The initiatives established since FDU unveiled its global mission in 2000 have been very impressive, says Gingerich. He particularly applauds the Global Virtual Faculty™ program, which connects scholars and practitioners around the world to FDU students via the Internet.
The key, he adds, to implementing more global lessons — particularly incorporating international perspectives into the undergraduate curriculum — is “faculty who believe in the mission and who are inspired to invent and enact new ways of bringing it into fruition.”
Gingerich has an excellent track record of collaborating with faculty to expand and develop academic programs. At St. John’s, he led the development of important initiatives including the formation of new doctoral programs in psychology and audiology and a successful grants program, and supported the Committee on Latin American and Caribbean Studies, created by his wife, Alina Camacho-Gingerich.
The veteran administrator describes his leadership style as faculty-oriented, consultative and inclusive. “Regenerating programs and departments, and building teams committed to common goals is something I do well and something I am very proud of, but it takes time.”
Literary Awakenings
Willard Gingerich actually never set out to spend his time as an administrative leader. The son of a minister, he was raised on a farm in upstate New York on the shores of Lake Ontario and developed a strong interest in language and literature. As he says, “In America, there’s a phenomenon of preachers’ sons becoming writers or literary scholars.”
Wanting to attend a large university, he selected the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and majored in English. “It was the right place for me. The excitement of the program, the caliber of the faculty and the students and the many writers and poets who came to campus all provided an incredible intellectual experience. Those few years in Buffalo gave me a calling for an entire career, and remain for me a model of what an engaging undergraduate education can be.”
Gingerich developed a strong passion for poetry and the work of contemporary American writers. He was particularly interested in figures like Charles Olson and the group known as the Black Mountain Poets, as well as the Objectivist poets.
Also during his days at SUNY-Buffalo he met Alina Camacho, a Cuban exile who headed the Latin American students organization. Gingerich would eventually marry Alina, who, he says, “provoked and stimulated my interest in Latin American studies.”
Gingerich then began doctoral studies in literature at the University of Connecticut. There, he met writers like Norman Mailer and William Styron. He became more curious about the indigenous cultures of the Americas, and wanted to go to the bottom, as Thoreau implied. “To me, the source seemed to be Mexico. The written record of American indigenous literature begins with the colonial documents of Mexico.”
In 1972, he received a dissertation fellowship to study languages at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and also studied at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, both in Mexico City. He found that there were thousands of documents recording the cultural and oral traditions of the Aztec empire, which flourished during the 14th and 15th centuries.
In the summer of 1976, he started teaching full-time at the first tribal college established in the United States, Navajo Community College in Arizona. Though he only taught there for one summer, Gingerich says he came to appreciate the “powerful traditions and the great sense of pride of the Navajo people.” He also gained a sense of the “resilience and resourcefulness of the indigenous peoples in the multicultural Southwest, who have persevered despite the extraordinary difficulties that have threatened their culture and ways of life.”
He would gain an even greater sense of the region as he next began teaching literature at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). “It was a great opportunity to teach at one of the largest state systems in the country and in a region of great cultural integration. Living on the border you see the importance of the Mexican presence and how pre-Anglo history is still alive and, in fact, experiencing a resurgence.”
During his stint at UTEP, Gingerich was selected as a Fulbright scholar and journeyed in 1980 to Panama, where he taught for a year at the Universidad Nacional de Panamá.
The first Fulbright scholar in Panama following the anti-U.S. riots of 1964 and the first since the Panama Canal Treaty of 1978, Gingerich expected to find some antagonism, but he says the Panamanians “couldn’t have been more congenial. We made some great friends at the University and became connected to a number of writers.”
Returning to UTEP, Gingerich says his teaching, which included literary criticism and the major works in traditional American literature, went hand-in-hand with his scholarship on indigenous cultures. “As unrelated as one might think studies in colonial Mexico might be, it’s my contention that tradition has had a direct impact on modern American culture, particularly the culture of the American West.”
Gingerich has published numerous articles on indigenous literature. He is a translator of colonial Nahuatl (Aztec) poetry, and his book, The Nahuatl Reader: A Historical Anthology of Nahuatl Discourse in English Translation, is under development.
“My small part has been to promote an awareness of the depth, richness and complexity of Mexican civilization to an English-speaking, North-American audience.”
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For a print copy of FDU Magazine, featuring this and other stories, contact Rebecca Maxon, editor,
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