After almost 50 years spent at Hillsdale as both an undergraduate and a professor, Professor of French Ellen Justice-Templeton ’71 is retiring at the end of this year.
Having graduated from Hillsdale in 1971 and completed graduate work at the University of Michigan before coming back to the college, Justice-Templeton said she has seen and experienced many changes since she has been at Hillsdale.
“It’s been an amazing ride here,” she said. “It’s been a tremendous evolution of the campus. The physical plant is beautiful now, and there are beautiful campus buildings. The students have become even more enjoyable to teach than when I first got here. I always had good students, from the very beginning. The best students back then could hold their own right now, but the general changeover in the college is very apparent in that there are more of that kind of student.”
Justice-Templeton said she didn’t know what career she wanted when she first entered Hillsdale, but her time student-teaching at Hillsdale High School and the education classes she took at Hillsdale led her to teaching.
“I really enjoyed trying to connect with students and showing students things that opened up their mind a little bit,” she said. “I enjoyed the high school students. I thought I wanted the chance to teach more literature and the great ideas.”
The teaching of great literature and delving into great ideas is exactly what many of her students said endeared them to her. Sophomore Kathryn Wong has taken two classes with her, and said that she enjoyed them greatly.
“I’ve only had her for classes that are literature classes,” Wong said. “In both of those classes, she does an excellent job of getting us to go beyond the plots. In a French class, it’d be really easy to just stick with the plot. She helps us bring together imagery and symbolism and getting to the deeper themes of the text, which is something I really appreciate.”
For Professor of French and the next chair of the department Marie-Claire Morellec, Justice-Templeton has been both a great co-worker and a dear friend for the past 20 years, since Morellec started teaching at Hillsdale.
“She was not only a wonderful colleague and a wonderful chair — very easy to work with — but also became a really close friend, so I think her retirement is sweet and sour,” she said. “Sweet because we’re happy that she’s going to be retiring and doing the things that she deserves to do, but sour in the sense that we are seeing her leave, and that’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be quite a transition. We’ve been relying on her in so many ways for so long — these are going to be big shoes for me to fill.”
In preparation for her retirement and Morellec’s new position as chair, Dean of Faculty Mark Nussbaum said the department has hired two new professors for next year, in preparation for Professor of French Maria Rebbert’s retirement in a year. Nussbaum said he’s appreciated working with Justice-Templeton as well.
“She is very level-headed,” Nussbaum said. “She is not easily rattled and is very clear-headed. The area in which I’ve worked with her the most was in deciding the new core, and I’ve appreciated her level-headedness and her rationality.”
After her retirement, Justice-Templeton said she plans on relaxing and reading in Hillsdale, and eventually traveling through the United States and Europe with her husband.
“It’s a wonderful thing to be ending up your career at this point,” she said. “I have such wonderful students, and it’s a real pleasure to teach.”
Morellec said her presence will be greatly missed.
“There is a calmness and grace about her that hides an amazing strength,” Morellec said. “She’s highly-principled, very kind, and loyal. She’s always looking in the interest of students, the department, and the college. I’m going to miss my friend. And we will miss her in the department as well.”
