Physics with Feeling A Mix of Quirks and Quarks Might Just Make Murray Campbell the Quintessential Colby Professor by Edward Hershey
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a l l orien t a t i o n w a s fa r enough along by the time Murray Campbell began his session on campus diversity that most member of the Cla s of '94 wore the glaze of a group j ust about oriented to sleep. But professors are used to cap tive audiences. So Campbell plunged into a dissertation on the distinc t ions between people-men and women, for example. W a n't it ad mirable that so many women even go to college, he asked, given the female predilection toward domes ticity ? A few male nodded and some fe m a l e s h i fted in t h e i r seats. Campbell was j u t warmingup. Surely they understood what he meant, Campbel l continued. W a n't the primacy of woman's role a ch ild nurturer an accepted fact? More nod and even a few chortle , countered by a few moans. The glazes were thinning fast. In the rear of G iven Audito rium, orientation taffers exchanged worried glances. "We understood what he was trying to do," Associate Dean of tudents Joyce McPhetres Maisel recall , "but we were begin ning to wonder if he wa n't carrying it too far." By now, the bolder males were virtually an amen chorusasCampbell rolled on, wondering why women would even want to abandon their natural roles to compete with men. A few moments later-they seemed like weeks to McPhetres-Mai el Campbell stopped as if to mull h is word and a ked bluntly, "lsn't that a load of crap?"
Colby, M ay 1 99 1
Lynn Bushnell
Murray Campbell
"Murray believes in human dignity and equality, and that dictates everything he does . .
"
Charles Hauss, professor of government
There was a knowing smile or two, a few giggle and some sheepish looks. Made to confront their readi ness to buy into Campbell's diatribe, the freshly minted collegians were soon discu sing the folly of stereotyp i n g . " H e scared us to dea t h , " McPhetres-Maisel says, "but i t was wonderful." Murray Franci Campbell ought to be good at puncturing stereotypes. He has been doing the unexpected and making it work for more than a decade on Mayflower Hill, employ ing equal parts of rumpled innocence, warm enthusiasm and calc ulat ing brill iance to lure, impress and capti vate students of physics. That's right, phy ics. Campbell, who chairs a department often conidered a domain of recondite genius, is himself a campus crossover-an engaging humanist who has never met a student he didn't want to like. "He's a really good teacher and a good guy to be around personal ly," says Aditya Dayal '9 1 , who came to Colby from Calcutta w ith thought of specializing in computer cience and is now contemplating a career in in frared a tronomy. " But really I can not use the word teacher to properly describe Murray becau e that ets him apart, and he's really o per anal ly involved with his tudent . He' ev erything a professor should be, I think, at a small college like Colby." Similar testimonials come from other students who have al o had contact w ith Campbell out of the cla sroom. "He's a very different kind of guy," says Vincent Humplick '89, who worked with Campbell on ummer 23