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Professor Metcalf Retires After 46 Years at MacMurray After 46 years, Dr. Allan Metcalf, professor of English, is retiring from MacMurray College and has been granted Professor Emeritus status. Metcalf served the College in many capacities over the years. He came to MacMurray in 1973 as chair of the English department and two years later became chair of the journalism program. He also served as college registrar and assistant vice president of academic affairs in the early 2000s. “Well I think the students kept me here,” said Metcalf. "If you have a class of about a dozen students, which I often did, you learn the names of everybody, and you learn some have interesting backgrounds.” At MacMurray, he taught courses ranging from composition to structure of English to medieval literature, as well as journalism and linguistics. Metcalf was founder and faculty advisor for The Daily Other, the only small-college daily newspaper in the country at the time, publishing five four-page issues a week beginning in 1977. The paper continued for more than a decade. “I liked the way that it was, kind of, fearless, maybe a little foolish,” Metcalf said about the Daily Other. “Students didn’t hesitate to complain about things they thought were worth complaining about or praise things that deserved to be praised. Also, the whole attitude of the staff was enthusiastic, they enjoyed themselves and had a good time.” Metcalf also spent 37 years as chief administrator of the American Dialect Society, a scholarly association, and as a weekly blogger for the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education from its beginning in 2011 to its ending in 2018. He is a published author as well. This September, Oxford University Press published his eighth book on language, “The Life of Guy: Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Unlikely History of an Indispensable Word.” In retirement, Metcalf looks forward to traveling with his wife and writing more books.
CBS Sunday Morning is “OK” Allan Metcalf’s book, “OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word,” garnered some national attention when comedian and television host Mo Rocca interviewed Metcalf for a segment on CBS Sunday Morning in 2014. The word OK was born on the second page of the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, so in honor of its 175th birthday, CBS sent Rocca to Jacksonville to learn more about the word from the guy who wrote a book about it. Metcalf wrote the book in 2010 and has even proposed celebrating OK Day every March 23. 9