Saint Xavier University’s Department of Communication will soon be one member short. After 35 years, Dr. Julie McNellis will be retiring from her position as Associate Professor.
For McNellis, retirement from Saint Xavier does not mean retirement from education, however.
“I intend to be very active and will focus on some aspect of education…be it tutoring or grant writing,” she said.
Education has always been a part of McNellis’s life. She moved from her birthplace of Madison, Wisconsin to St. Paul Minnesota to complete her undergraduate degree in English and Speech Education at the College of Saint Catherine.
In 1971, she arrived in Chicago to teach English but soon landed a position at Saint Xavier College in 1978.
From the time she began working at Saint Xavier, McNellis said she had a passion for interacting specifically with freshmen and transfer students who were new to the school.
She said she was always interested in developing extracurricular activities to bring such students into college life.
To that end, she observes, in her view, a positive shift at Saint Xavier and in higher education in general, from a more teacher-centered classroom to a more student-centered experience.
“It’s been exciting seeing the growth of residence life…it has brought a feel to the campus that wasn’t always there,” said McNellis, who notices a broader excitement and engagement on the part of today’s students.
As a professor of communication, McNellis sees the growth of new communicative technologies as a major impetus of this increase in student engagement.
She recalled the initial arrival of a machine at Saint Xavier in the mid-1980’s called a computer. Although she admitted that many faculty members were hesitant to adopt this new piece of technology at the time, she herself “was open to [it].”
Since then, she said it has been “fascinating to watch how technology has impacted the learning process,” changing how students learn and professors teach.
Although she can remember a time before many of the technologies that are taken for granted today were developed, McNellis believes that teachers “need to accept new technology to be relevant to students’ needs.”
As she sat reflecting on her time at the university, McNellis recalled certain memorable moments.
She remembered her participation in an international conference held at SXU in 1997 entitled, “Children in the World: Exploring the Rights of the Child,” which was the first such conference to ever take place in the United States.
She said she enjoyed the conference’s “emphasis on collaborating with colleagues on things that you believe in.”
McNellis also recalled a funnier moment when she first began at Saint Xavier as a young doctoral candidate.
She would come in late to work on her dissertation and two of the senior faculty at the time, Dr. Hassan Haddad and Sister Denis O’Grady, would constantly check in on her to make sure she was ok.
Finally, around 11:00 p.m. one evening, Sister O’Grady told McNellis she was leaving for the night. She indeed left, but not without stationing a public safety worker outside McNellis’s door to make sure no intruders came. “They made him stand there until I was finished,” laughed McNellis.
On a more serious note, she spoke of the senior faculty at the time, like Haddad and O’Grady, as supportive and very inspirational.
Now, 35 years later, McNellis is a senior faculty member herself. She has four grown children and eight grandchildren, who she plans on spending even more time with after retirement.
Aside from continuing to occasionally volunteer and work in education (she plans to still teach a class each semester at Saint Xavier for the near future), she plans on enjoying bike riding and hiking.
McNellis praised Saint Xavier overall as being “a very close-knit and supportive family.” Despite officially leaving, she said, “I always will feel like SXU is home.”
Tony Bara
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