A little over a week ago, retired English professor Phyllis Rose invited students to her home on Wyllys Avenue to help her move. The professor, who retired this year after 36 years with the faculty, gave simple instructions: Take whatever you want.
“It was open two days,” said Rose, a self-described packrat. “Those students cleaned it out pretty fast…I wanted to empty the house. That’s why I opened it. I loved everything in it.”
Rose said she derived great happiness from the sight of people taking away things that they need and appreciated.
“I saw one young woman leave with a half-slip I had gotten as a wedding present in 1965,” Rose said. “It had my initials on it. I never wore it. I am thrilled that she liked it and chose to take it.”
Much of the joy of her recent moving experience lay in meeting the students and telling the histories behind the objects they picked out.
“I made a couple of friends in the process,” Rose said. “It’s a good ritual for moving out. I recommend it.”
Students were most recently able to forge a relationship with Rose through the Writing Family Biography course she taught last fall, in which each student had to write a 30-page biography of a parent or grandparent.
“Her emphasis on the importance of intergenerational relationships has been a foundation of my reaching out to older members of my family,” said David Rood-Ojalvo ’06, “My grandmother told me just yesterday that she plans to write Phyllis Rose a thank-you note.”
Other students sang Rose’s praises.
“I thought she was a great prof. because she taught me not only what good writing looks like, but how to recognize your own bad writing,” said Desmond Serrette ’06.
The wife of a Yale professor, Rose began teaching at Wesleyan in 1969. She was a single mother by the time she moved into the Wyllys Avenue house in 1974, which had been unoccupied for some time. The house’s location next to the admissions office was perfect for a professor who became known for her close relationships with students.
“No one wanted to live in such plain view in the middle of the campus,” Rose said. “I didn’t care. I liked being close to home when I was at work. The students helped me bring up my son,” she said.
Although Rose had moments of tension with the Wesleyan student body over the years, she put a positive spin on her life on the Wesleyan campus. Rose found herself engaging in interesting discussions outside of the classroom when students argued their right to the flowers of her garden because God had planted the flowers for everyone. Similarly, students ‘shared’ their music with Rose when they blasted it out of the windows of the Foss Hill dorms.
Rose said that Wesleyan has grown progressively more bureaucratic since the days when she began teaching.
“From this vantage, those days seem like the wild west,” she said, adding that work days are longer, with greater emphasis on meetings and self-evaluation.
“When I came to Wesleyan, each professor got a fund for entertaining students,” Rose said. “That seems so quaint. Now people would worry about liability.”