Since 1974, John Carvellas's larger-than-life presence has resonated with students and fellow faculty, in the classroom, on the athletic fields and beyond
By Mark Tarnacki
Photographs by Andy Duback
A few notes and a friendly audience in the palm of his hand, economics professor John Carvellas riffed affably last fall on the history, personalities and possibilities of Saint Michael’s College.
“I say this often. I am really happy that I’ve helped make this school good enough that they wouldn't hire me now,” Carvellas quipped in a well received keynote speech at the Academic Convocation last September.
Popular among students and colleagues for his self-depreciating and mildly irreverent style, the burly former college football lineman has been a fixture in the classroom and at Purple Knights men’s and women’s home sports events as a fan over the last 33 years. He has also coached club football and women’s lacrosse as an assistant and served years as NCAA faculty representative, entering the college’s Athletic Hall of Fame 1999. He’s made a reputation as a generous host, mentor and friend to countless international students and taught semesters in Mexico. Carvellas has also earned seven awards for excellence in teaching, a yearbook dedication, the Gerald Dupont Award and the Norbert Kuntz Service Award; recently, the Professor John Carvellas Scholarship in Economics was established in his honor.
He has taught thousands of students, and still can picture most of them. “I taught four or five classes of 30 students per semester from my early years, so conservatively, that’s 100 students each year, which would be more than 3,300, and I can remember half their names probably,” he said.
After 30 years at Saint Michael’s, he’s lightening his teaching load so that he is only teaching during the fall semester. But he remains committed to his students and his pedagogy, albeit in a most unpretentious manner, keeping in mind two good bits of advice for teachers—Carvellas calls them “T-shirt philosophies”—that he heard long ago.
The first came via his old friend, Chief Information Officer Bill Anderson, who was just 23 when he began with Carvellas in the business department in 1974. Anderson asked a mentor for advice for the nervous new academics and came away with a simple mantra that he shared with Carvellas: “Always respect your students.”
“I’ve always tried to remember that,” Carvellas said. “It doesn’t mean always be nice to your students. But try to get what you can from them, and by respecting them you can get more from them.”
His other favorite teaching advice came from an old pro at a Boston high school where he once taught. “‘Remember ONE thing: Make every third sentence a question,’” Carvellas recalls being told.
“And when I do that,” Carvellas said, “I always have my best classes. When the material is most technical, that’s when it’s easiest to follow that rule.” In any of his large Principles of Economics sections, he considers it a good class when “all 35 students have had at least one question.”
“As soon as I know their name, I’m right at them, and not with general questions,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘will you repeat that?’ I’ll say ‘no, but I’ll be back.’ The key is, get them to see that they understand it without you. The few you can get to do that will get it and won’t even have to study.”
Renegade Faculty Athlete
His classroom antics are well-known. Economics Professor Herb Kessel, who came to Saint Michael’s not long after Carvellas, says he has witnessed “more than a few of John’s unique, some may say odd accomplishments.”
“Who among us has the chutzpah to lead a group of energetic senior economics majors on the last day of class on a march up and down the corridors of Saint Edmund’s playing kazoos and attired in odd looking hats, culminating triumphantly by breaching well-guarded administrative offices?” wondered Kessel.
“Who among us has the thespian talents to play the role of an academic Bobby Knight, chair-throwing and all, to seize the attention of students in a first-year seminar class?
Who among us has enough appeal and charisma to convince a group of seniors to donate $30,000 to the college to see him part with his beard?”
“And who among us has competed on the Saint Michael’s track team while teaching full-time at the college?” Kessel said. He recalls as well that Carvellas’s days as a renegade faculty-athlete ringer were short-lived when a former athletic director spotted the professor’s competition results in the Burlington Free Press.
Mixed among Kessel’s stories of Carvellas the Irrepressible are tales of his quiet generosity. Many times Carvellas has helped foreign students with the cost of travel back and forth from their home countries, or with the purchase of needed school equipment, he said.
Kessel marvels that Carvellas attracts more than 50 students to elective courses in the “arcane and peculiar world of monetary theory” year after year on the strength of his personality. And though he’s taught most of those courses for decades, “the week after finals, you’ll find him preparing for the next semester with the reminder that ‘you are only as good as your last class,’” Kessel said.
Colleagues today honor his elder statesman-status. “John has a special way with young people,” says Professor of Economics Reza Ramazani, telling of two recent cases where high-performing prospective students who were leaning toward Ivy League and other elite colleges decided on Saint Michael’s after meeting with Carvellas. “He’s such a smart, dedicated and unassuming person, and he’s so silly.”
The Road to Saint Michael’s
Carvellas’s father was a Greek immigrant who “went out of his way to Americanize us.” Part of that was football, and he played defensive and offensive tackle for his high school team in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, a town about 15,000 half an hour from New York City.
Carvellas was not an academic all-star at Colby College in Maine, because he had so many other interests — sports, student government, acting, and particularly, socializing. But the experience framed his outlook for future employment. “When I finally settled on what I was going to do, I had no doubt I wanted to work with a private institution of less that 3,000 in a non-urban area. I wanted to replicate my experience as a student at Colby,” he said.
“My real interest in economics didn’t come till after I graduated from college,” he said. “I didn’t ever like to do what people tell me to do. But I discovered it’s a wonderful topic. We economists don’t know what’s going on, but we ask important questions.” At Colby he decided to make economics his major, but his early teaching experiences went beyond his specialty. He and his wife, Betty, whom he met at Colby, moved to Boston so they could both begin teaching. He taught not only business to tough Boston High School students, but physics and biology too, while also coaching. “I was young and stupid so it was very enjoyable,” he said. He taught four years and coached football, a lingering passion from his high school and college playing days.
He began taking economics at night school at Northeastern University, “and that’s when it crystallized” for him that he wanted to go for his economics doctorate and teach college.
He enrolled at Syracuse University, getting a last-minute fellowship covering all tuition. He worked during his last year at the doctorate program in a think-tank so that his education was completely paid for.
“We went out to Syracuse without a job, zero money and a $200 a month fellowship, got married, spent our honeymoon camping, and rented a Hertz car. We were 26 and 24 years old,” recalled
Carvellas, who was at Syracuse four years before coming to Saint Michael’s. His doctoral thesis topic was building a mathematical model to predict the results of a radical new school aid formula in Michigan. “What I predicted was what actually happened,” he said.
Carvellas wrote to 40 schools with profiles like Saint Michael’s in search of his first job. When Saint Michael’s wrote him back promptly with an encouraging response, it got his attention and he began at Saint Michael’s in the fall of 1974.
“When I was hired, we had six economics majors here,” he said. “Many wonderful things that happened here politically with the department I credit to Joe Amrhein,” he said, referencing another venerable former Saint Michael’s economics professor and mentor.
“We were part of the business department and had our own major, but we split and we became a three-person, then four-person department, and now are a five-person department with 15 to 20 majors a year.” Business majors are required to take basic economics classes, “so we have as many minors as majors,” he said. “We have to stay on our toes.”
He sees it as his duty to play an active part in faculty development and has served on Faculty Council as well as the faculty’s curriculum, admissions, welfare and development committees. Carvellas was department chair for nine years (not consecutively) and served a three-year term as assistant dean in the 1980s. “But the best job on campus is being a professor,” he said. “There’s not a second place.”
Throughout the 1990s, Junior Fulbright students from Central America studied at Saint Michael’s. Carvellas became a “campus father” for one or two visiting students each semester. “They were having big adjustment problems, and we would help them,” he explained. “In many instances we became very close— I’ve visited one kid a few times in Costa Rica. Some of those kids are doing very, very well now. They were all hard-working.”
Anderson remembers how Carvellas would go riding on his bike regularly back then and a few times some international students said they’d like to go riding. “So he’d go buy them a bike so they could go riding together. He wouldn’t think anything about it,” Anderson said.
Not far removed in 1974 from those personal playing and coaching days, Carvellas embraced the Saint Michael’s sports scene with a bear hug befitting his bigger-than-life personality. According to his citation for induction in the college’s Athletic Hall of Fame, “John has been a virtual bridge between athletics and academics since he arrived at Saint Michael’s in 1974.” Carvellas joined the club football coaching staff in 1975, remaining through 1979 when the program disbanded. He became the assistant women’s lacrosse coach five years later and helped lead the program to a 23-6 mark from 1984-86. During that stretch, the Knights also made the first post-season tournament appearance in the program’s history. He has chaired the Hall of Fame Committee and Athletic Advisory Council (twice), and served on two Athletic Task Forces.
Carvellas and Betty live Colchester, where for many years they helped care for Carvellas’s sister, who has special needs. Because he and Betty have no children of their own, he has been able to follow Saint Michael’s sports teams more than many faculty can, he said. “If I had kids, it never would have happened. It’s sort of a surrogate family for me. I’m just enthralled to see the growth of women’s sports here in quality and quantity.”
Next year, in addition to teaching, Carvellas will continue writing a guide book to Mexico that he began recently. As he did this year, he will only teach in the fall semester, covering his favorite topics of money, banking, principles of economics and macro theory.
Anderson is glad Carvellas will still be around a lot since his presence “is so calming, reassuring to me.” “He’s just so smart and so wise and he’s still such a clown and so self-deprecating with no sense of self-consciousness. And he’s not afraid to burst somebody else’s balloon either, especially mine,” he said. “The other thing is that he’s really an unbelievable master with people. Do you know anybody who doesn’t adore him? He’s really good at handling people.”
Characteristically, Carvellas is positive as he ponders the crossroads he and Betty are approaching in their lives and careers. “We both feel really blessed, because the interaction with the students and our friends here has made our life really enjoyable. We know how lucky we are,” he said.