When examining campus culture, we often focus on student activities. So, we started a series examining how professors contribute to our culture! This week, we’re hearing from Dr. Jason Hawke, an Associate Professor of History.
Q: How did you come to work in your field?
A: I suppose the writing was on the wall when, after a unit on Greece and Rome when I was in sixth grade, I was so enamored of ancient history that I named the puppy we adopted a few months later “Julius” (after Caesar, of course). […] After struggling to find my muse throughout my freshman year at the University of Utah, as a sophomore, I decided to take an elective on Ancient Greece. The professor, W. Lindsay Adams, was inspirational: the man had the power of conversion in the classroom. […] I signed up the very next quarter for his survey of Ancient Rome. Over Spring Break that year, I came across a book by Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War, and felt myself drawn powerfully into the story of historical and archeological discovery presented there. The subsequent spring quarter, I took Lindsay’s course on Alexander the Great and the world his conquests created, which was his specialty. As I sat in the back of his class one day, I had the epiphany watching him that I finally knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. His attempts to test my seriousness and passion by explaining how difficult the road to a Ph.D. in ancient history would be proved unsuccessful, and I ended up at the University of Washington in Seattle for my postgraduate work.
Q: What is your favorite part of your work, and what is the most challenging?
A: My students are always the favorite part of the work. […] I very much like research and testing my ideas among my peers, whether that’s in print or at academic conferences. But I’m under no illusions, especially in this field, ancient history, that my work is going to make a potentially huge difference in anyone’s life, or that a fair number of people who ultimately might read my publications have yet to be born. Teaching, however, gives me the opportunity to have an immediate impact on the community of learners of which I am a part, and that’s always gratifying. […].
As for challenges, I don’t think it is any secret that higher education in this country has in recent years faced a variety of pressures – cultural, financial, and most recently political – and none of these have missed Roanoke College. Recent changes to our teaching load, while probably necessary in the face of those pressures, necessitate hard choices for me as an educator regarding how I handle an increase in quantity without sacrificing the quality I have always tried to achieve. […]
Q: What is the biggest thing you’ve learned since coming to work here?
A: The importance of being adaptive. In my early years of teaching, I was a graduate assistant or newly minted assistant professor, and I wasn’t far removed in age from my students: their cultural experiences and learning strengths and weaknesses were familiar territory. […] My current students grew up under a different set of circumstances, culturally and educationally. […] With the advent of AI, those background differences are also increasing: perhaps in a large state school where education is secondary to other priorities, focusing on reaching each new generation of students might not be as urgent. But that’s not how things are at Roanoke: you came here seeking a more intensive, more involved, more personal educational experience, and it’s important to me to figure out how to do that for each new generation of students.
Q: What’s your advice to Roanoke College students?
A: Check your email at least twice a day, manage your time wisely, and never hesitate to ask questions you don’t know the answers to, whether it’s about some difficult problem in a class assignment, help navigating some college system, or needing help in general with academic life and its various challenges. Everyone here wants you to succeed, but we can’t help you meet your challenges if we don’t know what they are.
Maggie Raker
Culture, Wellness & Lifestyle Editor
