Wheaton Wire

Issue date: 5/2/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Sarah Mielbye Dean of Work and Service Learning Dan Golden is retiring.

Media Credit: Courtesy of Gebbie Archives Golden with the original Filene Center staff in fall 1986.

Media Credit: Courtesy of Gebbie Archives Golden advising one of his first students, Diane Anci '88.

One afternoon in April, I asked Dan Golden, Wheaton's longtime dean of work and service learning, how he would describe himself.

"I'm just a funny bossy guy from New York," he replied, pausing, and then, as usual with Golden, he found a bit more to add. "And I want you to be happy, and I know you'll be happy," he continued. "And you'll be happy if you follow my instructions."

For more than two decades Wheaton students have been doing just that, asking Dan Golden a host of questions - he gets between 80 and 120 e-mails a day - and following his instructions down a variety of career paths.

"Dan's guidance over these last four years has been absolutely invaluable," said Erin Allgood '07. "I never would have developed into the person I am today without him." Laura Corkery '07, a French Studies major, said, "Dan is dependable; someone you can always count on to be there for you with a smile and a French phrase or two."

Now Golden is preparing to retire in June, leaving behind the Filene Center for Work and Learning, which he created in 1986, after leaving Northeastern University, at the behest of then Provost Hannah Goldberg. "This was a moment in my history and the college's history where there was a perfect match," he said.

In his honor, Jane Lisman Katz '69, a longtime supporter of the Filene Center, is establishing the Daniel Golden Endowment for Work and Learning to provide internship stipends for Wheaton students.

Yet at first Golden did not want the job that he has now held for 21 years, unsure what Goldberg meant when she said the college wanted to create something different from a traditional career services office.

Today, however, he is astonished at how far ahead Wheaton was in creating an integrated career center that stressed internships and hands-on experiences to put the theory of liberal arts into practice. Golden and his colleagues worked to integrate outside experiences into the school's curriculum, and that model has now become standard at schools around the country.

"[Former President] Dale Marshall said the best classroom education we can deliver to you is insufficient to your needs as workers in the next century, as partners in relations, and as engaged citizens in the world," he recalled. "When people ask you, they ask, 'Are you the career office?' And we say, yeah, we do that, too. But if you ask me what we really do, we're a life-planning and experiential learning office."

There is little argument about that from students who have worked closely with Golden. They often speak of him as a sort of life guru.

"What can I say about Dan? He's Dan," said Noah Saul Bernstein '07. "He's always energetic and passionate. It's contagious. You get the feeling he really works for you." Bernstein describes Golden as "not only a mentor but a friend," adding, "For him, there is nothing we can't accomplish. It only takes a little hard work and some passion."

In a sense, Golden does see himself as working for the students. "At the rate we charge you, I don't we should settle for a Hall of Fame batting average," Golden quips, returning to his constant theme: that the college needs to work harder to ensure that all students utilize the resources available to prepare themselves to be successful after graduation.


From New York to Norton

Golden grew up in the East Bronx - "where they drop the bodies off," as he puts it. He attended Queen's College for free, commuting from home and working at his father's store 25 hours a week. He had no choice, but he still regrets it. "If you live at home, socially and emotionally you don't really get to grow up," he said.

New York was also where he developed the sharp wit for which he is well-known. Golden's has been called the fastest tongue on campus, and for good reason. Luckily, his verbal agility is matched by his quick thinking.

At Queen's, one of Golden's friends was Andrew Goodman, a fellow New Yorker with a passion for the civil rights movement, which was then at its height. "We thought he was something of a shrill advocate," Golden recalled. "We were wanting to do normal college things, like meeting women."

In the summer between their sophomore and junior years, during the famous "Freedom Summer" of 1964, Goodman and two others were shot dead by the Ku Klux Klan while registering black voters in Mississippi. It was a national scandal, but it hit Golden personally.

"He had a higher mission, and he was right," Golden recalled. "That was the galvanizing, lightning-bolt experience - to come and see an empty seat at the table. The seat was gone. So his martyrdom became an important part of my after-hours commitments. It made me identify what matters to me, how I wanted to define the way I wanted to serve." Golden calls the Hebrew saying, "repair the world," as a personal motto.

After graduating from Queen's, Golden received his doctorate at Indiana University, where he met his wife. The young couple then moved to Buffalo, where they spent "nine snowy years" teaching English classes at a state college. In 1979, he and his family left Buffalo for Boston, where Golden started a new film studies program at Northeastern. "I still watch a lot of movies," he said, citing the first two Godfather films as particular favorites.

Looking for something new in the mid-1980s, Golden applied for a position in the Office of the President at Wheaton. His application was passed on to Hannah Goldberg, who courted him relentlessly to take on the assignment of overhauling the college's staid career office. "I came for two years 21 years ago," he said, laughing.

(He also points out that he is not alone in longevity at the Filene Center. "Three of my staff members have been here at least 20 years," he said. "You work for Dan Golden, you usually don't want to quit.")


[At Wheaton]

With barely 1,000 students, Wheaton was so small in the years before it went coeducational that Golden and his staff had all of Chapin Hall to themselves. Though Golden was aware that Wheaton's reputation had once made it one of the great all-female schools in America, he strongly supported President Alice Emerson's decision to admit men to the school starting in September 1988.

"The single greatest thing about going coed, far and away, was the door it unlocked to extraordinary young women," he said. "Getting the guys here, it's great, the boys are great. But there were always boys around Wheaton - they just didn't go to class. But when we became a school based on a male-female population, it opened us up to great, high-achieving, inspiring women for whom we were a perfect fit except that we weren't a coed school."

He also said the school's unique history made the advising center more keen to challenge stereotypes about appropriate career paths. "I'm as proud of a young woman who has gone on to become a nuclear chemist as a young man who's become a social worker," he said. "We will not yield to the stereotyping of gender in our society, and that's certainly a conscious advising philosophy in our office."

Golden also warns today's students - tomorrow's workers - that major challenges lie ahead. Most employers no longer can afford the luxury of slowly grooming a young employee, and they expect to see experience when an entry-level applicant walks through the doors. "The junior-senior summer is the single best anticipator of a student's value to an organization, employers tell us," he said.

To be prepared, Golden points to what he calls "the sacred triangle: experience, training skills. Without one, you've got to sell the other two harder, or maybe you get that post-grad internship."

As he reflects on the changes he sees in higher education today, Golden is critical of some trends. "It's very hard when colleges are often renovated and marketed as if they were hotel venues with classes," he said. "It's a nuclear war with the amenities, and students are often picking colleges as if they're wedding venues."

He has suggestions for his successors, too, including a radical overhaul of the first year to make it "impossible for a student not to have a sequence of encounters with a group of grown-ups who are interested in them, and pull out of them what they may not even know are their interests and values."

It's not enough, he said, for Wheaton to coast on the success of the handful of scholars who achieve great things each year. "I think we all have to take credit for the kids who don't use it as the kids who do use it," he said. That also requires students to spend more time reflecting on their futures. "People arrive pretty unreflective, and unless you find a way to get them to do it, they can leave pretty unreflective," he said.

Golden plans to semi-retire to the West Coast and do some consulting with high schools in the Los Angeles unified school district. His parting advice for students is the same one he has given for years. "Find a way to make the world pay you for who you are, do what you live, and find out what you love best by finding people out there who you can emulate," he said. "Look for your future shadow."

As he looks back on a long career, Golden is pleased with what he sees. "I've gotten much more out of this than I've given to others," he said. That is one thing on which his students will challenge him. "Dan has taken a personal interest in me and other students at Wheaton, as if we were his own children," said Alex Myers '08. "Dan is a great ambassador for Wheaton who will be sorely missed."

"It's been great. I've had a ball. I never expected it to last this long," Golden said. "But when you have fun every day, how can you quit?"

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