before I die.”

Schedler said he has used the Columbus metaphor repeatedly - in more than 40 honors-college graduations.

“I love the metaphor because it is so true to life,” he wrote in an e-mail later. “We frequently get what we never expected. The evening knows what the morning could not even imagine.”

Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/18/2013

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