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A
Toast Offered by President Carol Christ
 I am particularly pleased to
offer a toast to Bob Burger, the Achilles Professor of Geosciences.
Bob is the longest serving member of the faculty, now completing
his 45th year at Smith. When one of Bob’s earliest students, from the Class of 1967, wrote
to him on the occasion of his retirement, she commented that
he arrived as an assistant professor in a department of geologic
giants. She continues, “Like a mammal among dinosaurs, he
flitted around breathing energy into the somewhat dusty geologic
halls.” He came to Smith at a watershed moment in the development
of the geosciences, when concepts of plate tectonics and
continental drift were fairly new. Bob embraced these new
ideas, critical in changing the department to what it is
today. Bob is now one of the giants—though certainly not
a dinosaur.
His research focuses on ancient
mountain belts in southwestern Montana, the structural evolution
of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts, and the use of
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to mitigate natural
hazards. His bibliography lists well over one hundred books,
monographs, articles, and abstracts. His teaching has always
been deeply integrated with his research; many publications
speak to pedagogical issues, and, together with two colleagues,
he has published a leading textbook “Introduction to Applied
Geophysics.” He has also been quick to embrace information
technology in his research and teaching.
Bob has been an
important citizen and leader on campus. His cv contains a
virtual alphabet soup of committees; and he has served as
chair of geology for four terms, and fifteen years.
Bob is
a winner of the Sherrerd Distinguished Teaching Award. His
courses—particularly
those in structural geology and in natural disasters—have
been legendary for decades. When I was collecting information
for this toast, Bob’s colleague, John Brady,
sent me a file of letters from students that had been collected
for the department’s retirement celebration. I was deeply
moved by the scores of tributes, spanning four and a half
decades, many with vivid and detailed accounts of what they
had learned from Bob’s courses. Alumna after alumna testified
to how amazing Bob was as a teacher, a mentor, and a friend.
The geographic range of photographs
in this set of alumnae tributes is amazing—New England and Montana, of course, but
also Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, and one amazing shot
of Bob and Ann on a camel—probably not taken in the Grand
Canyon. Bob has been a stalwart of the Smith travel program,
leading trips to the Great Lakes, the Canadian Rockies, Ireland,
Patagonia, the Sea of Cortez, New Zealand, and Antarctica.
A welcome letter to the travelers on one of these trips gives
a sense of the zest and wonder he brings to them: “As a
geologist I try to look beyond what is visible today and
imagine how a landscape has changed and evolved over millions
of years. I hope I will be able to take you on such a journey,
so that you enjoy not only what you are seeing during the
trip, but appreciate how the present landscape originated
from many different events during Earth's history."
Bob (and Ann, his wife) love
travel, and rarely take the easy way. When Paul and I took
a trip to Peru a few years ago, we discovered Bob and Ann
were going there too. However, we took trains, planes, and
automobiles; they hiked the Inca Trail. Bob loves model trains,
however, and Bob and Ann are both accomplished gardeners.
In his tribute to W.B. Yeats,
Auden writes, “He was silly like us.” With
all Bob’s seriousness about rocks, he loves puns and sheer silliness. So in conclusion,
I will raise my glass with one of Bob’s verses, in imitation of Edelweiss:
You are nice, rocks
are gneiss
I know a gem when I see
one.
It’s crystal
clear, when you are near
You, my dear, I find faultless. |
Here’s to a nice, faultless
gem. |
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