South Africa, Hurricane Sandy and Blue Markers to the Head
The Quirky Path of Professor Sara Angevine
Imagine you’re in the middle of Wisconsin.
Blink.
Now you’re among the sand dunes in South Africa.
Blink.
Now you’re stuck in the library basement at Whittier College.
Who are you?
I’m Sara.
Sarah Joe?
No, Sara Jane.
Dr. Sara J. Angevine learned from a young age that learning how to adapt is necessary and sometimes hard. Things don’t always go as planned, but if you keep going, they sometimes work out. For example, Angevine never planned on becoming a professor of Research Methods and American Government at Whittier College. In fact, going to graduate school or getting a PhD in Political Science wasn’t on her to-do list as a child. But, then again, neither was watching her parents get divorced and bouncing between her parents’ households as a kid. As difficult as that may have been, it was then that Angevine discovered that it was she who needed to acclimate herself to different spaces.
When her parents remarried, Angevine gained a set of stepparents , but she also gained siblings from the new marriages — one of whom was named Sarah Joe. “Going from house to house wasn’t an issue,” laughs Angevine. “But imagine how it must’ve been to be in a house where there are two Saras!”
Angevine grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and despite the complexities of her homelife, managed to star on the school volleyball team. Angevine attended Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she continued to play volleyball and studied journalism during her first years there.
Then, 9/11 happened.
“I remember watching on the news and seeing everyone run towards the Pentagon. I couldn’t stomach it,” she says, looking out the window of the kitchen in Platner Hall. Angevine realized that rather than covering such events as a reporter, she wanted to research and examine how such events come to happen in the first place, focusing on the “truth” behind the events. “Research is stimulating for me,” Angevine says sipping tea out of a white porcelain mug, her voice hoarse as she fights off the cold sweeping through Whittier College campus. “It teaches us to fight the oppression via information. It’s a form of social justice. But, much like in journalism, you are looking for evidence that is not necessarily in plain sight. You find out whether something is bull or not.”
Angevine ended up graduating from Hamline in 2002 with a degree in Communications, Women’s Studies and Political Science. She thought her next step might be to apply to law school, but a colleague suggested that Angevine consider going to Rutgers University to study Women’s and Gender studies. Instead of law school or Rutgers, Angevine set her eyes on the South African coast where she pursued a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape as a means to study abroad and investigate what most interested her. Angevine helped pay for the experience with the money her grandmother had set aside for a wedding that she had no plans for. “It was the best decision of my life,” laughs Angevine, running a hand through her short brown hair, noting that the adventure was cheaper than what a wedding would’ve cost.
South Africa turned out to be an unforgettable experience for Angevine, who has returned several times to visit. She reminisces about backpacking up the coast from South Africa and looking up at the millions of shining diamonds scattered across the sky from the sand dunes in Namibia.
“I traveled with some friends, some times I even went alone… you’re fearless when you’re younger. And I recommend everyone do that at some point in their life,” says Angevine. “Be fearless.”
Angevine returned to the United States in 2006 to earn her PhD in Political Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, studying at Rutgers University, when Hurricane Sandy struck New York. She was rousted from bed with the news. “I just remember waking up and hearing someone say, ‘Sara, there are kids without food,’” she recalls, “’You need to do something about this.’” While Park Slope was relatively unaffected by the hurricane’s wrath, nearby Red Hook was devastated.
Angevine got busy organizing a “drop off” outside of her building for donations and goods for those in need: it was a success. Soon she coordinated runners to drop off the goods, and this started a distribution (canned food, diapers, batteries) center of sorts for the community. Angevine, who was then teaching at Brooklyn College while working towards her PhD at Rutgers, and other volunteers were overwhelmed by the amount of work. So, they teamed up with a church and local restaurant to house the donated goods and build a soup-kitchen. This group would then become the Hurricane Sandy Relief Kitchen.
Daily, the volunteers made several deliveries a day and served more 1,000 meals prepared by just a few volunteers. Angevine took to Facebook to recruit more volunteers, but even then noticed that what was sorely missing from the primarily poor neighborhoods’ suffering the most from Hurricane Sandy was aid from the local government. “The city didn’t seem to want to help,” she says, noting that without the city’s intervention and commitment to reconstruction some affected areas were going to be bulldozed because they were “prime real estate.”
The ongoing demand for help and the lack of aid from the local government soon took a toll on the volunteers, including Angevine. She returned to her studies, eventually earning her PhD at Rutgers University in 2014 while teaching at Brooklyn College.
After getting her PhD, Angevine’s next stop was to join the Poet community. She likes to remind people that change is good, and change can happen often. You can change careers 3, 4 even 5 times. Sometimes it’s progress. “You constantly need to readjust yourself… that’s tough, but then it makes change easier. Dynamics change, and you have to change with them.”
Angevine jokes that one of the biggest adjustments she’s had to make as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science is still trying to cope with having to physically go out and buy dinner, rather than simply order in like she did in New York. Oh, and of course, the weather can’t compare to that of New York’s.
Angevine says that so far, the Whittier campus and its students have made this particular change a warm one. “Students here at Whittier are inspirational… and interesting,” she says enthusiastically. Angevine says she is excited to be surrounded by a significant number of first-generation students and such a large Latino student population (Whittier College was recognized as a Hispanic-serving institution in 2012). Diversity is something that interests her as a political scientist dealing in research and methodology.
Angevine said one of the most positive aspects of Whittier’s diversity was the number of students that actually want to learn versus those who feel “entitled” or feel “like they know it all.” She feels that at Whittier College there are less students “taking up space” which in turns leaves room to teach. But this also leaves room to learn.
Today, Angevine is confined to the freezing temperatures and freshly painted walls of the library basement, teaching Research Methods to upperclassmen and American Government to undergraduates of all ages. When she isn’t in the basement or stuck in the middle of LA traffic, Angevine can be found on the top floor of Platner (the magestic Political Science Department building at Whittier College) where students hunt her down for extra review of the material. “This class seemed so intimiditing, the material can be difficult, but I like it. Prof. Angevine is helpful and actually answers our questions,” says Sacha Pomares, a junior taking Angevine’s Research Methods class.
Equipped with humor and eccentricity, Angevine comes prepared to teach those students willing to learn and prepared with numerous jokes and comebacks when caught off guard: hand movements, strolls around the class, punching the walls, marking up the walls — you never really know what Angevine will do, but you can see the spark in her blue eyes and often hear laughter exploding from the room. “She’s just so funny. I love to come to her class because she always has a joke for us,” adds Russell de la Rosa, one of Angevine’s students who notoriously bursts into fits of laughter during class sessions.
“You’re all political science majors. Have any of you read Kant?”
Silence.
“I KANT believe it.”
Class is never boring, despite the topic of the course she is teaching. In addition to her brown briefcase and multicolored water bottle, Angevine always carries with her multicolored Expo markers, two in each hand — one to write on the walls and whiteboard and the other to launch at unsuspecting sleeping students. Even the targets of such attacks find it in good humor. “I was up all night doing her assignment. I just wanted to lay my head down and BAM! Blue marker on my head,” laughs Gawen Grunloh. “It definitely woke me up.”
