Mass. Professor of the Year

Bristol CC's Bill Kelly: 'I have the best job in the world'

By JERRY SPINDEL

In 1987, shortly after Bill Kelly received his Ph.D. at the University of Rhode Island, a professor there asked him, "So when are you leaving Bristol Community College?"

Kelly's response was an emphatic endorsement of BCC. "I told him I wasn't leaving; that I liked it here," Kelly told MTA Today. "It's a wonderful place to do what I want to do."

What Kelly wants to do most is teach. His enthusiasm for his work as a professor of English is immediately apparent. And his talent for his work has been recognized most recently by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which this fall named him 1997 Massachusetts Professor of the Year.

The award is prestigious and, for a Massachusetts community college professor, unprecedented. The award has gone previously to faculty from such schools as BU, MIT, BC and Brandeis. The only winners from Massachusetts public institutions have been from UMass/Amherst.

Kelly described himself as "stunned" by the award, but he makes it clear that it is only one of the rewards of teaching, the most important being his interaction with students. He related how earlier that day (the first day back from winter break), he had been in front of a class in developmental English that was anything but enthusiastic.

"This was their first time in college. They were sitting there like dead people," Kelly said. The discussion touched on selling back school books, when "suddenly, one student called out, 'You don't sell back books; you keep books forever!'" And the class took off from there.

"It was like they had to learn how to talk in class," Kelly said. "But by the end of the class, they knew they were in college." So infectious was the experience that five students came to him after class to continue the conversation.

Indifferent student Paradoxically, perhaps, this man, so in love with teaching, was himself an indifferent student. And when, in 1971, he graduated from Fall River's Durfee High School (just up the road from BCC), he was rejected at Bridgewater State College. "My test scores were good, but Bridgewater knew I was a lazy slug," he said. He was accepted at Southeastern Massachusetts University (now UMass/Dartmouth), graduated in 1975, and went on to get his doctorate at the University of Rhode Island.

Before coming to BCC in 1984, Kelly taught in Fall River at the Henry Lord Junior High School and Durfee High School. During his first year at Durfee in 1978, the Fall River Educators Association went on strike and for 13 days Kelly walked the picket line with his colleagues.

He noted, "My older daughter had just been born, and I remember wheeling her carriage along when I marched. She was a big hit."

Since coming to BCC, Kelly has published five textbooks on writing (two in collaboration with his BCC colleague Deborah Lawton), but his first love remains teaching. Kelly has an empathy with his students that he' traces back to his own academic struggles.

"If I hadn't gotten into SMU, I would have gone here [to BCC]," he said. "I'm just like my students. I needed a place like a community college. They provide first chances and last chances."

Kelly's feelings for his students are reciprocated - a fact attested to by the large number of congratulatory cards and letters he has received from students, past and present. One is from a woman he taught in junior high school in 1976; another from a 99-year-old woman who, years before, when she was in her eighties, wandered into his class when her bus didn't arrive and stayed to complete the course (she got an A).

'Eulogies and lies'

Kelly is also moved by the letters students provided in support of his Professor of the Year nomination. "Reading those letters was like going to my own wake," he joked. 'They were beautiful, full of eulogies and lies."

On a more serious note, he recalled one student's letter recounting moments in his class that he himself didn't remember. "It brought tears to my eyes." he said, "And all of those clichés about teaching - how you're not aware of the impact you're having on students - this made it real."

Kelly's nomination by the BCC administration (Academic Affairs Associate Dean Penny Hahn and Dean David Feeney "did all of the leg work," he's quick to point out) was strongly supported by his colleagues and, here again, Kelly more than returns the warm feelings. In fact, he notes the "discomfort of being singled out" for the award.

"I work with so many people who do a great job," he said; "I feel they've been overlooked."

But Kelly's recognition can only call attention to the good things happening in the community colleges. Already BCC is using Kelly in newspaper and radio ads. And other honors have followed. His parochial elementary school has named him in Distinguished Graduate for 1998 (I have to go to a Mass and everything; my mother is delighted"; and he has been invited to address the faculty of Connecticut's community technical colleges.

Kelly has also been honored by the legislature and the Board of Higher Education. Ironically, on the day he was honored by the Board, Chairman James Carlin denounced higher education faculty.

"What I found upsetting and sad," Kelly noted, "was that, except for the several minutes during which I was introduced by Chancellor [Stanleyl Koplik, congratulated by him, photographed with him, and greeted with kind applause, there was virtually no discussion of teaching at all, no one defending the good teaching that goes on, no one challenging any part of what Carlin said in that speech. It was bizarre."

But even Carlin can't dim Kelly's enthusiasm for teaching. "I have the best job in the world," Kelly insisted. "Sometimes I just can't believe I'm getting paid to do what I love."

Staff Photos by Jerry Spindel

(Top Photo) Massachusetts Professor of the Year Bill Kelly,
of Bristol Community College, in front of his office computer.
On the screen: The Bill Kelly Home Page, produced by his publisher,
Allyn and Bacon.

(Bottom Photo) Kelly displays the five textbooks he has authored.