Professor of Psychology Karl Scheibe, who specializes in social psychology, will retire at the end this semester after 42-year tenure at Wesleyan.
Scheibe arrived at the University in 1963, after completing his dissertation at University of California, Berkeley, and has spent his entire career teaching at Wesleyan.
“I look forward to retirement as an opportunity to do other things,” Scheibe said. “Insofar as I want to teach, Wesleyan will [still] allow me to do so.”
Scheibe’s teaching career will culminate with a two-day symposium on April 22 and 23 titled “Drama and the Life of the Mind.” The symposium, to be moderated by Psychology Professor Scott Plous, will feature lectures from Wesleyan faculty and alumni psychologists, a career forum, and a performance by four of Scheibe’s former students.
“Karl Scheibe has done it all,” Plous said. “He’s published first-rate books and articles, taught courses that students describe as ‘life changing,’ given lectures at home and abroad, and even maintained a private practice. The symposium in his honor is well-deserved and promises to be a great event.”
One of the biggest challenges of teaching, Scheibe said, is finding new ways to present the same information each year.
“If you can teach freshly, you have the key to success,” Scheibe said. “At the start of [a statistics] class you have sixty solemn people looking at you. I see that as a wonderful challenge in that, how do you make students like statistics?”
Over the years Scheibe has learned how to transform his classroom each week into a stimulating 3-hour excursion through questions of how human behavior and attitudes develop.
“He creates an environment where students can feel comfortable expressing their different opinions about the course material and also their personal lives,” said Samantha Schwartz ’05, a psychology major. “He treats the students as people, as individuals.”
Steven Wengrovitz ’06 said he was deeply influenced by a course he took with Scheibe three years ago.
“Professor Scheibe taught my introductory psychology my first year at Wesleyan,” Wengrovitz said. “His passion for the subject and his love for teaching were especially clear to me and inspired me to pursue psychological research and [become] a teacher.”
“I’ve been able to teach a wide variety of courses, to invent courses that had never been taught before,” Scheibe said. “I’ve been allowed to take [my work] in different directions as my career has matured.”
In 1980, Scheibe created a course titled “The Dramaturgical Approach to Psychology,” a course with a syllabus that includes both plays and social psychological materials and explores the use of the language of theater and psychological identification. This course, which Scheibe is currently teaching, examines politics in theater, audience reactions, the ways in which role-playing can be used as a teaching and therapeutic technique, and general theory of masks.
Scheibe was familiar with Wesleyan’s reputation as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford. “Wesleyan had a reputation for being avant-garde, on the edge,” Scheibe said. “More intellectual than Trinity, certainly. People read real books and talked about real ideas.”
Accoridng to Scheibe, in his first years at Wesleyan there was a performance art requirement. Although the Administration eliminated this requirement in the late ’60s, Scheibe said that he has always been fascinated by the intersection between art and academics, an interdisciplinary study that Wesleyan’s progressive policies have allowed him to devote his energies to.
Although retiring from teaching, Scheibe plans to remain active in the field of psychology by continuing to travel, write, and research. Scheibe said that he usually travels to Brazil once or twice a year. He first went Brazil on sabbatical in 1967-68, returning to in 1972 on a Fulbright fellowship.
“Wesleyan is a base,” he said. “Your life doesn’t have to be absorbed here but it can be centered here. You can travel and you can always come home.”
After retiring, Scheibe hopes to be able to use the resources of the Wasch Center for Retired Faculty, a University project that will be completed in the fall. This new center, which will be located on Lawn Avenue, will provide resources for retired professors who want to continue their scholarship and maintain contact with students.
In particular, Scheibe hopes the Center will serve as a centralized resource for students seeking thesis advisors or professors to teach group tutorials.
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