Bernadette Waterman Ward, Ph.D.
Professor, English
My father finished high school and took a commercial training course so he could go into logistics for trucking. My mother had to leave school at fifteen when her mother died, so she could care for her sisters. My parents valued education and sacrificed a lot of comforts to send all nine of us children to Catholic schools. One of my high school teachers suggested that I apply to Harvard when he saw my test scores. Scholarships paid for much of my education. Because my parents could not contribute much, I worked at least twenty hours a week during my undergraduate years–thirty my senior year so I could pay all outstanding bills and graduate. I knew I was getting a huge opportunity to learn, and I loved learning. My professors encouraged me to go on; I wanted to start a mobile school for migrant farmworkers, having seen the need. After a year of trying to figure out how to do that and getting training for it, I was unable to find the money. Along with my desire to serve others who had difficult backgrounds, I was in love with poetry. Plan B was a Ph.D. in English at Stanford, which does give graduate students a stipend--not quite enough to live on, but in those days enough for rent. As a grad student, I was able to found a literacy program that got a couple of hundred people enough English and civics lessons to obtain green cards under the Reagan immigration amnesty. I still worked about twenty hours a week, except when a fellowship made it possible to concentrate on my dissertation. Dane Waterman met and married me during grad school. I worked for ten years at the State University of New York at Oswego, winning tenure. I was dissatisfied with the lack of coherence in the education provided there. In 2000, I abandoned tenure to come to the University of Dallas, where I have loved teaching ever since, both in Irving and in Rome. Once my children were grown, I again taught English to immigrants as a volunteer, until the pandemic stopped the classes. Now that I am back from sabbatical, I may be able to find a way to start doing that again.