AAUP Faculty Advocate Award, 1997
This year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) decided to expand our definition of what we considered "faculty advocacy." In the past, we have tended to focus on those colleagues who have helped achieve things like better pay and reduced workload. This year we decided to honor someone who's passionate concern centered on what we do for our money and how we spend our work time-reduced or otherwise.
We are pleased (as well as saddened) to award this year's AAUP Faculty Advocate Award to Fred Kollett. We are equally pleased to donate the cash award that goes with this to the scholarship fund established in his name.
In thinking about what I wanted to say here, what I knew I wanted to do-and what I knew Fred would have wanted-was not to make this too heavy. We all have so many memories of Fred, but one of my many is that Fred was a chuckler. Fred laughed like the rest of us, but then he would chuckle, as well. I remember him coming up to me well after one of these kind of events, when some of us had said the usual ridiculously silly things, and Fred was still chuckling, repeating the jokes and enjoying them all over again.
So in that vein...
Fred Kollet's commitment to the Wheaton faculty was something akin to a missionary, sent here to convert the heathens. And Fred succeeded beyond even Godly proportion. I remember seeing one computer workshop, just a couple of years ago, when Fred had managed to snare into a beginning Macintosh class what seemed to me last Luddite holdouts on the faculty. These colleagues shall remain nameless-but you know who you are. I thought-and Fred later confirmed-that getting these guys in (and later onto e-mail) just about finished his initial goal of getting every faculty person on a computer. I doubt anyone who ever set out to convert the primitives ever had such a high success rate as Fred Kollett.
But Fred also knew his role as a member of the faculty-our teacher and our advocate. When David Wagner offered his touching eulogy for Fred at the Memorial Service, he recalled how, even though they had been friends for years, Fred turned down his offers to meet him on campus during the day. If Fred was going to bring the faculty with him into the technological promised land, he had to be perceived as one of us, not one of them.
This was a vision beyond strategy, however. Fred held out steadfastly for the autonomy of academic computing, that it was not just another branch of campus computing. What it did for the curriculum, for faculty research, for student awareness and access-all these things Fred knew were qualitatively different than data management, computerized billing, electronic deposits, and the thousands of other things a computer does on any college campus. Academic computing was to be as integral a part of Wheaton's educational experience as the math courses Fred taught. And Fred fought for this principle throughout his time here.
Finally, Fred was a remarkable person in that his gentle, slightly "aw-shucks" facade veiled a both a brilliant mind and a large vision. I remember being stumped by a problem about the size of a computer file-this was back in the days of the main-frame in Knapton. Gail Richardson, then working there, was also stumped. We stopped Fred in the middle of the room, laid out the problem, and without a blink, Fred reeled off what seemed an enormous equation relating to file size, did the complicated calculations blazingly fast in his head, and proposed the solution to the problem.
What is striking about that example is that while lots of us can trot out our learning, erudition, our academic pizzazz (if that's not a non-sequitur), how many of us can keep it under wraps and instead answer things simply, make no one feel stupid or incapable of understanding, give the impression that it is easy and that anyone can do it.
I remarked to Gordy Weil as we left Fred's service that I understood why Fred opted for Macintoshes as our computer of choice. They are, in many ways, just like him. Inside, they are powerful, unbelievably capable, future-oriented, even elegant-the best there is. On the outside, however, they invite people in, draw them by their seeming simplicity, make the difficult seem easy, even fun.
Fred Kollett was the ultimate user-friendly guy. His style might have been different than some of the other winners of this award. But he was no less our advocate.
