Medievalist Encounters Student Chutzpah

Gail Berkeley Sherman [English and humanities 1981–2022]

Probably the first day I arrived at Reed in August 1981, the cashier at the Eliot Hall window asked me if I was a newly arrived freshman. A few weeks later, a freshman in my Hum 110 conference offered me some tips on how to run a real Reed conference. And before fall break, an English major informed me that whatever we were doing in my Chaucer class, it had nothing to do with what he expected of English classes. The challenges kept coming for the next 41 years.

What I have loved most about teaching at Reed is engaging with students who have the chutzpah to challenge minds far greater than mine: Sappho, George Eliot, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, or Edwidge Danticat, all of whose works I first studied and taught at Reed.

As the 28-year-old newly hired medievalist in the English department, I was overjoyed that so many thesis students wanted to write theses on Chaucer, Margery Kempe, or the Revelations of the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich (my dissertation subject).

Perhaps because I was a young woman and an avowed feminist, however, more English majors wanted me to guide their senior theses on women writers from Austen to Woolf, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, or Carole Maso. While I was initially rather overwhelmed by these unexpected demands, 30 years later I gave up my medieval courses to Michael Faletra to teach modern and contemporary American fiction. Teaching at Reed meant the freedom to keep learning with my students.

While many folks I’ve taught have become teachers in their turn, I’ve learned that what we teach has less to do with subject matter, and more with what we do. One summer day during the pandemic, I heard someone call out my name in the library foyer. I turned, but did not recognize the young woman. “Gail Sherman! I want to thank you for inviting me to your home for Thanksgiving dinner when I was a freshman. I now teach sociology in New Mexico, at the university with the highest percentage of Native American students in the U.S., and what I remember from that first term at Reed is that I didn’t think there was any way I would make it. Your invitation made a big difference.”

What I am proudest of having done at Reed is having invited that student to dinner, having made sure that all of my thesis students finished their theses, and having worked with others to establish the on-campus child care center—not an ideal solution, but it may make it a little easier for young faculty and staff to support Reedies from Hum 110 to thesis, and on to bringing more justice into the world.