Faculty farewells
Venerable scholars from math, music, education, psychology, and Spanish are retiring this spring.
Susan Lehr came to Skidmore in 1985, after earning a PhD from Ohio State. Her work in education studies included advo- cacy for a literature-based approach to learning, because, she says, “Children need to have some of their basic assump- tions challenged—which good children’s literature does.” Young readers are inter- ested in and able to handle complex is- sues such as race and gender discrimina- tion, she says. Lehr’s Skidmore courses included “Emergent Learning” and “Multicultural Children’s Literature,” and students have called her “very effective” and “inspir- ing”; she also worked with local teachers on students’ field assignments. Her re- search resulted in four books and many journal articles. In 2000 she gave the Moseley Faculty Research Lecture on “Barbarous Women and Invisible Chil- dren,” covering her British Library re- search into 18th-century female writers. In 2001 she helped lead a team from Skidmore and a local public school to visit and study schools in South Africa. She is the mother of Kristin Lehr Anderson ’95 and Matthew Lehr ’99.
Psychologist Mary Ann Foley, with a PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, joined Skidmore in 1984, teaching courses such as “Advanced Cognition,” “Memory and Imagination,” and “Mind: Metaphors
and Theory.” The Class of 1948 Professor for Excellence in Teaching from 2004 to 2008, she earned several National Sci- ence Foundation grants (some of them with husband Hugh, a fellow Skidmore psychology professor) to support student research in her lab. She frequently in- cluded her thesis advisees and other re- search students as co-authors on pub- lished papers, and she maintains strong relationships with many alumni. Foley’s research has explored memory accuracy—how well children can recall which of them discovered what during group learning, how mental imagery can help adults to recall a list of objects, and more. She reported her findings in scores of articles in major cognitive and experi- mental psychology journals and in her 2001 Moseley Lecture, “Sharing a Fasci- nating Journey: The Study of Children’s Memory Confusions.”
Among Alice Dean’s specialties are graph theory, useful for plotting efficient driving routes, search-engine algorithms, and more. She gave the 2011 Moseley Lecture on “Layers, Lines, and Boxes: Some Mathematical Puzzles and Pearls.” Dean earned a PhD from UMass- Amherst and taught at Smith and Bates before joining Skidmore in 1986. Her courses included “Design and Analysis of Algorithms” and “Robot Design,” and she helped launch Skidmore’s computer- science major. She and husband Gove Effinger shared a faculty appointment; in 1991 they co-wrote Common Sense BASIC.
A co-author with Skidmore students on many articles in math journals, Dean also collaborated often with faculty at other colleges and earned NSF grants to foster the recruitment and professional development of women in academe.
Gove Effinger was a schoolteacher be- fore earning a PhD at UMass-Amherst, teaching at Bates, and then sharing a Skidmore appointment with wife Alice Dean. His courses included “Calculus with Algebra” and “The Mathematics and Politics of Secure Digital Communi- cation.” He also oversaw and developed the introductory math course “Quantita- tive Reasoning.”
Effinger specialized in algebra and number theory. In 1989 he and a UMass colleague won an award in the IBM 3090 Supercomputing Competition. In 1991 he co-authored Additive Number Theory of Polynomials Over a Finite Field as well as a BASIC textbook with Dean. A longtime runner, he organized 5k runs for many Skidmore events.
Soprano Anne Turner earned a mas- ter’s in opera performance from Califor- nia State University-Northridge and also studied with leading voice teachers and institutes. She taught at SUNY-Albany and the College of St. Rose before join- ing Skidmore in 1988. She taught a range of courses and coached Skidmore’s opera workshop and vocal ensemble. She has said that almost anyone with “patience and commitment” can be taught to sing;
SUSAN LEHR
MARY ANN FOLEY 8 SCOPE SPRING 2014
ALICE DEAN
JOEL LEVIN
ERIC JENKS ’08
PHIL SCALIA
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