On the Commons
ONE-ON-ONE
with Paul Fahey, Ph.D. ’64
Paul Fahey, Ph.D. ‘64, who has taught at the University for more than 50 years, is retiring. He was also dean of CAS for a time and chair of the department for seven years. If you pry, he might tell you that he was the editor of the literary magazine when he was a student. Mostly, though, he talks — modestly — about his career in teaching and research, which had implications for hearing tests and speech recognition that we rely on in today’s digital world.
What was it like to be a physics major in the early ’60s at Scranton? College opened up a whole world of academics and new friendships for me. For the first time, I was in an environment where really serious academics was the first priority. I was also super lucky to have the faculty members I did, among whom were Fr. J.J. Quinn for rhetoric, Fr. Ed Powers for mathematics, Fr. Eugene Gallagher for theology, Bernie McGurl for speech. In advanced work, I had some the ‘greats’: Joseph Harper, Eugene McGinnis and Andrew Plonsky for physics; Edward Bartley and Bernie Johns for math; Matt Fairbanks and Tom Garrett for philosophy. The best part of my undergraduate years, though, is that I met a Marywood student, Rosemarie Corallo. We married in September 1965. 12
THE SCRANTON JOURN A L
Professor of Physics & Engineering
You got your doctorate at the University of Virginia on a NASA fellowship. How did you get back to Scranton? In the spring of 1968, I got a call from Gene McGinnis asking if I was finishing up my doctorate and, if so, would I like a job at Scranton. I said “yes and yes.” How did you like teaching? My first year of teaching was the most difficult and stressful year of my professional life. My struggle, in the beginning, was with advanced physics courses. My first course was statistical physics at the graduate level. (Yes, we had a master’s degree in physics back in 1968.) I spent hours preparing for that course and was never happy with the results. Lucky for me, the students were so talented that they learned in spite of me. After the first year, I started to figure it out. How did you get to researching at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Nokia Bell Labs), often called the “idea factory,” which had been “tasked with overcoming the dayto-day engineering challenges of building a national communications network” at the time? When I returned from a sabbatical at Cornell in 1976, the chair of the Department of Communications asked me to create a natural science course for his majors. The course had
