Dean Among Deans
by Tim Ungs

John C. Ward retires after 16 years at Centre

When John C. Ward, Maryanne Ward, their cherished bay tree, and Slipper (the cat) pulled away from Overstreet House the day after commencement—destination retirement and the Kennebec River in Maine—one of the most stable, convivial, and productive deanships in the history of Centre College came to a close.

“Ward has had a remarkable run,” Centre president John A. Roush told the campus newspaper, The Cento, in February. “When the institution’s next history is written, John Ward’s name will be called often as one of the key players in enriching and elevating the College’s academic program and progress.”

His 16 years as vice president and dean of the College made him one of the longest-serving deans in the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS). John Churchill, national secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, described him, aptly, as “dean among the deans in the ACS,” at a campus symposium honoring Ward. Bill Johnston, Centre mathematician and associate dean, echoed that description at one of many farewell dinners for the Wards, saying: “John was born to be a superb dean.”

His mark can be seen in the Centre faculty: he hired more than 70 percent of those who will be teaching in the fall. And as just one sign of the esteem in which his faculty colleagues hold him, he was elected a rare “honorary member” of Centre’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa earlier this year.

The College made significant strides in his 16 years as dean. For a comparison of Centre when he arrived and Centre today, Ward rattles off figures based on the first registrar’s report he analyzed. “The faculty-student ratio was one to 12; now it is one to 11,” he says. “The faculty taught eight courses; now they teach six. . . . Sixty-four percent of those [students] who entered, graduated. Eighty-one percent of the students who entered in 2002 [graduated] this spring.”

Ward sees other—less quantifiable, but more important—improvements as well, including a “gradual but unmistakable improvement in the academic and intellectual character of the campus.” Research, classroom work, publications, and teaching innovation are all “more validated and more a part of Centre’s character,” he says, than they were in 1990, the year he came aboard.

Another change he cites is the “amazing growth of student interest in study abroad,” a development for which he refuses to take “any unique credit,” but which he “happily supported and helped.” Fewer than 100 students studied abroad the year he arrived. Today, an eye-popping 84 percent of the Class of 2006 has studied outside the country. Study abroad, he says, has become “the hallmark of the Centre education.”

Ward’s demurrals notwithstanding, Milton Reigelman thinks the dean’s efforts have been essential to Centre’s international outlook. “He has, throughout his tenure here, been enthusiastically supportive of and helpful to the Centre abroad efforts,” says Reigelman, English professor and director of international programs.

Ward’s enthusiasm for Centre’s study abroad programs is not surprising, perhaps, given his own international background. The son of missionary teachers, he spent his early years in China and Hong Kong. After graduating from Amherst College (the 25th member of his family to do so), and earning a Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia, he joined the faculty at Kenyon College. During 20 years there, he twice directed Kenyon’s program based at the University of Exeter in southwestern England.

Both John and Maryanne Ward supported themselves in graduate school by catering—he as a bartender, she as a cook. Those jobs provided an unexpected and most welcome addition to their skill set during their years at Centre, with Overstreet House, the dean’s official residence, a frequent setting for gatherings large and small.

“One of the things that Maryanne and I have enjoyed,” says Ward, “is making Overstreet House a place of hospitality,” a place “in which the faculty feels that it’s perfectly okay to call us up and say, ‘Would you mind having a dinner for this visiting lecturer?’”

Another intangible but significant hallmark of the Ward years has been the overall air of collegiality on campus. “Perhaps the thing I’m proudest of is that the academic administration and the faculty are at odds with one another very, very infrequently,” says Ward. While acknowledging inevitable disagreements, he adds that “it’s a remarkable accomplishment—and it’s very much to the credit of the faculty—that we have chosen to respect one another and not to be impolite.”

Although Ward’s primary responsibilities lay with administration, he taught a popular 18th-century British literature class once a year. A student recently sent him a letter that moved Ward greatly.

“You have somehow managed to maintain your austere refinement without becoming an aloof figure seen only at official events and in photographs,” wrote Josh Smith ’06, a mathematics major from Dayton. “In Kipling’s words, you ‘walk with kings’ but have not lost ‘the common touch.’ Your ability to remain at all times dignified, yet somehow retain that familiar ease is something I revere in you.”

Much as he has loved teaching, Ward acknowledges his pleasure in the sheer variousness of a dean’s work: from managing budgets and information technology to speaking formally and informally to faculty, parents, students, alumni, and even, on occasion, being able to cook a tenderloin of beef for unexpected College guests.

Being a dean brings him full circle, in a way, to the ideals of the very education he’s administering. “I’m more truly a student of the liberal arts now than I was as an English professor,” he says. “I think you can’t be a one-trick pony and be a good dean. You have to have a series of enthusiasms and interests and abilities that go way beyond your disciplinary identity.”

Tim Ungs is the media associate in Centre’s communications office.

To read about Maryanne Ward, click here.

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