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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Spring 2002 : Seeger takes students along for the rise

Seeger takes students along for the rise

by Joel Hoekstra

“When CLA called, I went on a nostalgia trip,” says Mary Seeger (B.A. '61 magna cum laude, German). Seeger, Dean of Academic Resources and Special Programs at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Allendale, Mich., has much to be nostalgic about. From a job that she loves at a place that she loves, she can look back with immense pride on a well-spent life of learning, travel, teaching, and leadership in higher education.

A prescient story in the May 7, 1961 Minneapolis Sunday Tribune features “tall, dark-haired" Mary Sue Anderson as one of the up-and-coming young women of her generation. A German major passionately interested in the world around her, this future dean already had traveled to Germany as an AFS student and to Scotland on a Student Projects for Amity Among Nations scholarship.

She was both studious and gregarious. And she was, for starters, vice president of the SLA (now CLA) Student Board, president of German Club and Mortar Board, representative to the Minnesota Student Association, and member of the Senate Committee on Student Affairs.

“I don't have to be top,” Seeger insisted in 1961. And yet she not only has risen to the top of her profession but also, as an outspoken advocate for gender equity in higher education, has taken many along. Her multiple leadership positions at GVSU have allowed her to “agitate" for issues she cares about.

In the '90s, Seeger headed a large-scale GVSU women's climate study that not only increased awareness of women's issues at GVSU but also generated significant institutional change and earned her a national reputation—and an invitation to Sweden—as an expert on equity issues. In recognition of her leadership, in March 2000 she received the Progress in Equity Award from the Legal Advocacy Fund of the American Association of University Women.

Seeger never set out to be a dean, but as a young woman in the 1950s, she set her sights high. When she graduated from Mahtomedi High School, she was keen on Vassar, but her parents were not—and so, along with her sisters, she followed her mother and father, two uncles, and “lots of cousins" to the University of Minnesota.

Today a self-described “language nut,” Seeger plunged into German early on, under the wing of favorite professor Gerhard Weiss, whom she still considers a friend. Weiss “assumed that I could do anything, learn anything, be anything,” she says. And it appears that he was right-with one possible exception. An accomplished pianist who also played the baritone horn, Seeger says she “practiced scales and arpeggios for months,” hoping to join the U of M marching band. Luckily, she could also sing. Barred from joining the all-male band, she was undeterred: she joined the University Chorus.

CLA, says Seeger, “was a great place" for her, with “challenging instruction and supportive faculty"—like Weiss and colleague Frank Hirschbach—whose example and gentle urging would redirect her life. Indeed, by the time she left for the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow to earn a Ph.D in Germanic philology, she knew she would dedicate her life to higher education. Little did she know, however, that a few years later she would end up in the middle of a Michigan cornfield at a campus that, when she arrived with her husband, Wilhelm—also a professor of German—was “barely more than a model on a card table.”

When the Seegers learned that a friend—GVSU's first president—had started “his own college,” they just couldn't resist. In retrospect, says Seeger, they were “pretty naïve" to take such a step; but they were “captivated by the idea of something new and small that [they] could help build." And build they did. Soon, other faculty followed, and so did students, by the thousands. Today, GVSU is the fastest-growing higher education institution in Michigan, with a mostly undergraduate student body of roughly 20,000.

As dean, Seeger oversees the honors program, freshman studies, and a host of other programs—but not from a distance. She is deeply involved in the academic lives of students. “Working with undergraduates is the joy of my life,” she says.

The feeling, apparently, is mutual. Former students have honored both Seegers by endowing a scholarship in their name that now funds seven students per year. And GVSU's crew team named a racing shell after the couple. In 1996, Seeger was named an Outstanding Freshman Advocate by the National Resource Center for the Freshman Year Experience and Houghton Mifflin—one of the honors she is most proud of.

Fluent in both German and Swedish, Seeger is passionate about language education and regularly teaches German and linguistics. “One doesn't really know one's own language unless one knows another,” she says, adding that learning another language and another culture “helps remove cultural blinders." She also teaches (and voraciously reads) detective fiction. She believes that solving mysteries teaches students how to think critically, not just about whodunits but about larger issues.

Besides, she says, there's nothing better than a good story.