Departments
In Brief
International Students Make Local Connection; Faculty & Staff Explore New Options; Earth Day Poetry Contest; Student Reps at SAAC Conference
Making Their Mark
Find out about Colby-Sawyer people engaged in writing, presentations and exhibitions.
Past as Prologue
Explore the digitized photo archives of Colby-Sawyer College.
The Colby-Sawyer Courier
View the PDF of the student newspaper's most recent issue.
Chargers Update
Get the latest on Colby-Sawyer athletes and teams in this weekly newsletter.
Q&Alumni
Catch up with Colby-Sawyer alumni and find out what they've been up to since graduation.
Weather Station
You could look out the window to see what the weather is … or you could click here and really know.
Virtual Herbarium
Here you will find pictures and descriptions of the flora that grows around the New London area.
My Colby-Sawyer Experience
"My students are always kind of surprised to learn about what they have missed, what they haven't been paying attention to all their lives."
- Laura Alexander, Assistant Professor, Natural Sciences
[ read more ]
Places to Go
Things to do in the New London area and beyond.
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Professor Mike McMahon Enjoys Stories That Come With Time
By Alicia Harris '07
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Mike McMahon has enjoyed being part of the transitions that |
Mike McMahon has been a faculty member in the Humanities Department for the past 37 years. Currents talked with Professor McMahon about his teaching, transformations at the college, and personal interests.
What is your favorite subject matter to teach?
Creative writing because it's always different, and you never know what's going to happen in class, which also makes it good. You set up a literature class and you allow for participation, but if you just read a poem and talk about it, there are only so many things that can happen. Creative writing classes are different, and I look forward to them with more anticipation because I don't know what's going to happen.
What was it like when you first came to CSC?
It was a very unusual college. It was a two-year residential college, which was unusual because most two-year colleges are community. People thought of it as a two-year Ivy League college. The faculty here thought it was a prestigious school. They believed the mission of the college was to provide an excellent two-year general education that would allow students to transfer into colleges and universities they would not have been able to enter when they left high school. There were also a few nationally famous programs in applied health, like medical technology and medical records administration, and the school was entirely for young women.
How have the student/professor relationships changed?
Well, in some ways they have, some ways they haven't. The school today emphasizes that each individual student is responsible for her or his education and believes in that. I think back in the late sixties, the college was, much more loco parentis. It exercised a parental responsibility towards its students. (Don't do this, don't do that, but we love you) That hasn't changed. This school, more than any other I know, spends more on having conferencing time, more counseling time, more one on one time. Maybe that's what's left of the original sense of parental responsibility the school once exercised or had.
What was it like to change from all girls to a coeducational college?
I think it took the school a number of years to get the change down right, so it took a number of years to develop campus institutions, such as athletic teams, and changing certain curricular materials that had been gender specific.
I didn't personally feel much of a change because I had been moonlighting at other colleges, teaching classes at coeducational schools at the time. So it wasn't much of a major transition in terms of working in the classroom, but I did have to make changes in the curricular material because they had been gender specific. The purpose of the college when it was an all women's college was more social and political, meaning we existed to foster women's rights as a whole. A lot of those themes and materials had to be changed.
How has teaching creative writing classes and working around students who love to write affected your own writing?
It sure keeps me thinking about writing all the time. It allows me to see emerging different sensibilities very different from my own, as people 19 and 20 think about fiction and metaphor, so it always seems to introduce me to new ways of seeing, new ways of creative thinking, if not always to new subject matter.
