This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Matt Hoover.  He was born in Voorhees and raised in Collingswood, New Jersey.  Both of his parents were unionized supermarket clerks who worked for various ACME stores in southern New Jersey.  They did a wide variety of jobs, sometimes in the bakery, sometimes the meat department, sometimes the cash register, and so on.  They retired at the onset of the pandemic.  He has a younger sister who went to Richard Stockton University and studied hospitality and hotel management.  Matt and his sister attended Catholic schools.  Matt graduated from Camden Catholic High School in 2011.  Four years later, he graduated with degrees in history and economics from Rowan University.  He was in the history honors society, Phi Alpha Theta, and completed the Honors Concentration and the International Studies minor.  In his senior year, he was invited to work for Camden Catholic in a support role doing a wide variety of tasks.  After a year, when a history teacher retired, he applied for the position and won the job and began teaching social studies. In addition to teaching a variety of social studies courses, he moderated the debate and ethics bowl teams and briefly served as department chair. He was honored to receive the Good Shepherd Award in 2023, given annually by the vote of the graduating class to the teacher who demonstrates care of students through teaching, example, and positive relationships. He was also involved in the New Jersey Catholic Teachers Union, serving two years as executive treasurer, and helping successfully negotiate three contracts with school administration. After working at his alma mater for a total of eight years, he changed jobs and began working at Thomas Jefferson University as a grant administrator.  He has been in this role for the past year.

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I can’t remember ever deciding that I would go to college.  It just seemed liked that was what one did.  Both of my parents graduated from Rutgers-Camden.  I applied to many colleges, St. Joseph’s, Fordham, the University of Scranton, and several others.  I had wanted to go to Fordham, but my father pushed hard for Rowan because it was so much more affordable.  In the end, I came to Rowan somewhat begrudgingly. I look back now, however, and believe that my father was right.  I ended up having a great experience in college, and I have seen the downside of college debt that has befallen several of my former classmates.  I began as a history major because I had some great high school history teachers.  I found the subject fascinating, and I was the type of student that needed to be studying something that I enjoyed. I could not have done many other majors, like business, simply because it might one day reward me with a higher-paying job.

I was part of the CLIO learning community, and I had you, Dr. Carrigan, and Dr. Heinzen in my first semester.  My early impression of the Department was that the history faculty were very present and very visible on campus.  They knew me by name from that first semester, and it was great being “seen” in this way.  I remember that the Department sponsored many lectures and events on campus.  I got involved with the Student History Association and Phi Alpha Theta.  The CLIO program and these two groups helped the students to bond, and we knew each other as well.  It felt cohesive.  I picked up a second major in economics, but that Department was very different than history, as it was going through a transition of sorts at the time.  Faculty were retiring, and new ones were being hired.  The result was that I never felt connected to the economics faculty or my fellow economics majors in the same way. 

I was admitted into the Honors program, and I lived in the Mullica dormitory with other Honors students during my freshman year.  The following year, my class became one of the very first to live together in the Whitney Center.  As a result, I became good friends with a number of other Honors students, even though they were in different majors.  The Honors courses were also very interesting.  I remember taking a great philosophy course with Professor Abe Witonsky and “Location and Dislocation in Narratives of Place” with Professor Sandy Tweedie.

In addition to Western Civilization to 1660, I took Historical Methods and Stalinism with Dr. Heinzen.  I even completed an independent study with him, sponsored by the Honors program. I ended up producing a paper on understanding Vladmir Lenin through the context of Russian anarchism (instead of the more traditional perspective of Marxism).   I later presented this paper at the regional Phi Alpha Theta conference in Washington, D.C. Dr. Heinzen was always very patient with me and my diverging interests throughout his courses.

Another faculty member that I remember very well was Corinne Blake.  I took World History since 1500 and a course on the Arab-Israeli Conflict with her.  She pushed me to be a better student.  For most of my academic career, I had always been able to submit papers that my teachers or professors found to be good.  She was more critical of my writing.  She gave me good advice and helped me improve.

British historian Stephen Hague was a fairly new addition to the History Department.  I can’t remember the class, but one of my most memorable college experiences was the day that he took us outside on the Robinson Green to play a game of cricket.  I can remember taking a graduate section of his course The British Empire.  I had talked him into offering this section, as I wanted to take another class with him.  At the time, I was in the 4+1 program.  There were three of us in this grad section, me, Rachel Corma, and Natalie Hiester.  I quite enjoyed this experience, which involved us participating in the undergraduate portion of class as well as meeting with Dr. Hague separately.  I remember that the graduate students were asked to lead a class session on a book reading.  On my assigned day, it quickly became clear that the undergraduates had not read the book.  This was the single best lesson that I ever had in terms of preparing me to become a teacher.  All of my carefully planned questions were no longer going to work. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I believe Dr. Hague interceded to help me get through the full 75 minutes.

I took two classes with Dr. Joy Wiltenburg.  Like Dr. Blake, she also pushed me to become a better student.  I found her own research to be fascinating.  I took Senior Seminar with her, and the course was on “History and Emotion.”  This was a new way to appreciate history that I had never considered before.  My paper was on Robespierre and his religious cult during the French Revolution.

Nine years after graduating, I look back at Rowan and see it as an important time in my life, one in which I began to mature as a student and as a person.  Even at the end, however, I was still a bit immature relative to today.  For example, I regret the way that things ended.  I was in the 4+1 program, but I dropped out in the middle of the semester when I got this job offer at Camden Catholic.  I would now handle things differently.  I would have explained what was happening to the faculty better or found a way to complete at least that semester’s work.  Despite this part of my last semester, I really enjoyed my overall time at Rowan.  It was fun to be there during a time of expansion for the University.  I also made friends that persist to the present.  The faculty in the History Department did a great job of helping me improve my critical thinking, my writing, and my research skills.  Even though I now work in a career that is not directly related to the study of history, the general reasoning ability that I honed and improved in my history courses is of great utility to me in my present role.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_all/project_100+.html