Norm McElvany retires after 22 years at JSC

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Norm McElvany sits behind his desk, glasses perched on his nose as he talks. Although he hasn’t found any lost national artifacts (that he disclosed) or has been chased by violent cult members (that he admitted to), for a marketing professor he’s had some exciting classes in European countries.  After years of teaching at Johnson State College he is retiring and he says the unknowns of retirement can feel a little daunting, but he sums up his job at Johnson State College as “serendipity.”

In 1991 he found himself unemployed, but at the urging of a friend picked up a job as an adjunct professor at UVM in marketing, something he had been involved with for years in the ski industry. The part-time job was barely enough to pay for gas, so he picked up another adjunct position at JSC in January of ’92.  Shortly after, a full-time position opened and he threw his hat in. He figured he’d stay for one semester. Instead he stayed for 22 years.

For the first decade he continued working as an adjunct professor at UVM, but left when his department began overhauling the program. He was okay with that, though.

“I liked the smaller classes here,” he says. “At UVM I taught in an amphitheatre with about seventy-five kids.” Sometimes all he ever saw was the brim of a hat and never had eye contact with the students. With Johnson’s smaller classes it was easier to form professional relationships with his students, he says. “Whether the students want it or not, it’s easier to be a mentor here.”

But his connections at UVM led to one of his highlights as a teacher at JSC. The man is in love with traveling and has shared the bug with his students, taking about a dozen class trips in the past decade. When he was planning his first Johnson class trip to Italy he ran into a UVM colleague who introduced McElvany to his foreign exchange student who just happened to be the grandson of the Contessa Corsini in Florence.

“I couldn’t have bought that trip,” he says with a proud smile. After getting to know the family, the class got amazing quarters including private tours of galleries not open to the public. He says some of the books they got to see were giant, dusty tomes difficult to even open. On the wall he saw books going back to the year 1000. The Contessa apologized to them that she couldn’t show them the “old section,” however.

Experiences like that, he says, are what he hopes his students will remember of his classes. “You can’t plan it, buy it, or replicate it.”

One of McElvany’s colleagues, Todd Comen, says that McElvany’s real-world experience from the ski-industry really helped bring the subject alive for his students with applied knowledge.

On a personal note, Comen says that McElvany’s been a close friend for years. “I’ve been here 17 years and he was my mentor, and he was a good mentor. I’ve always been entrepreneurial; having been a small business owner before teaching here I’d always had coworkers. Norm helped me know what it felt like to have colleagues.”

“JSC has been very good for me,” McElvany says. “There’s a strong sense of camaraderie with the staff and faculty. That’s what kept me here. Experiences and friends, that’s what life is about.”

Between that and his office “man cave,” those are the things he will miss most. His office holds dozens of souvenirs from his class trips and personal travels. Irish drinking glasses, a tiny Irish drum, Rossignol skis, and pictures of Italy, Ireland, and London plastered on the wall. A world map is stowed behind a well-used couch which provided a comfortable seat for students and a cushy sleeping place for exhausted faculty. McElvany says his office was the most welcoming on campus. “It’s an office but it doesn’t have to be sterile.”

His most cherished memento, however, is reverently folded and stored in his closet behind his filing cabinet. The story begins in the mid ‘90s on a night after hours back when classes were done for the day.

“For a while morale was low,” he says. “And at that time people had expected I would be finding a new job, because I told them this was just part-time. So I came back from a trip and I called them into my office. They were all like, ‘Oh, this is it, he found another job.’ But I asked them to sit down and then said, ‘I have found religion.’”

He says the surprised faculty wasn’t sure how to react as McElvany proceeded to pull out a purple shirt that read “The Church Brew Works” and slipped it on. The shirt was from a trip he had just returned from where he had visited a pub in Pittsburgh that was in a renovated Roman Catholic Church that had kept the religious feel to the building.

“I’m starting a church and you are my first members,” he told them. Then he gave each a glass with the same logo and invited them to join in his first communion, some beer he had brought in. It became a tradition to gather on Friday nights when school was over and have some bread, cheese, and a little beverage to start the weekend. They’ve met less frequently in the recent years, but McElvany says he still has very fond memories of the “communions.”

He says it’s definitely his time to retire, though he will miss his good friends and colleagues as well as meeting young entrepreneurs. It’s  been rewarding to spend the last two decades watching students grow, several who went on to become successful business people making six-figured paychecks. He says life is what you make of it, and not to let perceived restrictions keep you from attaining your dreams.

His last words of advice to students: “Study. Read. The smartest people I know have never gone to college but all were voracious readers.”