Interview with Jacob E. Nyenhuis : An Oral History
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Dr. Jacob Nyenhuis is the Albertus C. Van Raalte Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Classics, Emeritus at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. In this interview, Dr. Nyenhuis speaks about his early life in Michigan and how he discovered his love for the Greek language as a pre-seminary student at Calvin College, which led to a year of graduate study in the Stanford Department of Classics in 1956. After two years teaching at Calvin College, he returned to Stanford in 1959 to pursue a PhD in classics with a National Defense Education Act fellowship. He reflects on key figures in classics at Stanford, including department chair Brooks Otis, and shares memories of his teachers, fellow students, and dissertation work. Nyenhuis also speaks about teaching classics on the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and his move into the administration at Hope College. He reflects on the friendships and influences from his time at Stanford, which played important roles in his career as teacher, scholar, administrator, publisher, and promoter of public education in the classics.
- Summary
- Early life in Pease, Minnesota, including birth and naming story • Encouragement from uncle • Move to Michigan as teenager • Attending Calvin College in Grand Rapids in classics-oriented pre-seminary course • Falling in love with the Greek language • Decision to attend Stanford for a year of graduate study in Greek • Reflection on important high school and college teachers • Being the first in family to go to high school and college • Driving west to study in Stanford Classics Department • Impressions of Bay Area, Palo Alto, Stanford, and the Classics Department at that time • Location of Classics Department on outer quad across from library • Professors and instructors: Richard LaPrentice Trapp, Eva Brann, Hazel Hansen • Differences between Stanford and Calvin College • Professors Lionel Pearson and Philip Harsh • Being unaware of ongoing department politics at the time • Arrival of Professor Brooks Otis in 1958 and the rebuilding of the department and the PhD program • Professors outside of Classics: Virgil Whitaker (English), John Goheen (Philosophy) • Goheen’s joint humanities seminar with Brooks Otis • Returning to Stanford in 1959 as first group of post-WWII classics PhD students at Stanford • Teaching at Calvin College in late 1950s and deciding on a teaching career rather than seminary • Memories of Professor Eva Brann • National Defense Education Act graduate fellowship enabling return to Stanford with young family • Living in the Stanford Village • Collegiality among the classics graduate students • A richer and more stimulating department under Brooks Otis • Professors Ted Doyle, Jan Hendrik Waszink • Interest in history of Latin language • Professor Hermann Frankel’s seminar on Pindar • Working with primary dissertation advisor Charles Beye, Homer specialist, on his dissertation Homer and Euripides: A Study in Characterization • Family responsibilities as encouraging timely completion of dissertation • Roles of Otis, Beye and Whitaker in his dissertation committee • Pearson’s course on Cicero, which Nyenhuis would later teach • Collaborating with chemistry professor Bert Livingston to devise Greek and Latin names for new polymers • Seminar with Otis and Goheen as a model for interdisciplinarity • Applying interdisciplinarity while developing Hope College course on the “Golden Age of Greece” • Accepting job offer at Wayne State in 1962, partially to be near in-laws • Opportunity to build a small classics department into a large and popular one • Strategies for attracting students to classics on an urban commuter campus • Detroit in the 1960s • Developing textbooks on Plautus and Petronius based on initial materials from colleague Thomas Cutt • Working with colleague Norma Goldman to develop a better elementary Latin textbook, Latin Via Ovid, which becomes a top-seller • Story behind Myth and the Creative Process about British artist Michael Ayrton • Building a new liberal arts honors program • Michigan Classical Spring • Leaving Wayne State in 1975 to assume role of dean of humanities at Hope College • Reflections on the continuing relevance of the classics
Description
| Type of resource | sound recording-nonmusical, text, still image |
|---|---|
| Extent | 2 audio file; 1 text file; 1 photograph |
| Place | Stanford (Calif.) |
| Publisher | Stanford Historical Society |
| Date created | April 16, 2019 - 2019-04-24 |
| Language | English |
| Digital origin | born digital |
Creators/Contributors
| Interviewee | Nyenhuis, Jacob E., 1935- | |
|---|---|---|
| Creator | Nyenhuis, Jacob E., 1935- | |
| Interviewer | Pyzyk, Mark | |
| Publisher | Stanford Historical Society |
Subjects
| Subject | Nyenhuis, Jacob E., 1935- |
|---|---|
| Subject | Stanford University. Department of Classics |
| Subject | A.C. Van Raalte Institute |
| Subject | Classicists > United States |
| Genre | Interview |
Bibliographic information
| Biographical Profile | Jacob E. “Jack” Nyenhuis is Professor of Classics and Provost, Emeritus, and director of the Van Raalte Institute at Hope College; he also is editor-in-chief of the Van Raalte Press, which he founded in 2007. At Hope he served as Dean for Humanities from 1975 to 1978, Dean for Arts and Humanities from 1978 to 1984, and Provost from 1984 to 2001. Before coming to Hope in 1975, he taught Classics at Wayne State University for thirteen years, and was the founding Director of the Honors Program of the College of Liberal Arts from 1964 to 1975. He has held visiting professorships at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Ohio State University, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, and has been a visiting scholar at Green College, Oxford. Nyenhuis earned his AB degree with a major in Greek from Calvin College in 1956, an AM in Classics in 1961 and PhD in Classics in 1963 from Stanford University. During his graduate school years, he served as a full-time assistant in Greek and Latin at Calvin College from 1957 to 1959 and as an instructor in Latin at Stanford University in Winter Quarter 1962. While at Wayne State University, he led a two-year-long effort to promote Classics in the public arena, heading a fifty-two-member statewide coordinating committee which organized 132 separate events--performances of Greek and Roman dramas, exhibitions of classical coins in banks, public lectures, a symphony concert of Orff’s Carmina Burana, Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, fashion shows, and much more--extended over the first six months of 1967, under the rubric, Michigan Classical Spring: 1967. Nyenhuis has also been actively engaged in promoting interest in Dutch heritage. He has served on two commissions for the Bicentennial of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the US and the Netherlands in 1982 and on the Dutch Heritage Coordinating Council from 2009 to 2015. He currently serves on the Dutch-American Historical Commission and the Dutch American Heritage Day Committee. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Wayne State University Press’s all-time best-seller, Latin Via Ovid: A First Course (1977; rev. ed., 1982), and his magnum opus, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker (2003). His most recent book is the two-volume Hope College at 150: Anchored in Hope, Educating for Leadership and Service in a Global Society (2019). |
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| Transcript |
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| Finding Aid | |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/gy376yk4681 |
| Location | SC0932 |
| Repository | Stanford University. Libraries. Department of Special Collections and University Archives |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Collection
Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program interviews, 1999-2022
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