By SYDNEY MANNING
Contributing Writer
During college, students will encounter great minds, learn other languages, and other social/political languages that can make them powerful to create a new world in the future. Dr.Jeanne Wiley hopes to help with just that. She is a philosophy professor who has also taught religious and women’s studies. In the Fall 2018 semester, Wiley is teaching Existentialism, and Ethics and Values.
Wiley wants to try and give her students skills in order to earn the credentials they need to have a better life. As a professor, she is always interacting with students who are thinking about what comes next in their lives. She said that being a college student is a powerful time in life, where students are creating new projects, having flexible lifestyles, and are “living towards something.”
When Wiley was teaching Religious Studies class, an old assignment that she always liked giving her students was to observe a ritual outside of their home faiths. For example, if a student was Catholic, they would have to go observe a Buddhist ritual.
Wiley also liked teaching students about classical Greek mythology. This is because she could then match it up with a structure from a traditional fairy tale, and then explain how fairytales got retold in contemporary movies. An example she had was the contemporary movie “Pretty Woman” and how the fairytale “Cinderella” plays a part in it.
The cool thing about teaching students Women’s Studies, she said, was that she could teach her students a little bit about the history of it, and then hope it opened their eyes to the social forces that shape their personal choices. Wiley said that she wants her students to get the credentials they need in order to secure a professional job, but she also wants them to have the opportunity to explore academically.
For her college education Wiley attended LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York for two years, and during that time at LeMoyne, she chose to study abroad. It was because of the works of Thomas Hardy that she wanted to get out of the United States and see more of the world.
She applied to a programs in both Rome, Italy and Leuven, Belgium. She chose Belgium because it gave her the opportunity to do more than one semester abroad. Wiley chose to go to the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium to study Philosophy. This is where she earned her Ph.D., Licentiate (M.A.), and her B.A. in Philosophy. With each degree, Wiley was also magna cum laude.
During her time in Belgium, Wiley put herself through university. She did farmwork, worked as a cleaner, harvested grapes in France, and did a lot of behind the scenes work in restaurants. The work she chose to do was because of her limited language skills.
During her time outside of the United States, Wiley saw the political arrangement was a democracy combined with socialism. She saw that it created a much more caring, sustainable environment. She said elders were not really in nursing homes, but had a dignified respect in society. She also said that students do not have crushing debt for higher education like is common in America.
“Living in Europe gave me the opportunity to think about the big questions in a very deep way,” she said.
When Wiley came back from her time abroad, she was looking for work that involved her Philosophy degree. For a while, she went back to Syracuse and taught at LeMoyne college, where she started her college career.
After her time at LeMoyne, she got hired at Sage, where she worked for two years. During this time, she started meeting other philosophy teachers in the Capital Region. While she was teaching at Sage, she applied for a job at Saint Rose, was hired, and has been teaching here since 1989.
“Her manner of evaluating, in those classroom moments, is always full of kind affirmations to all her students,” said Ken Scott, director of Community Service. “How wonderful Dr. Wiley is as a teacher.”.
Growing up attending Catholic schools, Wiley thinks this gave her a good moral formation. She also thinks that growing up with a big family had the biggest impression on her. Her social skills improved as the sixth of eight children. Her dad was a teacher and her mom was a court reporter.
Since her parents had to take care of eight children and themselves, there wasn’t always a lot of money. Wiley said that there were positives to this, because it taught her to learn to manage without. Growing up without lots of money created a different value system for her—one where she wasn’t always seeking material stuff. Her family made their own fun, usually with her mom taking her and her siblings to parks.
Although Wiley is from East Syracuse and lived in Albany for 15 years, she now lives in Saratoga Springs. She is an early riser so she beats a lot of the morning rush hour traffic. To pass the time in the car, she listens to books on tape and is hoping to get into podcasts.
Every year, Wiley tries to travel to a new place in the world “to see something novel.” So far, she has been to Portugal, Ireland, the Islands in the North Sea, Norway, Greece, Italy, and Scotland. She likes to see how other cultures live and the differences from how Americans live. Traveling gives her a better perspective about how others live their lives.
