CAMPUS CURRENT
Faculty News
T.J. Mueller, was hired in 1981. Mueller and Purves soldiered alone for most of the decade until the College decided to ap- prove a biology department and major. “I felt the College really needed somebody in molecular biol-
ogy,” Purves says. “We hired Nancy Hamlett for that. And T.J. and I felt very strongly that we needed an evolutionary biologist/ ecologist—and that was Catherine McFadden. And then I also felt a need to have somebody who you could call a cell biologist, and we hired Jim Manser. We rounded out the initial depart- ment when we hired Steve Adolph, a behavioral ecologist.” Purves taught several biology classes himself. “He was very
approachable,” Shaka says. “He had a very keen ability to sense whether or not you actually understood what it was he was teaching. He had a sixth sense about that.” Purves had fi rm beliefs about how students learned and was
very interested in writing a biology textbook that would sup- port his strategy. He had known New England publisher Andy Sinauer since the early 1960s, fi rst serving as a reviewer of de- veloping textbooks. Sinauer encouraged Purves to tackle a book himself—an introductory biology course meant for both biology majors and nonmajors. Working alone, Purves started on the book while at the
University of Connecticut, but took the work with him to his new position at Harvey Mudd College. “I was working at night and on campus all day and writing.
One night I was in my offi ce at Harvey Mudd and a student, Mike Ross ’86, comes through the door—this was about 1 a.m. I heard this, ‘Whoa! What a stud!’ “It was because I type really fast,” he says with a laugh. “That
was how I lived in those times!” He eventually collaborated with a second scientist-academic
to produce the fi rst two editions of the book. His last edition was the eighth, by which time he had three more coauthors. Purves recommended that his students use his book in his in-
troductory class, but he didn’t think it right to get royalties from them. He returned the amount of the royalty to all students who bought an unused copy of the current book. Purves left HMC in 1995. “I think I was 61 or 60 when I retired, and I had just come
out of having cancer, which is long gone,” he says. “I’d loved working with the students there, and I couldn’t get enough of them, but I really needed to move on.” He turned to his passion—how students learn—and helped start a company that created educational software on CD-ROMs.
Bill Purves and Anne Marie Stomp, then a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Connecticut, set up and taught the fi rst HMC biology laboratory.
He also collaborated with Roger Schank, a long-time colleague, on ventures to replace current schooling with truly effective and stimulating courses. The work “concerns what’s wrong with teaching and learn-
ing now, and what it should be,” Purves explains. “Accretion of knowledge is not the point. What people should really be learn- ing is how to reason—and then using that skill.”
–Shari Roan
SPRING 2013 Har vey Mudd College 11
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