For North Greenville University students and residents in the local com- munity, the world just got a little bigger. Tey’ll now have expanded ac- cess to distinguished history scholars from near and far, thanks to Robert Boggs. Boggs, an instructor of history at North Greenville since 1999, has created an endowment specifically for NGU’s History Department to bring published historians to speak on campus. His generous gift en- sures the newly named Boggs-Hickson Lecture in History will continue at NGU for future generations, too.


School Six Days a Week If you were any regular kid growing up in Slater-Marietta, SC, then you went to school five days a week. But if you were Robert Boggs or one of his closest friends, then you had classes for six days instead.


Boggs liked setting up his own classroom for his friends to attend, whether they liked it or not.


“My poor friends sat there — as if they weren’t in enough misery as it was, going to the real thing. But having to go through it again on a Sat- urday with me? I don’t know how I had any friends at all!” Boggs jokes.


Boggs grew up in Slater-Marietta — just nine miles from NGU’s Tiger- ville campus in northern Greenville County — where his parents worked in the mill. Still, he never felt like the rural setting limited his opportuni- ties to learn.


“My friend Lonnie Wilkey’s (’78) mother would take us to Greenville every two weeks and leave us at the library for a few hours,” he says. “I didn’t get it for a long time but, you know, it was the whole idea that she was determined that — my mother was the same way — that we loved our home and we were proud of it, but we needed some knowledge of the world to succeed.”


From early on, Boggs’ mother also filled their home with books and en- couraged him to read the classics. Tough he didn’t enjoy reading at first, even back then he liked teaching his friends what he knew.


The “Hillbilly” Who Won the Show Te learning must have stuck. By ninth grade, Boggs had earned a spot at the South Carolina State Science Fair for his project on radioactive isotopes.


While in Columbia for the fair, students from multiple schools went out for breakfast together. Boggs wasn’t sure how to order his eggs, and one of the other kids made fun of him for it. Te boy went on to announce to the whole group that the second day of the fair wouldn’t matter: that’s when all the “hillbillies” would be presenting — hillbillies like Boggs.


“I despised the intention of that comment. I was being dismissed for 16 | NGU.EDU


the circumstances of my birth, which I think is fundamentally unfair to anybody,” Boggs says. “I was utterly delighted, though, that the ‘hillbilly’ won the entire shooting match. It made it sweeter to know that some wrong perception was being righted.”


Yes, Boggs took home the gold medal the next day.


Banker, Biker, Pastor, Prof Not that he was always a perfect student. Boggs says he made “every mistake you can make” during his first few years in college. So his father, always a quiet man, came one day to pick him up and take him back home; he would have to stay and be a day student at Furman University.


After that, Boggs become more serious about his schoolwork, especially as his father began to have health concerns. Tough he studied religion in school, he went into banking after graduation, hoping he could learn to manage money and help take care of his parents.


What Boggs enjoyed most about the banking job was befriending and advising his clients in the trust department — many who had recently lost loved ones and needed help figuring out what to do with the money they’d left behind.


“I developed kind of a ministerial relationship with a lot of my clients,” he remembers. “I realized I felt more fulfilled doing that than managing the money.”


Maybe that realization was what sparked his “spiritual” journey to Ireland a few years later: he quit his job, sold his things, and bicycled the country, taking time to reflect before his next step in life.


Once he came back to the U.S., Boggs had greater clarity: he start- ed serving the poor, heard a call to ministry, and began his Master of Divinity at Duke University. He went on to become a clergyman in Te United Methodist Church. Over the years, he pastored three different churches, two of which his mother’s family had founded.


Eventually, Boggs found his way back into academic teaching and joined the NGU family.


“My mother was thrilled when I got this job,” he says. “I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘’Cause they’re our people. And we owe something back to the place we come from.’”


The Time He Got Tackled


Like many faculty members at NGU, Boggs had previously taught in a secular school where he didn’t always feel welcome. He faced opposition when he mentioned the “moral structure” that had influenced the major events of history. One student, in particular, told Boggs he hated him.


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