Why Not Us? The long and riveting road of the University’s dean of engineering. By Brian Doyle
PHOTO BY: STEVE HAMBUCHEN
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ere we are in the streets of Portof-Spain, on the island of Trinidad, in the Caribbean Sea. It is the first day of Carnival, the wild colorful seething peaceful musical hilarious festival before Ash Wednesday. The streets are filled with rambling musical bands: the Village Drums, the Young Harts, the Callaloo Company, Mas Jumbies, the Fever Crew, so many more you cannot count them. Many of the musicians and wandering minstrels have their faces painted white. African griot storytellers hold forth on street corners. Every kind of food and fruit and drink you could imagine is for sale, papayas and mangos and bananas and plantains and oysters and snowcones and masala and a hundred other delicious spicy things. The foods of Africa and India and Portugal and China and Guyana and Venezuela and England and Syria are here because the people here came from all those places long ago and they mixed together peacefully so that now everyone is brown and you cannot very easily say what heritage or race someone is. Running through the streets is a small girl. She is twelve years old. She is a gentle brown and you cannot say very easily what heritage or race she is. She was born in British Guyana and came to Trinidad when she was two years old. For as long as she can remember she and her mother and father and sister and brother have lived in a hill over the sea here. Her father is a boat pilot, among other things. Everyone has a few jobs in Trinidad. There is music everywhere. Much of it is parang, the lovely sinuous vibrant infectious music of the island. The small girl can play it on her cuatro, her four-string guitar. She is also a terrific reader and a fine scholar and she’s deft with her hands and she and her dad fix things together around the house and his boat. Also she speaks three languages already, four if you count Trinidadian patois. And she is running through the streets because she adores cricket and there
are casual matches today on the perfect lawns at Queen’s Park Savannah even in the midst of Carnival. Her parents are strict but not quite cold or rigid. Her mother never went to school past the age of twelve so she is intent that her children will finish school. Her father was the one chosen among his eleven brothers and sisters to wear the one school uniform the family could afford, so he is intent that his children will finish school. Both parents are intent that their three children will soar beyond their parents. The small girl is the oldest. Her sister is five years younger and her brother is the baby. She will say later that she thinks her parents staggered their children so that they could devote to each their full and undivided attention and resources. She will also say that maybe they secretly wanted a boy as the oldest child. Maybe that is why she is sent to the most rigorous high school. Maybe that is why she is expected to be able to fix anything and everything. Maybe that is why she is encouraged to finish high school early and go to the best college she can. And she is a superb student, this girl. She finishes at the top of her class at every level, and a Trinidad student who finishes at the top is admitted free to the University of West Indies. But she is not from Trinidad. She is from Guyana. So she must look elsewhere for college, and where are there more Trinidadians than even in Trinidad? Why, yes, of course: Brooklyn and Queens, in the City of New York, in the United States of America. It was either Columbia University or New York University, says Sharon Jones, now in her office in the University’s Shiley Hall, three decades after she ran through the street on her way to the Queen’s Park Savannah cricket ground. We had relatives there, so that’s where I looked, and... Bachelor’s degree, Columbia. Wanted desperately to study history; fell deeply in love with history; would Portland 18
have done anything to be able to major in history. Absolutely not, said her father, and in my family you don’t argue with dad, she says. Yet I never forgot, and even now when I teach I want to bring context and story to what we are talking about. How did we get here? From what did we grow? From whom do we derive our energy and direction and environment? So the girl fascinated by physics and mathematics and chemistry and technical drafting, the girl who was disencouraged to study those subjects in high school because those were the subjects that boys studied, the girl who loved to fix things and build things with her dad, decided that engineering was the best match for her interests in math and science and drafting and fixing and building things, and she majored in civil engineering. Then she worked as an engineer, first for the city of Los Angeles (solid waste, biosolids, recycling, composting, regulations) and then a private firm (hazardous waste). Then a master’s degree in Florida (geotechnical engineering, husband), and another master’s degree in California (public works). More work as an engineer, with CH2M Hill (waste management, Superfund cleanup, pollution prevention), and then a doctorate (engineering and public policy, children)... Along the way Sharon Jones also stepped back into the academic world not just as a student but as a professor, and increasingly as an administrator — Allegheny College, Caribbean Academy of Sciences, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and finally Lafayette College, where she found herself, at age 43, running the engineering school. But along the way she has also begun to sense her real work. It’s not just engineering, or teaching, or running entities that teach engineering. It’s...bigger. It has something to do with showing children opportunities and paths and careers and possible absorptions they did not know they