PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 10, Nov. 17, 2005

Faculty members, academic professionals retire
Between Sept. 1, 2004, and Aug. 31, 2005, 92 faculty members and academic professionals retired from the UI, according to the Office of Academic Human Resources.
The retirees, their positions, units and years of service are posted on the Inside Illinois Web site.

‘Retired’ chemistry professor not slowing down after 50 years

By Allison Sues
News Bureau Intern

Click photo to enlarge Photo byL. Brian Stauffer ‘What free time?’ R. Linn Belford, who retired after 50 years as a faculty member in the department of chemistry, still spends long hours in classrooms and laboratories on campus, teaching and continuing his research into the behavior of free radicals and magnetic ions.

R. Linn Belford jokes that chemistry students see him as someone who’s simply weird and colleagues see him as someone who will never leave.

“He is a wonderful person,” said Gregory Giorolami, professor and head of chemistry and a close colleague of Belford’s. “He is always willing to help students and colleagues. He has made the University of Illinois a better place.”

Belford is still as excited about chemistry as he was 50 years ago when he began teaching at the UI. With little prompting, he will excitedly jump into a 15-minute lecture on his continued research with free radicals and magnetic ions, simplifying the most complicated of terminology and delving into his subject to any student, chemistry major or not, who seems curious.

Belford still puts in full days in the Roger Adams Laboratory, teaching classes and researching the structure of materials through electron spins, materials’ sensitivity to oxygen and the functioning of the MRI and electron spin resonance.

“Those are just a couple of the things I am researching,” he said. “There are many others.”

Belford said that he cannot remember a time he was not interested in chemistry. In grade school, he conducted experiments in his backyard with fireworks. In middle school, he spent hours playing with chemistry sets. In college, he sat in UI lecture halls and tried to beat professors to a derivation. Now, he said, he is the professor that students race against for derivations.

Belford completed his bachelor’s degree at the UI in 1953, graduating summa
cum laude with Bronze Tablet and valedictorian status. As a chemistry major, he spent his first few semesters working his way through the curriculum trying to decide what type of chemistry he liked.

“When, I hit physical chemistry, it was so much fun I knew that was it,” Belford said. “What’s fun is there is a theoretical basis for everything.”

After completing his bachelor’s, Belford went to the University of California at Berkeley for his doctorate. During the first fall Belford spent at Berkley, he ran into a woman majoring in mathematics that he had known in high school in Philadelphia. In January, he and Geneva were married.

The newlyweds moved to Champaign-Urbana in 1955. Geneva began working toward a doctorate at the UI while Linn began teaching as an assistant professor. Geneva eventually became the coordinator of graduate programs for computer engineers.

Now that both are retired, the couple has more time to enjoy each other outside the realm of math and science. They enjoy music at Krannert Center for Performing Arts, reading, ethnic food and WILL radio.

Although he may have a little extra time for such interests, Belford is far from defining retirement as lazy days and relaxation.

“What free time?” he said. “I don’t have any free time.”

Always keeping himself busy, colleagues and students know Belford for his characteristic quickness.

“When he had serious and painful back trouble a few years ago, his optimistic outlook never wavered,” Girolami said. “Despite the fact that his best attempts to stand up straight still left him looking like an oversized question mark, he managed to retain his ability to walk at his trademark hyper-speed.”

Belford said that he developed an ability to do things very fast to combat his students’ shrinking attention spans.

“Now with video games and television being so fast-paced, students have much shorter attention spans,” Belford said. “If I don’t keep it just as fast-paced, students are not able to follow a thought all the way to its conclusion.”

Belford also may have adapted his knack for quickness to fit all of his accomplishments into his 50 years at UI. He was named a fellow of the Sloan Foundation in 1961, a special fellow of the National Institutes of Health in 1968, and in 1988 he received the John H. Kuebler Award from the Alpha Chi Sigma national chemistry fraternity. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals and was an associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He has published nearly 200 papers and has directed the thesis research of more than 60 Ph.D. students.

He also found time to act as an official academic adviser, working individually with more than 1,000 students.

“That means thousands of different individual personalities with their own backgrounds and stories,” Belford said. “I get exasperated with some of them, but I don’t often get bored.”

Long-time English professor catches up on reading, writing and family

Click photo to enlarge Photo by L. Brian Stauffer Lots to do Retiree Emily Watts is using her newfound free time to complete a book on the writings of Hemingway and catch up on her reading when she’s not spending time with her grandchildren. Sam, left, age 2, and Olivia, 6, are children of her son, Ben Watts, and his wife, Judy, of Champaign. Emily Watts retired in May after serving 45 years as a faculty member in the department of English.

By Allison Sues
News Bureau Intern

Emily Watts has her own Facebook interest group.

Facebook, a popular student directory Web site used by UI students, includes a feature that lets users create common interest groups and link each other through them. A recent addition: “We miss Emily Watts already.”

“Oh, my goodness, how touching,” Watts said when she heard about the Facebook group created by some of her past students. Watts, a professor of English for nearly 45 years, retired in May.
Kevin Schneider, a junior in English, joined the Facebook group, saying that Watts was one of the best teachers he had ever had.

“She just knows so much about literature, and she really does care about what is going on with her students. I can remember one class where she asked everyone what we were doing for the summer and what we wanted to do with our lives,” Schneider said. “She’s just amazing.”

For Watts, the adoration is a two-way street.

“I like the students very much and if I miss anything about teaching, it is the students,” she said.

Though still a common presence on campus – at the Krannert Art Museum, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the library (her favorite place on campus) – Watts also has traveled far from the tree-lined, crisscrossed UI Quad since retirement. She and her husband recently returned from China.

“Not having the regular schedule is much better for me and my husband now,” Watts said. “It was a great time to go to China and I had the flexibility to go.”

Watts was known for sticking to the rigid schedule a school day brings. In her decades of teaching, Watts was a reliable constant in the red brick English building.

“I didn’t miss more than 10 classes in 45 years, and I had three babies,” said Watts, who missed one semester of teaching for each of her children’s births.

“I know the old days were incredibly hard for women faculty members,” she said. “If you had a baby, you had to sit out. It was policy; you weren’t paid.”

Watts witnessed the evolution of women’s roles on the UI faculty during her 45 years of teaching. After receiving an undergraduate degree in Latin at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., Watts attended the UI for graduate studies. She had wanted to concentrate on medieval studies, but the department would not take female graduate students.

She earned a doctorate in English literature with a minor in Latin in 1963 and began teaching at the UI. Throughout the years she noticed female students and faculty members both growing in numbers.

“Now, female students are much more outspoken in class,” Watts said. “In fact, the women are just as aggressive as the men now.”
In addition to watching the faces and roles of her students change, Watts also saw a great change in the medium through which they learned.

Computers had benefits as they became a dominant force in the classroom, Watts said, pointing out how quickly knowledge could be acquired. But she also saw a downfall to new technology.

“With e-mail, students tend not to come to the office as much,” Watts said. “In my classes, I did not allow e-mail. It works better if they come to me.”

Encouraging personal interaction between herself and her students may be one of the reasons Watts was so highly regarded by those who took her class.

At her last seminar, Watts was overwhelmed by the parting gifts she received, including cookies, flowers and a book signed by all the students in one of her classes.

With all the books and novels from her old office now stacked and cluttered throughout her brimming home library, Watts enjoys reading books she didn’t have time to read before.

“While I was teaching American lit, I didn’t have time to read as many British books as I would have liked,” Watts said. “Now, in between spending time with my grandchildren, I have read three books in 2 1/2 weeks.”

In addition, Watts looks forward to having more time for other hobbies such as cross-country skiing, gardening and archaeology, as well as spending time with her family. She also is busy finishing a book she is writing on the classical and Christian writings of Hemingway.

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