Professor Emeritus Jane Hallinger has been named Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year for 2016 by the PCC Faculty Association.

Hallinger, who has been at the college for more than four decades, is being recognized for her body of work and years of extraordinary service for the FA, other campus and statewide groups, and related activism.

Among her many activities, she served on the board of the PCCFA for four years, including one year as secretary. She also served about 20 years on the Academic Senate including stints as its president and vice president. “It was so long ago it was still called the Faculty Senate,” she quipped. “I consider those years as Senate president one of my best accomplishments.”

She also served more than a decade on the board of the statewide Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC), including three years as its president.

Hallinger has had a storied career as an instructor at PCC, beginning as a reader in the English Department. She got the job, she says, after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake that scared a woman in the position so much that she said “take my job” and left the state for Las Vegas. Hallinger then taught several 1A English classes as she worked on a degree from CSU Los Angeles.

“I did several semesters of filling in full time for faculty members who were out for the semester. This shows how casual it was in the 70s. I worked too often and too long and was automatically tenured when hired. Today, one can barely walk out of a room without filing papers,” she said.

Hallinger earned a Communication’s degree in the 1960’s from Indiana University and began teaching a film class. “Then, since there were no separate degrees for ESL, I began to teach that,” she said.

Later, Hallinger developed a play writing class and this was her introduction to the Theater Department. “Since I went to our [study abroad] Oxford program three times, I started teaching Humanities through the Arts, and co-taught it in a campus block program with a philosophy teacher Robert Doud. So I was grandfathered into those areas in the days when all was very relaxed,” she said.

Hallinger co-led a number of trips to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and has co-led PCC’s Theatre in London course many times. She has taught in and directed the Oxford, England Semester Abroad program and developed tours to China and Vietnam.

Hallinger helped launch a Sister Cities program at PCC for the Pasadena Sister Cities to bring students from Finland, Japan and Germany to the school for a summer session and she helped select PCC students for summer exchange visits to those countries. “I was also vice president and president of Pasadena Sister Cities for several years and helped establish our relationship with China and with another group that established a friendship relationship with Paju, Korea.

Hallinger even spent 10 days in North Korea, “which was akin to entering a world of draconian make-believe,” she said. She has also taught in China twice, once for an eight-week summer program and four months at a community college where only five faculty spoke English. She spoke zilch Chinese.

She was the first PCC faculty member to get a scholarship to the Great Teachers Summer Program in Santa Barbara. This was an idea she brought back to the campus, where then-President Jack Scott asked her to set up a similar program. “I developed one for our faculty [but it] only lasted one year as we did it off campus,” she recalled. “We also did a program that took a year to complete where every employee of the college was invited to meetings where we discussed how to improve the college. Jack and I called the time period the golden years.”

A long-time adviser to the English Department’s Inscape magazine, Hallinger is also a published poet. Her book, “In the midst of life,” has been available on Amazon since January, 2015.

– by Warren Swil