Summer 2002
From binomials to Beowulf: a legacy of lifelong learning
Photo by Diana Watters
William Faragher may be one of the few people on the face of the planet who has read James Joyce's Ulysses just for sheer pleasure. Even among diehard fiction fans, Joyce is considered difficult to digest--and the 732-page Ulysses amounts to something of a literary decathlon. But Faragher, a retired operations researcher and member of the Class of 1956, recently took up the tome--and, more important, finished it.
"It was a lot of fun," he says, "even though I didn't understand all of it."
Nobody save Joyce ever has, of course, but Faragher's willingness to try is a testament to his lifelong intellectual curiosity.
Literature has always fascinated the 68-year-old Washington, D.C. resident--he even read Beowulf recently just for fun--but his real skills have lain in scientific fields. He majored in mathematics at the University, and later obtained a masters in math from UCLA. A year ago he retired from a job at Synergy, a D.C.-based consulting firm that develops software and logistics tools for the Department of Defense.
Throughout his career, a knowledge of math, statistics, and probability have provided Faragher with the analytical tools to solve difficult problems.
"There's something about the finality of math that I really enjoy," he says. "If you prove it, you've proved it."
But the ineffable qualities of good writing have also intrigued Faragher since his days as a student in the College of Liberal Arts. A native of tiny Ada, Minn., he enrolled in a humanities class during his junior year, shortly after transferring to Minnesota from the University of North Dakota. The course introduced him to Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a novel that transformed his view of the world.
"The
psychology of [Dostoevsky's] characters is wonderful," Faragher
says. "They're so full of life." Upon graduating, he bought
a boxed set of the Russian author's complete works.
In 2000, Faragher took steps to ensure that U students who followed in his footsteps might have the chance to make the same sorts of discoveries about literature, politics, art, and the humanities. He established the William E. Faragher Scholarship for undergraduate CLA students majoring in math, statistics, or other science-related fields. Last fall, two students each received a yearlong $2,500 scholarship generated by the endowment.
First-year honors student Laura Vander Molen, from Edina, Minn., was one of the beneficiaries. She shares Faragher's affection for math: "There are so many places where things can go wrong," she says. "You have to be on your toes. You go through this messy equation, then everything starts canceling and then the answer boils down to something like 2. It's great."
Vander Molen is also pursing a minor in art, however, and says one of the best learning opportunities she has had at the U was an honors colloquium that examined the role of sculpture, painting, and performance in promoting citizenship and public ethics. In other ways, too, she's begun to knit together her understanding of art and math: "I think there's a real spatial aspect to art that's very mathematical. There's geometry involved in understanding angles," she says. "In math, you don't have to draw the angles to understand them, whereas with art, you have to be able to execute it properly. I like being able to do both."
Scholarship recipient Bryan Sowieja is equally sanguine about applying his knowledge of science and the arts to a variety of problems. The chemistry major from Inver Grove Heights, Minn., is spending his summer working as a technical aide at 3M, but he has also donated time to such non-scientific volunteer causes as city beautification and serving meals to the homeless at the Dorothy Day Center in St. Paul. He chose to enroll in CLA because "you get a more diverse education," he says. The scholarship has boosted his growth as a student, he adds: "I don't have to work as much to earn money for tuition, so I can concentrate on my studies."
Faragher says those are among the very reasons why he established the scholarship--and why he has also included a bequest to the U in his estate planning. "I got so much out of the U myself--not only training for my career and profession but also an education that set me up for a life of learning."