After 46 years at Western, Larner to retire

After 46 years as a Western faculty member in several university departments, president of the Faculty Senate and a former dean of Fairhaven College, Professor Dan Larner is set to retire from his teaching career.

Fairhaven College is holding a reception to honor Larner where faculty and staff are invited to celebrate his many accomplishments from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 10, at the Solarium in Old Main on Western’s campus.

Larner’s teaching career is coming to an end, but he plans to continue his scholarly career, which includes writing a book, and his creative career writing plays and films.

Larner also plans to continue his activism to turn Mount Baker Theater into a community theater resource.

“I’ve been an activist since the beginning of the movement to turn the Mount Baker Theater from an old movie palace into a community theater resource,” Larner said. “I think it’s extraordinarily important to the community to have that cultural resource.”

Dan Larner is a playwright and theatre scholar who teaches writing, film and theatre. He has been an activist in civil liberties since he was 25 years old and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington for many years since the late 1960s. For the Law, Diversity, and Justice concentration in Fairhaven College, he teaches a class called Rights, Liberties and Justice in America.

He is the recipient of the Liberty Bell Award from the Whatcom County Bar Association for lifetime achievement in civil rights education and advocacy, and is the advisor to the student civil liberties club on campus.

Larner taught in Western’s English Department, Speech Department and Theater and Dance Department. He helped establish the College of Fine and Performing Arts in 1976, and he was the dean of Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies from 1982 to 1989.

Larner has enjoyed his many years of interacting with students at Western and helping them learn.

“The best memories are all the light in students’ eyes. There’s just nothing like that,” Larner said. “When a student thanks you for having done something that they are convinced you could have only done, I’m sure they are wrong, but for someone to say that it is very precious.”

Larner grew up in the Midwest and performed well academically as a child.

“I did not grow up thinking of becoming a professor,” Larner said. “I grew up as a junior scientist and even won an honorable mention in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which was the big national contest back then.”

Larner went on to attend Harvard College as an undergraduate with plans to become an astronomer. At Harvard, he was advised to pursue physics.

Larner quickly discovered that physics was not right for him; he fell in love, discovered theater, and received the first and only C grade of his life in an advanced mathematics course.

“I realized that my attentions had shifted, and I needed to find a way to graduate in a year and a half, so I chose a major that looked really interesting to me called history and science,” Larner said.

Larner went on to graduate from Harvard and pursue a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the History of Science Department.

“One professor accused me of being a person that has never lost an interest and so here I am with these deep interests of science, with a love of theater and literature, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself when I grew up,” Larner said.

As a graduate student, Larner was casted in the lead role of several plays and became recognizable to the University of Wisconsin’s theater department.

After receiving a master’s degree, Larner accepted an offer to teach at St. John’s College in Minneapolis, Md., where he taught for three years.

He then returned to the University of Wisconsin for his doctorate degree but decided to pursue a doctorate degree within the Theater Department instead of staying in the History of Science Department.

“I walked up the hill to the theater department and for some crazy reason, with one previous course in the field they accepted me,” Larner said.

Shortly after completing his doctorate degree in dramatic literature, Larner received a job offer from Western’s English department and moved to Bellingham to begin his 46-year-long career in 1968.

“It seemed like a great place to teach,” Larner said. “This was a part of the world that I didn’t have my eye on at all, so it was a real discovery.”

Western has changed in many ways over the past 46 years, but Larner believes the quality of Western’s faculty has continuously increased.

“Western has managed to attract a very high percentage of faculty members, no matter what their specialties are, who consider themselves partisans of the liberal arts, and I think that’s extraordinarily important to students,” Larner said. “The liberal arts are key to your future success, because it enables you to learn how to learn, it gives you flexibility, it helps you with creativity, helps you with teamwork, and it helps you become comfortable with the unknown.”

Along with his plans to continue his scholarly and creative careers, Larner also hopes to find some time to relax in his retirement.