Frightfully fun Poetry night features record crowd, original poems.
Page 3 James P. Quick Agora staff
Some of the first words out of Paul Hedeen’s mouth when discussing Joanna Sabo are “impossible to replace.” Sabo, a political science professor who has been at MCCC for a quarter of a cenury, is retiring at the end of Fall Semester. She is proud that she took a circuitous route to MCCC that started with a modest childhood in Wyandotte. “I came from a relatively-poor family of five kids,” Sabo says. “They’d consider us not upper-middle class anyway. I guess we were a classic middle class of the time.” Sabo did not move directly into a career as an educator. “I dropped out of school at age 16,” she says, “and then went back some years later. Found that I wanted to be, initially, a lawyer.” Then her boss at a Detroit internship intervened. “My boss talked me out of being a lawyer and he asked me to intern in the educational institute there that was called the Government Educational Institute,” she says. Sabo found that she loved it and set up several training programs at the institute. She was still flirting with her original career via training and development for the U.S. Federal Courts, Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C., and Michigan Consolidated Gas. In 1991, she began her own training and development company, Beyond Interactive Training. “Like everybody else, the new business struggled at first,” Sabo says, “but it got established eventually and I did that full-time for a few years. “But while I was doing that – initially to shore up my income, and I had my master’s degree at the time – I sought out part-time teaching.” Mary Roberti hired Sabo as an adjunct to teach political science at MCCC in 1992. Sabo still remembers her first class in C222. “That first fall, vice president Quayle came to campus,” she says, reaching behind her to grab an old campaign sign. “And I actually happen to have one of the campaign signs from the rally that was here right in the middle of the campus. I had my whole first class sign it.” After that first class, it was a done deal. Sabo happily says that she “absolutely fell in love with college teaching” and she’s been at MCCC ever since. Her colleagues are certainly quite happy she did. Kojo Quartey, president of the college, has
Serving Monroe County since 1968
Irreplaceable Sabo leaves lasting legacy
MCCC professor Joana Sabo poses on the rooftop of Casa Mila, a building designed by famous architect Antoni Gaudi, in Barcelona during the college’s 2013 Study Abroad trip to Spain.
nothing but praise for Sabo. “She will most definitely be missed,” he says. “She has been an instructor par excellence at this institution for many years. “She’s been an integral part of our Study Abroad program and championed the Global Studies division. It’s a very vital part of
what we do here at this institution. “And now that she’s leaving… it’s going to be a missing cog in the works of our institution. She will be missed. She was a very valued individual here.” Hedeen, the dean of Humanities/Social Sciences, is happy for the political science professor.
Nov. 13, 2017
“I’m very happy for her, that she’s retiring and moving on to another time in her life,” he says. “She’s going to be impossible to replace.” “I can say that Joanna is a very hard worker who, when she sets her mind to
See Sabo, Page 8 Vol. 65, Issue 3