Dr. Lyle “Sandy” Smith retired at the end of the 2020 academic year after serving over forty years in the English Department. A professor who loved reading and teaching—Milton and Shakespeare, especially—Dr. Smith was an anchor in the department’s faculty, helping to guide and shape its sensibility throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Current department chair Chris Davidson recently asked Dr. Smith to share a little bit about his time at Biola and what he plans to do next.
Professor Davidson: When did you start at Biola? And how did you find yourself here?
Dr. Smith: I started at Biola in the fall semester of 1978. I received my Ph.D. from the U. of Minnesota in March of 1973, some months after beginning my first year with the English and Speech Communication faculty of Asbury College in Kentucky. I met my first wife, Samuela Dare Davidson, who was working on her own Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Kentucky, and that was the best thing to come out of the Asbury years. A Wesleyan-Arminian school was not a good fit for this Presbyterian boy. Although Dare also found her first job teaching at Asbury, collegial issues cost us tenure, and we started looking for employment elsewhere. After two years of sending out job letters, I finally received an invitation from Virginia Doland to apply for a position at Biola, and in the fall of 1978 began my first year with the English faculty. The difference for me between Asbury and Biola was like night and day, and I was happy to settle in for the next forty years. Although Dare died in childbirth in 1981, it was here at Biola that I met my second wife Dorothy, who was working at the time as the secretary for the provost.
You saw a lot of changes in the department, the university, and the discipline over the years. What are a few highlights—classes you loved teaching, work you were able to complete, interactions you had with colleagues or students—that you're grateful for?
I think the classes I enjoyed the most were the 200-level surveys and the 400 Shakespeare and 440 Milton. The 200-level students were often receptive and inclined to seek out my friendship—I made some good friends among them, especially international students. Emily Martin, who graduated from Biola and is now pursuing a Ph.D, at Oxford, was first turned on to Spenser in a survey course I taught several years ago, and which issued in a kind of collaborative relationship as we worked through two major papers on Spenser she wrote in a tutorial.
Biola encouraged and supported scholarship, and I was able to work up a modest body of papers for publication and conference presentation, and collaborate on a couple of C.S.Lewis book projects.
A number of Biola colleagues stand out for me—Virginia Doland and Bill Shanebeck, Mark Sargent, Brian Ingraffia, Paul Buchanan. All of whom offered friendship, support and encouragement over the years. More recently, Marc Malandra, Aaron Kleist and yourself.
What plans do you have now that you've retired from Biola?
I continue to wallop away at a life-long ambition to write and publish at least one novel. Right now I have two in the works, one for a couple of decades. Since the late nineties I have been in a critique group with a number of talented writers, two of whom have remained, along with me, at the core. Both John De Simone and Thomas Albaugh have published novels, and Tom a chapbook and a short story collection as well. I also have time to read more widely than I could while teaching and am finding that a broadening experience. Even if the novels I’m working on never see publication, I will have died trying.
What's a piece of literature you were able to teach during your time at Biola that you love? Can you share a particularly sweet passage with us?
The individual works I have most loved teaching while at Biola are Wordsworth's The Prelude and Milton's Paradise Lost.
A particularly "sweet" passage from Paradise Lost is this, from Book III. As God surveys all His finished creation, the innumerable hosts of Heaven stand “thick as stars” about Him, ready for service, transported to ecstasy by the Beatific Vision:
Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure empyrean where he sits
High thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye
His own works and their works at once to view:
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv'd
Beatitude past utterance… (ll. 56-61)
For me, this is the most beautiful segue in all western literature, from the Hell of Books I and II to the Heaven of Book III— exceeded only by the transition from the Inferno to the Purgatorio of Dante.
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