Faculty Profiles
Renaissance Man Offers SBS Advising and a Chance for GED Students
“He was easily the best teacher of my college career,” wrote a former student of Richard Wikander, lecturer in anthropology and associate dean of undergraduate advising in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UMass Amherst. “He is smart and funny and interesting. The best part about him is that he gets really excited about the material, and you can’t help but get excited too.” It seems as though Wikander was a logical choice for academic advisor too. Wrote another student, “Rich will talk with you and work it out. He’s so helpful, you just give him the time of day, and he will do the same for you.”
But behind the inspirational teacher and advisor lies the story of a journey that adds depth and breadth to a man whose life as a leader in academia once was a far-fetched illusion. “My current position is qualitatively different from anything else I’ve ever done,” Wikander acknowledges. “I actually end every day with the feeling that I’ve made a significant difference in not just one life, but in many. How’s that for maudlin?”
Wikander hails from the East New York section of Brooklyn. “As a teenager,” he relates, “I ran the streets. Then the DPW took that over, and I had lots more free time. By then I had fallen so far behind in high school that if I had stopped to finish, I might still be there. It was a war zone anyway. I didn’t want any part of it. So I left the building, so to speak, took the equivalency test, and eventually ended up at Queens College of CUNY.” Wikander is not too forthcoming about the exact course of events that led to Queens College. But he “spent some time in banking in Manhattan, eight and a half years in what is euphemistically referred to as ‘food service,’ ten years in retailing clerking/management, and a short but hilariously disastrous stint in construction.”
At Queens Wikander majored successively in creative writing, English literature, studio art, music performance, and finally philosophy. “In my last year (it took about five to get the degree),” he recalls, “I spent a lot of time hanging around anthropologists because their parties were way cooler.” Most of the major events of Wikander’s life, both positive and negative, he says, have involved a woman in some way. “Suffice it to say that all sorts of wondrous, marvelous, magical and often very humorous things happened to me, often involving unicorns, dragons, and fair maidens—and then I ended up here.”
At UMass Amherst Wikander studied a lot of math, some foreign language,
more anthropology, anatomy and evolutionary theory and collected an MA and
PhD in anthropology in 1984 and 1991, respectively. Indeed, he might be
described as a sometime Renaissance man, spending “so much time practicing
classical guitar that my left leg is semi-permanently numb from having my
foot on a stool for hours. I love to run, play chess, do origami and the
martial arts. I used to do a lot of bonsai, but that takes a bit more care
than I can now devote to it.” And then he shares a poem: Here
are the flowers/Touch them for me/Tell me how they feel/I can’t handle
anything/Sensitive/
Or Beautiful/They break.
Of UMass Amherst, Wikander says, “The quality of instruction here and the astonishing dedication I see among faculty and staff just astounds me. Being part of the Five-College Consortium actually makes us one gigantic institution with more class offerings that any other institution I can think of. And, of course, the area is spectacular—that’s one reason why I’m still here—that and the job. I just want to make that clear!”
Wikander has now put his money where his mouth is. Recently, he endowed a scholarship, named for his parents, specifically for students who come to UMass Amherst with a GED. Why? “Lots of folks go through hell just trying to make ends meet, and for some academic achievement just doesn’t come the traditional way,” he says. “Along with that there is a lack of recognition of success. I suppose in a way I’m a case in point.” And then another poem: The sky splits/and crushes me under the weight/of everything I should have been responsible for./But I have an alibi:/I had a day to get through. “The point is,” Wikander continues, “that, pulling yourself out of disaster—which is what not finishing high school and not going on with education really amounts to—deserves and demands some sort of acknowledgement, and I wanted to do that.” His parents, he says, deserve “a wheelbarrow full of recognition, for putting up with me and encouraging me—not to mention resisting the urge to kill me in my sleep sometime during my teens.”
October 18, 2005
