Professor Spotlight: Dr. Reitman

By Isabel Duarte

Dr. Roger Reitman is a familiar face around Hood College for anyone who is in the Honors program or is involved with the Sociology Department. He has worked at Hood College since 1983, when he was hired at the mere age of 7 years old to be a professor. He has been here ever since. I went to go ask him about his school and career experiences because, as anyone who has ever interacted with Dr. Reitman would know, he is extremely interesting. Before starting the interview, Dr. Reitman and I spoke for a short while about how cats, domestic or not, are all predatory creatures. Then, we got down to brass tacks.

Isabel: How do you describe your job to people you meet at dinner parties? Or any other social events?

Reitman: I don’t think I’ve ever been to a dinner party… So, if somebody says, ‘what do you do for a living’?

I: Yeah, exactly.

R: I, typically, when people ask me what I do, I say I’m a sociologist. Because, I was never trained as an educator or anything like that. […] I don’t define myself as a teacher. I define myself as a sociologist, and I think there’s a slight difference there. It happens to be the case that academicians, as part of the requirement for their job have to profess in the classroom, but that’s only a part of their job. And I think that people that are not familiar with the academy don’t understand that. […] They think of us as teachers. But, most of us think of us in terms of our disciplines. So, if you ask somebody who happens to teach in the math department what they do for a living, they will say ‘I am a mathematician’, right?[…] Part of what I do is teach, but that comprises only a small part of what I do. Anybody who teaches at a place like Hood College […] there are other aspects to your position: part of it means you are a scholar, part of it means you do service to the college community, and to the wider community. I’m always a sociologist, but for a while each week, I teach.

I: What do you like most about what you do for a living?

R: I’m thoroughly enamored with my discipline. […] I get to do for my whole life what it is that I love. I love the sociological way of understanding the way around me. […] Because of the nature of my position here, I can go into a class and talk about important issues of the day, that’s the cool thing about being a sociologist. I’m not sure you could get away with that if you were a mathematician. Almost everything is sociologically relevant.

I:  Was there a specific time or a moment that you can remember, either growing up or when you were a student, that something clicked for you concerning sociology?

R: When I went to college, […]  I was not career oriented. I didn’t know what a major was. People weren’t as career-oriented. […] I went to the University of Maryland, and at UM, you had to declare a major upon entering the college.

I: Really? As a freshman?

R: Yeah, that’s how you were assigned an advisor. And so, I didn’t know what majors were, and they said ‘Well, why don’t you try business?’ and I said ‘Okay, I’ll be a business major’. I think I might have taken a course and I thought ‘No, I can’t possibly be a business major’. And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be an educator’. I took a course in education and I hated it. I though ‘I’ll never be an educator’. I still didn’t know what the different majors were, but I had taken a psychology course and I thought ‘That’s sort of cool, so I’ll major in psychology’. I took a couple more courses in psychology, and I was fully intending on becoming a psychologist. But, then in the second semester of my junior year, I took a sociology course. It was a wonderful professor. He would come into class, and say things, and explosions would go off in my brain. It was the first discipline that I ever thought that… Everybody else, they were compelling, and what they were saying made sense to me, but this was the first time that I ever thought to myself ‘this really helps me to understand the world around me’. And so, it was that moment, […] that I decided I would major in sociology.

And still, he graduated on time. I found it very inspiring that Dr. Reitman was self-professed “not goal-oriented” throughout college, and he still found his way through undergrad, graduate school, and to a successful career that he absolutely loves.

Additionally, in our interview, Dr. Reitman expressed to me that, growing up, he wanted to be a cowboy; He still does.