Upon Retirement: Professor of Psychology Tom Schoeneman

After 43 years, Professor of Psychology Tom Schoeneman is retiring from teaching at Lewis & Clark. In the following Q&A, Schoeneman looks back at his favorite courses to teach and what he enjoyed most about his work.

What was your path to Lewis & Clark?

I got all of my academic degrees at SUNY Buffalo (BA Psychology, 1973; MS Social Sciences, 1974; PhD Clinical Psychology 1979), and in my final year there I was accepted to a clinical internship at the Portland VA Hospital. My wife Mary and I had never been west of Ohio, so we put our six-month-old daughter Katie in the car and camped across the US to Portland. The trip was a revelation and, although we were quite poor on an intern’s salary, we loved it here in the Pacific Northwest.

Then I got my first job as an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota. It was a good job, but Grand Forks was not the kind of place that we wanted to commit to for the long haul, so I began applying for other academic jobs straightaway. In my third year at UND, I got my one and only interview: Lewis & Clark College. (No pressure.) I hadn’t been to the College during the year we lived in Portland, but in the interview, I was impressed with the beauty of the campus and reminded of the beauty of Portland generally. And I met some interesting professors and students. I got the job!

What was your favorite course(s) to teach?

I loved all of the courses that I taught. But I’d have to say that my favorite was PSY 440: Social Construction of Madness (SCM). Throughout my research career, I had always been interested in how people make sense of their experience, and some courses in Anthropology made me interested in cultural influences on our “negotiated understanding” of our world. In particular, I was interested in how we construct the Other as a way of defining ourselves and our values by contrast and of making sense of misfortune. Since I am a clinical psychologist who teaches Abnormal Psychology, one type of Otherness was a particular interest: mental disorder. SCM was my way of moving beyond Abnormal Psychology to look under the hood, so to speak, and examine the assumptions beneath our understanding of “abnormality.”

This class was a favorite for a number of reasons:

First, there was an organic relationship between the teaching of this class and my research. Most of us teach classes in our areas of research, and that was certainly true of SCM: Scholarship informs teaching. But interestingly, SCM also generated scholarship. That is, many of the classroom activities in this class later became formal analyses of images and metaphors of madness. These were published in professional journals, all with student co-authors who had taken the class.

Second, this was a very interdisciplinary course. I had no idea what a liberal arts education was until I came to L&C, but it turns out that in my own education, I had in fact been pursuing a breadth of interests while at a state university. (For instance, as an undergraduate, I had trouble deciding whether to major in Psychology, Biology, or English.) So I like to roam around the disciplines. SCM included clinical, social, cognitive, and affective psychology; medical anthropology; art history; film, theatre, and literature; philosophy of science; critical theory; history of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology; and feminist theory.

Third, I love film and I love teaching film. I smuggled a film course into SCM. Every Tuesday evening we saw films related to madness (yes, of course, Psycho, but also King of Hearts, Sunset Boulevard, Rosemary’s Baby, The Lady from Shanghai, M, The Thin Blue Line, sex, lies and videotape, and more). We had a film textbook so that students could analyze these depictions of madness with precision.

Finally, and most important, students loved this class and participated with enthusiasm. And many have told me that it was transformative. For instance, four years after her graduation, a former student—someone whose intellect I admire—commented that “I think about that course all the time! SCM has had long-lasting impacts on the way I see the world. That is special.” It is, and I’ve had similar comments from many other students. And that’s what kept me going for all the years I’ve been in the classroom.

One other favorite, not really a course, but a semester experience: overseas programs. I have been the faculty leader for eight programs: Kenya (1990), Australia (2003, 2005), London (2007, 2011), and Dublin (2015, 2019, 2025). Prior to the Kenya program, my international experience consisted of a handful of trips to Toronto and Winnipeg. So I chose to go to equatorial Africa as my first overseas immersion, along with my family that included kids aged 9 and 12. It was tough (malaria, unreliable logistics, heat, etc.) but it was transformative. This group of former students still gets together every five years or so—we have a 35-year reunion planned for next summer. Also, one of the students on that program, Blythe Knott, is currently Lewis & Clark’s Director of Overseas and Off-Campus Programs.

But all of my overseas programs have been transformative, for Mary and I and for our students. Getting to lead these programs is a major, major perk of employment at L&C, and I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to do it.

What did you enjoy most about your work?

The relationships. Research collaborations with students. Interacting with students in the classroom, in both lecture and discussion formats. Maintaining and revising the major with colleagues in the department. Interacting with colleagues across the campus on committees and common syllabus courses like Inventing America. Conversations with staff members and administrators. Of all of these, though, the student-teacher relationship was most rewarding and most important.

What changed the most during your time at the college? What remained constant?

There are many, many changes. Foremost is that L&C was not a research institution 43 years ago. The exception was the Psychology department. When I was hired, I was given the expectation that I would do collaborative research with undergraduate students. That sounded fine to me, since I was establishing an identity as a researcher at my first position at UND, and I got to work right away. But I discovered that the Psych department was an early adopter of the scholar-teacher model, and an outlier as a result. I was told by senior colleagues in other departments that “You can’t be a good teacher and a good researcher at the same time” and that “In my discipline, we can’t do scholarship with undergrads because you need a graduate degree to understand our research.” By the time ten years had passed, the tide was turning and both of the aforementioned statements were no longer true. And nowadays, we do an excellent job of including students in our research and creative endeavors across the departments on campus.

And then there is the physical plant. In the early ’80s, the library was a building on concrete stilts that was about 1/3 its current size. Where Howard Hall stands there was a line of “temporary” (for decades) one-story faculty office buildings and classrooms. Several departments were housed in small ranch houses on the hill above Fowler (née Templeton) where the newer dorms now stand. No Miller building; the Art department was in a kind of extended, ramshackle shack. The BioPsych building was new. The graduate school campus was a convent. With the exception of the Manor House and reflecting pool grounds, the reigning landscaping philosophy was “Let it grow.” And there was an outdoor pool.

What hasn’t changed?

The connection between students and professors—in the lab/studio, classroom, faculty office, hallways, everywhere—has been a constant hallmark of the excellence of a Lewis & Clark education. This connection also kept me and my colleagues going throughout all the years of long hours and short pay.

What’s something people might not know about you?

Early in my career, I was a scholar of witchcraft beliefs and witch hunts (the real, historical kind, not the Trumpian complaints). In my Masters in Social Science program, I took a course called Anthropology of Religion taught by Phillips Stevens, Jr. It was primarily about the anthropology and European history of witchcraft beliefs. My final paper for this course became my first professional publication: “The Witch Hunt as a Culture Change Phenomenon” (1975), published in Ethos, an anthropology journal. I then went on to write a series of papers critical of the history of psychiatry in abnormal psych textbooks that portrayed the European witch hunts as a misguided persecution of the mentally ill. These appeared in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, American Journal of Psychiatry, and Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.

What is your favorite place on campus?

This is going to sound terrible, but: my office. It’s bigger than most, has two windows and is lit by lamps rather than fluorescents, and it’s full of books and DVDs. A home away from home.

What are you most proud of?

First, Internships. The College is currently emphasizing the need to get students off the campus and out into the community for service learning. For something like 50 years, the Psychology Department has had an internship class. Students work 10 hours a week at local social service agencies and come together in a discussion class that includes readings, weekly assignments, and a capstone term paper. Contrary to popular belief, I did not originate this course: It was in place in the Psych department when I arrived, but it was handed to me as a part of my teaching load. Originally, it was handled using the 444 practicum course number, meaning that in a class of 12 students, I would end up with 12 grade sheets. We soon converted this regime into an actual class: PSY 445: Internship. I was the sole instructor of the class for a decade or so, and then in the ’90s, other psych faculty members became instructors. The department now teaches several sections of PSY 445, sending approximately 30-40 students per year into the community.

I did, however, initiate PSY 345: Overseas Internship. Starting with the department’s first Australia summer program in 2005, we began building an internship class into our overseas programs. Subsequent semester programs in London and Dublin have sent our students for two days per week into British and Irish workplaces using the same model as PSY 445 in Portland.

Second, a couple of special alumni: Kate Schoeneman (’00, Psychology) and Brian Schoeneman (’05, Communications), my two kids. Kate went on to receive a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Nebraska and Brian has an MBA from the University of Denver. Kate has been active in forensic threat assessment with the FBI, US Marshalls, and the Pinkerton agency. Brian is in marketing and has already co-founded and sold his own agency. (I should also note that Kate is currently an adjunct professor in the L&C Psych Department: She is teaching two of my former classes, Abnormal Psych and Personality Theory, and is currently situated in my former office.)

I’ll also include a shout-out to my wife of 49 years, Mary. She supported all three of us throughout our schooling. And she was also co-leader (and student favorite) for all eight of our overseas programs.

What’s next for you?

TBD. Travel, certainly. Downsizing eventually. I will definitely be spending more time with my granddaughters Nellie, Rose, and Josie. Mary and I may be eligible for Irish citizenship if we can come up with the relevant documents for our respective immigrant great-grandparents, so that’s a project. But once retirement is settled, I’ll be looking around for new interests and activities.