By Jacob Gomoll
At 70, Jay Hatheway, professor and former chair of the History Department at Edgewood College, will retire after this semester. He has taught at Edgewood for 29 years.
Hatheway is undergoing phased retirement, which gives him three classes per academic year beginning fall 2019. This phased retirement will take “a couple years,” he said.
Before becoming a professor at Edgewood, Hatheway was a Green Beret for the U.S. military. He was scheduled to be discharged in 1975. But just days before, he was dishonorably discharged from the Army because of his relationship with another soldier.
Hatheway challenged his discharge in the federal courts, claiming that the Army was prosecuting cases of homosexual sodomy but not heterosexual sodomy.
Hatheway lost the case — the Army had the right to terminate the career of a soldier if they were found to be homosexual.
Decades later, however, Deputy Assistant Secretary Francine Blackmon overruled the Army Board. In 2015, she instructed the board to give Hatheway an honorable discharge, dated May 28, 1976.
Hatheway wrote a book called “Guilty as Charged,” telling his story and explaining the psychological trauma he experienced. Two years later, he wrote another book, “The Gilded Age Roots of Modern American Homophobia,” about American’s toxic views of homosexuals.
Hatheway went on to teach at Edgewood College, where his subjects included the officer corps of the Nazi SS, LGBTQ in the military, the Holocaust, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Students have gone out of their way to rate Hatheway on sites such as Rate My Professors — students say he is “respected,” “hilarious,” and even “inspirational” in his classes.
On campus, one student, who requested to remain anonymous, said that she is “bummed” that he is retiring this semester. She said she would have taken more classes with him if she’d known he was retiring.
“He was a good professor and really knew what he was doing. He taught hard stuff in a really easy way that got to me.”
Hatheway, however, doesn’t seem to think that he does things too much differently than other teachers.
“I go into the classroom to try to make students successful, and I’ll do that any way I possibly can,” he said. “Teaching isn’t a chore to me, and it really never has been. When I’m in front of a classroom, I just like to have fun with it.”
Each spring semester at Edgewood College, the History Department presents a lecture for the school. In 2011, the series was renamed as the “Hatheway History Lecture” as a tribute to him.
In 2016, Hatheway received a letter from President Obama, thanking him for his military service.
Hatheway will be leaving Edgewood with no hard feelings. “The only problem I have with Edgewood is the price of food at Phil’s.”
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