Ray Robinson: Fifty years and counting

Fifty years of teaching history at Northeastern, and Ray Robinson says he's never once been bored.

Quite the track record. The seventy-eight-year-old Robinson also says he's thankful the university stopped requiring employees to retire at sixty-five.

"There's no job like teaching," says Robinson, who in March was feted for his Northeastern half-century by an appreciative crowd of 350 colleagues, friends, and former students in the Curry Student Center Ballroom. "To me, it's an exciting way to make a living—to impart a subject to people who become your associates over the years. And I love the material, from early American history onward."

As the longest-serving professor at Northeastern, Robinson is almost as much a fixture at the university as the bronze Husky in the Ell Hall lobby. A graduate of Penn State and Harvard, he chaired the history department for a record thirty-two years, finally stepping down when former student William Fowler Jr., LA'67, H'00, took his place.

He's been the chief marshal for commencement for twenty-four years. He initiated the creation of the Faculty Senate. And it was he who hired a part-time history lecturer named Richard Freeland, who would go on to become Northeastern's sixth president in 1996.

Originally, Robinson wanted to be a farmer. He'd come from a long line of dairy farmers in central Pennsylvania. As a youngster, he'd shadow the farmer who lived across the street.

But at age eight, when his teacher tacked photos and stories about George Washington on a bulletin board, Robinson got hooked.

"I was so fascinated by these pictures. I couldn't stop thinking about them," he says. "When I got home, my dad was reading a copy of Liberty magazine, and on the cover was a picture of George Washington at Valley Forge. I said, 'Can I have the cover of that magazine?' He said, 'When I'm finished reading it.' And I said, 'No, I mean right now,' because I didn't want it to be crumpled or get a coffee stain on it. And, I guess to get rid of me, he said all right."

That picture was the first of many Washington images that Robinson would come to own. His sizable collection will eventually be donated to Mount Vernon, he says.

In addition to the founding father, Robinson reports, his other big influence was his high-school history teacher Jane Mervine, who was the first to tell Robinson that he would one day become a college professor.

"That was an epiphany," Robinson recalls. "From then on, that was my ambition."

And so Robinson found his true calling. Sure, he says, there are those times when he's less than satisfied with his performance in the classroom. And there's the occasional student who gets on his nerves.

"But when I get up in the morning, I never say, 'Omigod, I've got to get dressed, and get into my car, and go teach that damn class,'" he says. "That never happens."

He's got habits some might consider old-fashioned. For instance, he gives students assigned seats to help him remember their names. "I try to establish a personal relationship with them," he says. "I find that's very important. Lots of teachers don't give a damn whether students come to class or don't, sleep or don't sleep. But I make it very apparent to them that I care. I write things down on my little chart, and I call them by name, with a 'Miss' or 'Mister.'"

Theodore Doherty, CJ'85, a former student who's become one of Robinson's closest friends, says he was, quite simply, a wonderful teacher.

"Ray's lectures," Doherty said at Robinson's fifty-year celebration, "were like witnessing the chapter of a great novel unfold."

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