Barbara Glasrud Department: Art Years at Concordia: 1964-1987 Current Home: Moorhead, MN Phone: 218-233-1843 Email: bglasrud@aol.com
Hello, Class of ’67! You were juniors when I began teaching at Concordia. I had not planned to be a teacher. When I graduated from Carleton, I found a job at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the print department, and this inspired me to go on to graduate school in art history I went to the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU for a year, then transferred to Bryn Mawr College to study with a leading professor of Oriental Art. After my marriage, we moved to Cambridge Massachusetts for two years, while my husband was completing his doctorate in English at Harvard, and I had the “dream job” for an art historian, a curatorship in the Oriental Art department at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. We came back to Moorhead for my husband’s job teaching at Moorhead State in 1952, had a son, and when he was eight, we three spent a year in Europe on my husband’s Sabbatical. After the Sabbatical, Cy Running, who was head of Concordia’s art department, asked me if I would be interested in teaching art history part-time. I wasn’t at all sure I could be a teacher, but my husband sort of talked me into trying it. While you were at Concordia, all the art classes, studio and lecture, were held in the Berg Art Center (formerly the college’s gym, I understand). I found I liked teaching, and I liked my students a lot. The year you graduated, the college started a “May Seminar in Europe” program, and in 1968 I took my art history students to London, Paris and Italy, the first of many years of art history May Seminars. Later I included Greece as well. Also in 1968, to my surprise (really!) I was suddenly made full-time, given tenure and asked to be chairman of the art department. And chairman I remained until I retired in 1987. I remember I used to be very formal in the classroom. I called you “Miss” or “Mister” and your last name, and I think I demanded quite a lot of you. And you responded! I think in order to like teaching, you have to love your subject and want to make your students love it, too. And the rewards for the teacher are many— especially if, when you see them years later, they tell you that their art history course had an effect on their lives.
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