A new endowment in support of psychology majors at ˛ÝÝŽÉçÇř honors three exemplary emeritus professors. Kim Gingerich Brenneman ‘85, Galen Lehman ‘73, and Judy Mullet ‘73 have 101 years of service between them at EMU.

The endowment honors the transformative impact of their teaching, scholarship and advising on hundreds of EMU students, but also supports the continued studies of new generations of students.

“It is an honor to have my name on the psychology endowment, especially with two other brilliant psychology faculty whom I know have made huge differences in the lives of EMU students,” said Brenneman. 

This scholarship is the first of its kind for psychology majors at EMU. Full-time psychology students in their first year at EMU will qualify as recipients, and students of African, Hispanic, Asian and Native American descent will be given priority.

Dennis Showalter ‘73, who graduated alongside Lehman and Mullet, saw an opportunity to create it.

“I decided that a psychology scholarship was definitely needed,” Showalter says. “Our EMC 45th reunion was coming up, so I reached out to the 10 psychology majors from the class of 1973, to see if they would partner with me in securing the scholarship.” 

Lehman and Mullet joined Showalter and Gretchen Maust ‘73, administrative assistant for the Visual and Communication Arts Department, to help establish the endowment. They then invited Brenneman, who was eager to join the team. But the coalition still needed to name the scholarship.

Each professor was “too humble to want it to be named after him or herself, so we named it after all of them,” says Showalter. 

They’re seeking $10,000 in financial support through EMU’s new crowdfunding platform, which has recently helped fund the Matt Garber Endowed Scholarship and MJ Sharp Peace & Justice Endowed Scholarship, both in honor of young alumni who have passed away.

“Endowments such as these affirm, energize and invite students to more deeply commit to a community of explorers and travelers in one of the newest disciplines in higher education,” says Mullet. “As a faculty member in the department I sought to live what we explored together both in and out of classrooms. The richness of one-to-one conversations were ‘holy moments’ that I cherish to this day. I’m honored to support ongoing ‘holy moments’ at EMU through this scholarship.”

Legacies live on through students and colleagues

All three former faculty have left indelible marks on the program through their tenure. Maust is proud of how far the department has come since she was a student.

“I am delighted to see our current psych majors challenged to explore all sorts of career options. I’m most excited about the new art therapy concentration which prepares our grads for advanced degrees in art therapy and the collaboration between our undergrad psych program and the graduate Master in Counseling program,” Maust says.

Lehman, having joined the faculty in 1973, brought some of the earliest improvements to the program, including Apple II computers, and renovating the formerly dirt-floor Suter Science Center basement into instructional and collaboration space.

Mullet, in addition to teaching psychology, also directed the Honors program, taught undergraduate and graduate courses in education, and co-founded and co-led Student Kairos Place, a week-long gathering of EMU undergraduate writers. 

She had a reputation as an excellent listener and mentor with deep compassion for her students.

“Judy Mullet is one of the kindest, and without a doubt the most affirming, persons I have ever known,” said Joshua Kanagy ‘13, a mental health counselor at Morrison Child and Family Services in Portland, Oregon. “Judy has a remarkable knack for recognizing and encouraging her students’ talents, and she was instrumental in my own decision to become a counselor. I am a gentler, more vulnerable, and more hopeful human being because of her.”

Brenneman, respected for her academic rigor, also led many cross-cultural trips to India over the years. And she was skilled at putting her colleagues and students at ease. 

“Her ability to always treat me with the highest respect for both who I am and the emotions that tag along with me has had an impact that will last throughout my entire life,” said Emily Suttles ‘16. “I have met many people who are good listeners, but she definitely tops the list, and I continue to strive to be that same type of listener for other people.”

Ultimately, Brenneman hopes to provide “a bit of financial relief” for tomorrow’s psychology students. “I hope it also shows that we are committed to encouraging the next generation of psychologists academically as well as financially.”

“A classroom this size is now a rarity at EMU,” observed , who was a student in SC-106 when it was brand-new and who studied under each of the professors on the panel. “Smaller classes are the norm now.” Lehman, who chaired the that moved to the science center in 1981, retired earlier this year. He earned his PhD in applied experimental psychology at Virginia Tech University.

Most of the professors on the panel arrived at EMU, fresh out of graduate school, around the time the state-of-the-art building, with its domed planetarium, opened in 1968. All six were EMU alumni. The science center had not yet been named for , longtime biology professor and pre-med advisor who retired in 1985 and died in 2006.

“The highlight of my career was working with all these people,” said Joe Mast, looking fondly at the row of colleagues to his right. “We formed quite a community.”

The six professors were a good fit for a small college, where they had to teach a variety of courses. But they were also a product of a college where they were encouraged to delve into a variety of subjects. Many of them were on faculty teams that taught “IDS” (interdisciplinary studies) courses that were required of all students in the 1970s.

, who earned his PhD in plant ecology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, taught almost every science-related course, at one time or another, that didn’t have “human anatomy” or “physiology” in its title. “I even taught a nutrition course,” he said. Over the years he became an expert on ornithology, the study of birds. For 25 years he was the curator of the in the science center.

Kenton Brubaker, with a PhD in horticulture from Ohio State University, branched out to , biochemistry, genetics, ecology and agriculture. “I taught a course on cell biology, which was new to me but very exciting,” he said. “Years later I saw a former student who got a PhD in cell biology from Harvard. He said my course started his quest in the field.”

“None of my nutrition students got a Harvard PhD in nutrition,” retorted Mellinger.

One of Brubaker’s primary interests was international agriculture, fostered by a three-year teaching term in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1960s with . Another interest that he pursued, beginning in the early 1970s, was environmental studies and conservation. He and Mellinger helped start a campus organization called that continues to this day.

Brubaker, the oldest of the retiree group, joined the EMU faculty in 1959. The others came during the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Suter Science panel discussion, coinciding with the , attracted alumni who had studied in the building and sat in the professors’ classes.

Millard Showalter, who earned an EdD from the University of Virginia, taught in the mathematical sciences department. He followed five simple teaching principles: be enthusiastic, use humor, always be prepared for class, use praise, and demonstrate a sincere interest in each student.

In his “Math and the Liberal Arts” course, he had a standing invitation for students to earn an automatic “A” by showing how they could take a plain sheet of paper and fold it eight times. For years, no one met the challenge. Showalter felt it was not humanly possible to fold a paper that many times. Finally, a student showed up one day with a tiny lump of paper that he had folded eight times. The student was – and Showalter looked to his left on the panel – Lehman, who worked part-time at a machine shop and used a mechanized press to aid him.

Glenn Kauffman, with a PhD in physical organic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, marveled at the equipment improvements in his department over the years. “It’s amazing that we never had a major fire in the chemistry labs in the early years,” he said. “And the organic chemistry lab used to be the smelliest place in the building.”

Kauffman is most proud of “developing a culture of research” among his students. He devoted much of his own time – in addition to a full teaching load – to conducting research with students. Sometimes the research was in collaboration with James Madison University, across town, with grants from the National Science Foundation.

Joseph Mast juggled his interests in , , astronomy and . His PhD from the University of Virginia was in astronomy, but he was also trained in the other areas. He was an early student and then early instructor in computers. For 20 years he was director of EMU’s M.T. Brackbill Planetarium, enjoying his interaction with school children who came to his planetarium shows.

“My favorite course was astronomy,” he said. “When students would excitedly find Orion in the sky – that was great.”

“The opportunity to work with children with autism was not the result of a deliberate plan or any previous experience with autism,” says Oswald. “Grafton School in Berryville, Virginia, was just beginning the program for students with autism and I was fascinated by the children and intrigued by the opportunity to work with them individually.”

Oswald’s fascination with the emerging field of autism diagnosis, combined with the strong foundation he received as a major at EMU, helped launch his productive career.

Raised on a Nebraska farm, Oswald chose for his first two years of college. EMU’s innovative psychology department, led by John Hess, attracted him for his junior and senior years. A young had just started his long teaching tenure. And in one psychology class, Oswald met Jean Miller, the woman who became his wife.

Of his non-psychology professors, Oswald names Willard Swartley as “perhaps the most memorable. His Old Testament course made a lasting impression because of his commitment to scholarly integrity.”

Within the newly built , Oswald was introduced to scholarly research first-hand. “I recall the pleasure I got from spending whole days in the library tracking down sources, and reading and integrating the material I found. I no longer remember the topic, but the process made a real impression and the experience whetted my appetite for independent research.”

Whetted may be an understatement. Oswald’s 19-page curriculum vitae lists more than 12 pages of academic articles, book reviews/editorials/abstracts, books/chapters, grant-related products, and workshop presentations which he authored, co-authored or produced.

After graduating magna cum laude in 1975, Oswald received a master’s in education in school psychology from James Madison University in 1981. Two degrees from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University followed: master of science in psychology in 1987 and doctor of philosophy in psychology in 1989.

Among his peers, Oswald is known for his willingness to share knowledge and research. He is director of diagnostics and research at in Richmond, Virginia.

Of his work there, Oswald says, “About 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to develop an interdisciplinary diagnostic assessment clinic for young children for whom there was a question of a diagnosis of autism. The clinic was established on the principles of using the best evidence-based diagnostic tools available, working together collaboratively across disciplines, and actively seeking to integrate parents as essential and equal partners in the process.”

He has served as director of the clinic ever since, guiding it to its mid-Atlantic status as a model training site for interdisciplinary teams that wish to provide similar diagnostic services.

Oswald is also clinical professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s department of psychiatry, mentoring psychologists-in-training.

His wife, Jean ’74, has just retired from her position as director of a preschool where she spent 20 years. Oswald is active at , leading music and worship. His hobbies are reading, bicycling, and singing.

Music unites Oswald’s EMU years with his present life, recalling that he sang in the touring choir under Lowell Byler. “I still sing with a community chorus, One Voice Chorus. Our mission is to foster harmony between people of African-American and European-American descent.”

Oswald will be honored with the Alumnus of the Year award during Homecoming and Family Weekend 2014 at EMU, Oct. 10-12. Celebrations include: class reunions for years ending in “4″ and “9″; community picnic on Saturday, Oct. 11, for all members of the EMU community; sporting events; !

Distinguished Service award: 

Young Alumnus of the Year award: 

And when, a decade later, that cornfield on the east side of campus sprouted a science building, capped with a prominent white dome to accommodate a then-state-of-the-art planetarium, those chemicals were carted down to the new laboratory supply closets, in the characteristic spirit of Mennonite thrift.

And when, many years later, Spicher returned to EMU to work as the chemical hygiene officer, he began a process of general inventory and cleanup of the no-longer-new laboratory supply closets, cluttered over the years by Mennonite thrift and other forces of entropy. And it was then with a sense of nostalgia that Spicher discovered some of those very bottles procured 50 years earlier when Spicher was an undergrad, and the Suter Science Center (where the bottles had sat just-in-case, like twist-ties in the kitchen drawer) was still a cornfield.

But it was alarm, not nostalgia, that arose when Spicher came across an old bottle of picric acid – a chemical useful for staining tissue when diluted with sufficient water concentration. When insufficiently diluted, however, picric acid forms explosive crystals. (A close chemical relative to TNT, picric acid played a major role in artillery science through World War I.) Spicher backed away, well aware that uncorking a crystallized bottle of old picric acid could cost him his fingers, or more. Mennonite thrift in the Suter Science Center had taken a potentially treacherous turn.

A Northern Virginia bomb squad was called in. The fire department sent personnel for some explosives training. A hole was dug behind the science center, a fuse was lit, and the picric acid bomb, unwittingly improvised in the chemical closet, was disarmed. In the end, says Spicher, the bang was small, but it pays to be careful with the stuff.

UNDERCOVER POET
Daniel B. Suter ’40, for whom the science center was named, joined the science faculty at what was then Eastern Mennonite College (EMC) in 1948. By the time the new building opened 20 years later, his students in the program enjoyed medical school acceptance rates far above the national average. So valuable was Suter’s recommendation that, according to faculty legend, a medical school candidate who had never even attended EMU tried to finagle a letter from Suter.

Suter’s office was in the science center basement, adjacent to the secretary’s office and the lunchroom, where the faculty regularly ate together while skimming the newspapers, telling jokes, chattering and generally enjoying one another’s company. For years, on their birthdays, personalized poems would appear on the lunch table, written by a mysterious poet who published under Salvelinus fontinalis (“Brook trout” in the jargon of scientists).

From a poem on the 64th birthday of Wilmer Lehman ’57, who joined the mathematics faculty in 1959:

Forty years teaching
Is that what he said
How many functions
Are left in his head?

A teacher of Math
And The Liberal Arts
With much dedication
Gave his students some smarts.

Eventually, it came out that Salvelinus fontinalis was the pen name of Bob Yoder ’57, an enthusiastic fisher of S. fontinalis. Yoder, who taught in the biology department for more than 30 years, was the resident jokester of the science center lunch bunch; upon his death in 2005, a volume of his collected poems was distributed to his colleagues.

WOMEN NEED RESTROOMS TOO!
The Suter Science Center reflected its day and age when it opened in 1968. Science was mostly a man’s world then. There were no women on the permanent science faculty, and the college didn’t bother to put in a women’s restroom on the downstairs level; the secretary (always a woman, in those days) and female students had to go upstairs. Before long, agitation against the basic unfairness of this situation began and EMU kept pace with the changing world around it by establishing restroom equality throughout the building.

Because energy was cheap back when the building was built, insulation wasn’t much of a priority. When Lehman began to notice light streaming in large gaps that had opened up between the window frames and the block walls in his math classroom, physical plant staff came over to work at some retroactive solution. Still, the classrooms were a nice improvement over the “E Building,” a former egg processing plant on the south side of Mount Clinton Pike that housed the math department before the science center was built.

Over his four decades of teaching, Lehman taught just about every class that was offered by EMU. One of the memories that stands out was the time a student answered a test question with an unexplained Bible reference. Lehman was tickled when he looked up Psalm 139:6 – Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

Another long-time mathematics professor, Millard Showalter ’62 loved to encourage creative approaches to problem solving, and thus, routinely offered his Math in the Liberal Arts students an alternative and deceptively simple-sounding way to earn an A in the class: fold an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper in half eight times. The challenge was a fun illustration of exponents; making that eighth crease was like trying to fold 256 sheets of paper at once.

RESOURCEFUL GALEN LEHMAN
For years, Showalter’s students tried and failed, until Galen Lehman ’73 marched triumphantly into class one morning, with a look in his eyes that told Showalter his game was up. It had been easy, really. Lehman was supporting his college habit with a job at the Kreider Machine Shop over the hill from campus, where he had access to a 200-ton hydraulic machine press entirely capable of folding 256 sheets of paper.

Lehman also earned an A honestly in the class and went on to become Dr. Galen Lehman, chair of the EMU department and the longest-serving member of today’s faculty. When Lehman joined the faculty, the department was inconveniently housed on the fringes of campus in the same E building that the mathematics folks had previously escaped. Looking for a more respectable location, Lehman settled on an unfinished, dirt-floored crawl space beneath the science center’s planetarium that had been presciently excavated to someday accommodate this very sort of future growth.

Around 1980, Lehman spearheaded the renovation of the space into what still serves as the psychology department. He personally poured the concrete floor, built a large table still in use in the seminar room, and, while breaking through a block wall to run some plumbing, discovered an empty whisky bottle in the wall cavity, likely hidden by a worker during the building’s original construction.

EARRING STUNTS & MORE WITH DEAD ANIMALS

But let’s return to Showalter’s paper-folding assignment. Outmaneuvered by Lehman and his machine press, Showalter learned a lesson that science center faculty have been learning over and over since the building opened: never underestimate the dedication and creativity undergraduates will apply to various capers, tricks and other antics. The famous “Head Room” – SC 104, its walls lined with the mounted heads of various mammals – has been the scene of repeated pranks, often involving the dandying-up of these animal heads with different eyewear, headwear, jewelry and other fashion accessories.

Some of the faculty found this amusing. D. Ralph Hostetter, a professor of biology from the very earliest days of the Eastern Mennonite School until his retirement in 1966, did not. After retiring from teaching, Hostetter curated the natural history museum, now housing more than 6,000 artifacts and specimens (and now bearing his name). With hardly any acquisitions budget to speak of, he paid for most of the stuffed heads out of his own pocket. A highly meticulous man, he simply didn’t find it funny to discover the dik-dik (a tiny African antelope) wearing glasses and earrings.

For years, the sheer size and weight of the 300-lb. American bison specimen on display at the Hostetter Museum of Natural History seemed sufficient to keep it in place in the science center, though this too was an underestimation of the undergraduate determination to prank. In 2007, a posse from Oakwood made off with the stuffed bison and attempted to hoist it up to the three-story residence hall’s roof. When things went awry mid-hoist, however, both the bison and a 19-year-old freshman fell from the roof. The student was airlifted to the University of Virginia medical center with a concussion and fractured hip.

The freshman healed and the bison was none the worse for the experience. Now he stands in his old position at the entrance to the science center on a thick concrete platform, anchored with tamper-resistant bolts.

MASKED PRANKSTERS
On another occasion, while lecturing in the Head Room, physics and mathematics professor John Horst ’60 raised one of the sliding blackboards to discover the one behind it had been covered by a high-resolution enlargement of a Playboy centerfold. After the class regained its composure, Horst made a mental note to check for sliding blackboard surprises thenceforth.

That was not the most memorable sliding blackboard surprise of his career, however. For years, Horst and several colleagues team-taught a general humanities class covering art, music and literature in history. The large classes were held in SC 106, the biggest classroom on campus; it also saw frequent use as a recital hall, theater and general performance space before other buildings specifically designed for those purposes were built.

Hidden all the way behind several layers of sliding blackboards in SC 106 was a chemical hood, a relatively large space where professors could safely demonstrate various experiments and reactions. For some time, Todd Weaver ’87 had been aware that the chemical hood could also be accessed from behind, through a storage room, and early in the second semester of his senior-year humanities class, he and a classmate “hatched a brilliant plan,” as he remembers it.

Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and monster masks, and armed with loaded super-soakers, Weaver and his accomplice climbed into the chemical hood from the storage room and waited for class to begin, hidden behind the blackboard. Horst was lecturing in front of the class when the two sprang into action. One by one, the sections of blackboard begin sliding up, eventually revealing the water gun bandits crammed in the chemical hood.

“We caused total chaos,” says Weaver, now a dentist active in EMU’s alumni association. They sprayed at least two of the professors in the room, and unloaded their super-soakers on their classmates as they fled up the auditorium’s two aisles. “The goal was to empty the water by the time we reached the back of SC 106 and sprint out the doors and run for the dorm,” says Weaver, who lived in Oakwood and therefore stands proudly in a long and distinguished tradition of campus mischief.

In what turned out to be a serious lapse of judgment, however, Weaver had let a few other friends in on the plan. And when Weaver and his accomplice reached the back of the room, their prank complete except for the get-away, they found the doors barred with two-by-fours.

“I will never forget Doug Geib ’87 with a big smile on his face unwilling to unbar the door. I was screaming [at him] to give in and let us out, but he only laughed,” Weaver remembers.

Language and literature professor Carroll D. Yoder ’62, one of Horst’s co-teachers in the room that morning, marched slowly up the steps and unmasked the pranksters, who could do nothing but stand with heads hanging, trapped with empty squirt guns at the back the room in their underwear. Ashamed, they walked back to Oakwood, changed clothes, and returned to catch the end of the humanities class. (Horst got one last hurrah. When Weaver approached Horst and asked humbly for one extra point to make a much-coveted “A” for the term, which was needed to maximize his chance of dental school admission, Horst made him squirm in his office for some long moments and then declared he would receive one more point in recognition of his “energetic class participation.”)

EXPERIMENTING, LIVING, BANKING IN THE CENTER
One damp Saturday morning an undergraduate chemistry major named Terry Jantzi ’87 was running an experiment that sent a bunch of sulfur dioxide through the lab hood. Normally it would have drifted off into the blue Virginia sky. But the cool, humid weather caused the sulfur dioxide to condense into a heavy fog that spread across the intramural soccer field – think “acid rain” recalls professor emeritus Glenn M. Kauffman, class of ’60, Janzti’s chemistry prof at the time. Folks at an auction near the dormitories thought the science center was on fire.

That same Terry Jantzi is now Dr. Jantzi, professor of practice associated with EMU’s peacebuilding and development program.

There was the time in 1976 that Millard Showalter’s Modern Geometry students got so jazzed about the non-Euclidian material he was teaching that they showed up to the final day of class wearing T-shirts that read “Millard’s Magnificent Mathematicians.” They arranged for a photo, and after class, went up to chapel and set together at the front, as proud as a bunch of athletes after winning a tournament.

Kauffman recalls his department colleague Gary L. Stucky putting money into a satellite dish on the science center roof in the early 1990s. This enabled him to watch concurrently three different TV channels late into the night in a prep room near SC-106, where he liked to pass his time outside of regular work hours. In the early 1990s, too, a dietetics program headed by Janet Harder ’73 moved into the science center and she also spent long hours at the workplace. By the late 1990s, Stucky and Harder were married, re-settling in his home state of Kansas.

The Park View Federal Credit Union began in 1969, in the Suter Science Center offices of professors Robert Lehman ’50 (physical sciences) and Joe Mast ‘64 (math and computer science), offering financial services to members in the days before easy access to credit. Many of their science center colleagues were the very earliest members. John Horst still has a single-digit account number at the credit union, and says that the credit union’s assets were said to be approaching $1 million by 1980, when it moved off of campus. (Kauffman remains the proud holder of an account number in the low double digits.)

Kenton Brubaker’s two-digit account number – between Kauffman’s and Horst’s – at the credit union gives him away as another early denizen of the science center. A 1954 grad of EMU, Brubaker returned as a horticulture and botany professor well before the science center was built. Up in the old science department, in the Ad Building basement, Brubaker secured grant funding to buy a gas flow analyzer capable of detecting Carbon-14 beta particles. With Brubaker’s help, another colleague, Merle Jacobs, used the tool to examine the low reproductive fitness of homozygous ebony Drosophila fruit flies. The resulting paper – “Beta-Alanine Utilization of Ebony and Non-ebony Drosophila melanogaster” [Science 139 (1963): 1282-1283] – was likely the first science research published in a major journal by EMU faculty.

Jacobs soon left for a job at Goshen College, and Brubaker was in the first wave of professors to work and teach in the new science center. The greenhouse had an automatic ventilation system – a big deal at the time. The planetarium was another big-ticket item. The whole building was exciting and new and fantastic. No sooner had the science department moved in then did Kauffman begin writing grants for other exciting gadgetry. A gas chromatograph and a UV-visible spectrophotometer were among the early acquisitions, allowing for undergraduate chemistry research that has continued ever since. (Students now enjoy research opportunities in a variety of science fields, usually collaborating with faculty.)

AHHH, THE MEMORIES, THE LEGACIES!

By the time Todd Weaver, of SC 106 chemical hood ambush fame, arrived on campus to pursue pre-medical studies, Daniel Suter was approaching the very end of his years on the EMU faculty. On his first visit to Suter’s office for an advising appointment, Weaver learned that Suter had also been Weaver’s father’s pre-med adviser years earlier, and they had corresponded for years while Weaver’s father was in medical school.

Between his graduation and the start of dental school, Weaver got married to Anne Kaufman ’88. Suter – then recently retired – and his wife, Grace were in attendance, and presented the Weavers with an end table.

Suter passed in away in 2006. The next year, Weaver was elected president of the Mennonite Medical Association; joining him in the leadership of the organization was Janice Showalter, the daughter of Daniel and Grace Suter.

“Life feels like it circles sometimes, especially in a community like EMU,” says Weaver.

The end table that the Suters gave him has moved with the Weavers from house to house since dental school. It remains a treasured possession that has been relocated every time in the family car rather than the moving truck, and it largely owes its prominence to the many people and memories that have and continue to inhabit the Suter Science Center.

— Andrew Jenner ’04

But it probably doesn’t hurt that Kniss, 54, who’s serving as the acting president during President Loren Swartzendruber’s three-month sabbatical, still sees the man occasionally. After all, professor Galen R. Lehman has continued his career there for more than three decades.

Lehman, 63, is the longest-serving professor at EMU, beginning his career with the university in 1973 in the psychology department. When he first started teaching, he often found his students were very close to his own
age.

Now he’s finding that many of them are children of his former pupils.

“If I ever find someone who says I taught their grandparent, I’ll know it’s time to quit,” he says with a heartfelt laugh.

While the university must constantly recruit new professors who are on the cutting-edge of education practices and theories, Kniss says having long-term professors such as Lehman around provides other employees with a sense of context and stability.

“A problem or an issue comes up and people who haven’t been around think it’s new,” said Kniss. “[But] people who have been around say, ‘Oh yeah, we dealt with this back in 1970.’ Or they say, ‘Here are the roots of the issue.’ ”

Lehman, who is now the psychology department chairman, has served up his share of new ideas while at the university. He was among the first to integrate computers into the classroom, using an Apple II computer to administer tests to students in 1974.

He also led an initiative to turn a dirt-floor basement in the Suter Science Center into instructional space, creating an area where upper-class psychology students could spend time with underclassmen.

Reconciling Science, Religion
Lehman received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from EMU in 1973. He earned his master’s degree in general psychology from then-Hollins College, and he earned his doctorate from Virginia Tech in applied
experimental psychology.

His expertise is in working with groups to solve practical problems or prevent unsafe behaviors, particularly in the workplace. While many employers might say it is good enough to just have people who want to be safe at work, Lehman argues that, “If you can work on the behavior … that’s what will actually increase the safety measures in a manufacturing plant, rather than simply working with the attitudes.”

Lehman is also very active with the Virginia Mennonite Mission Board. He makes several trips yearly to Jamaica to assist with the logistics of missions there. He splits his time between EMU and working as the Caribbean regional director for the board.

Some might see a contradiction in his interest in science and his dedication to his faith, but not Lehman. For him, the two work together.

“I can use my science and knowledge of human behavior … to motivate  people,” said Lehman, who was raised in the Mennonite church. “One of the things I find very fulfilling about my work is that I feel each area -[science and religion] – complements the other.”

The Maryland native became interested in psychology after living in Jamaica for a few years in the late 1960s where he did missions work as part of Alternative Service during the Vietnam War. The experience exposed him to the behavioral problems some disabled children in the Caribbean nation faced, such as learning difficulties or acting out and other disciplinary issues.

“I asked myself the question ‘How could I prepare my life in a way that could address those problems?’ ” he said.

Now he serves on the board for a school for deaf children in Jamaica, using his background in psychology to help teachers learn how to better interact with students with disabilities.

A Mentor’s Suggestion
Lehman says he hadn’t considered teaching psychology until a professor asked him during his senior year if he had thought about teaching the subject.

“It was really that affirmation from a mentor of mine that sort of planted in me the dream of teaching,” he said.

And so it was that Lehman’s dream blossomed into a lifelong career, allowing him to leave his mark on a host of students.

Kniss said he remembers Lehman’s passion for his chosen field, which Kniss described as contagious – inspiring, even.

“The interest in the material, it was infectious,” said Kniss. “Even though psychology wasn’t my field, the fact that he was so interested in it – you couldn’t help but get interested in it. It’s more that kind of flavor or spirit of the classroom that I remember.”

Farm Life
Lehman’s interests extend beyond the science of the mind. He enjoys  architecture (he designed and built his own home, as well as several others) and the visual arts, such as photography and videography.

He lives on a farm, where he raises cattle and bales hay.

“My life has all that variety that helps make it fulfilling to me,” he says.

And it is that diversity that makes Lehman a good professor, Kniss says.

“He has a lot of different interests and a lot of energy and curiosity. And I think that’s always a good thing to have in a university – people who ask questions outside of their disciplinary box,” he said.

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Reprinted by permission from the June 18, 2011 edition of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record.

Contact Joshua Brown at 574-6218 or jbrown@dnronline.com