Making the ‘old stuff’ relevant

Rosalind Hays has devoted her life to “the old stuff” and how to make it relevant to the modern world.

“Does everyone have to know about all parts of the past?” the Oak Park resident asks. “No. Should anyone coming out of education have some notion of how we work with the past, what kind of questions we ask of it and how we answer those questions? I would hope so.”

Examining the past and helping students grasp its importance were components of her career as a history professor at Dominican University — a career that has spanned a half century.

Hays, who taught mediaeval and early modern England history, plus the Greek and Roman worlds as well, has retired after 50 years, one of the longest-serving faculty members at the institution. The former chair of the history department also was a founding director of the interdisciplinary University Honors Program.

She officially retired 10 years ago, but until this past semester taught history part-time, as well as one of those inter-disciplinary seminars. The history course covered whatever area the department needed whereas the seminar often had Darwin’s History of the Origins of the Species as its focus. 

“I’ve loved it. I’ve done exactly what I’ve wanted to do. How many people get to do that?” she asked, rhetorically.

To make the “old stuff” relevant, Hays tried to connect the subject she was teaching to issues and events in the modern world. Democracy in ancient Greece, for example, excluded slaves and foreigners. Students in her medieval history classes learned about the development of parliament, the legal system and the origins of common law. 

“And what about the relationship between church and state in the Middle Ages?” she said, framing things, as she often does, in the form of a question. “These were huge issues. … It’s relevant to the present.”

To supplement the classes, students read literature that reflected the society and attitudes of the times they were studying. 

But she didn’t just teach history; she has lived it, especially as it pertains to Dominican. 

When she came to Rosary College in 1966 after teaching at a small liberal arts college in New York state, the institution was predominately female, fed by Catholic high schools around the Chicago area. Around 40 percent of the students were preparing to teach in elementary or secondary schools. The only males on campus were in the library school. Almost all of the students were white. Many of the students lived on campus. Two-thirds of the faculty were nuns who wore full habit.

The campus is now a lot more diverse. More than half of the student body is Latino. Dominican continues to be an institution whose mission is serving students who are the first in their family to go college. In the 1960s, a lot of those students were Irish; now they’re Czech and Polish and Latino. In the 1970s, the university began recruiting and admitting men. 

During the 1960s when campuses were demonstrating against the Vietnam War and for civil rights, Rosary was involved in its own way. One chaplain burned his draft card. Some students went downtown to march during the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968; one faculty member was injured after being thrown through a plate glass window. Faculty and students marched down Michigan Avenue in opposition to what happened during the convention. 

But there was also a rebellion of sorts on campus. Hays said students protested in the early ’70s, contending that the school’s curriculum was too stilted, that there were too many requirements to graduate (including four in theology) and they wanted a say in what they were learning. Eighty percent of them signed a petition urging the faculty to take time out from classes and talk about what should happen to what they were being taught. What the institution did was abolish all requirements, except one: To graduate, students had to place out of or take freshman English. They also set up a strong advisory program for students and set a limit to how many courses a student could take in any one field. Some requirements were re-instituted in the 1990s, she said. 

In June she’s off to Wiltshire, where she will pore through provincial documents from 16th- and early 17th-century England for any mention of any kind of performance, be it a scurrilous song or a dance or dramatic performance. The material she comes up with will become part of a reference book. 

Mary Scott Simpson, professor emerita of English at Dominican, called her the university’s “institutional memory.” In her introduction to Hays’ commencement address at graduation recently, Simpson said her departing colleague “taught all of us, students and colleagues alike, to take pleasure in that common enterprise, to treasure and to exercise our membership in a community of scholars.”

In her speech, the professor emerita of history alluded to the university’s mission: preparing students “to pursue truth, to give compassionate service and to participate in the creation of a more just and humane world.”

“Any academic institution ought to be doing that,” Hays said. “We’re all involved in attempting to look at part of the truth through our own disciplines.”