Nancy Edmonds Hanson
Her grandmother’s voice still echoes in Patty Corwin’s memory, clear as a bell.
The 8-year-old was playing with her sisters in Grandma Arneson’s back yard when she remarked, “Kids, if you don’t try to make the world a better place, in the final analysis, your life won’t mean as much.”
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s my job to make the world a better place,’” Patty reflects. “I didn’t exactly know what ‘final analysis’ meant, but I wanted to make sure it would be okay.”
That moment nearly 70 years ago still often comes to mind. Today, though, when she looks back on 50 years of teaching at North Dakota State University, as well as decades as a sought-after speaker, she needn’t wonder about that final grade. She has left her mark.
Some 56,000 students have come to know the dedicated teacher since her first days as a graduate assistant in 1968. A student of Patty’s own totaled up the number of lives she has touched in classes ranging from Introduction to Sociology, which she led throughout the entire half century, to more closely focused studies of the sociology of gender roles, diversity, literature, food and behavior.
Not only that. In addition to the 6,500 lectures she has given at the front of a classroom, by now she has delivered nearly 4,000 talks to business and professional groups, from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota to the Internal RevenueService, from the North Dakota Car Dealers and Grain Dealers to the National Women’s Political Caucus, and from hospitals to manufacturers to multinational corporations. The 44 topics she’s addressed include buttoned-up business advice on team building, emotional intelligence and stress management. Some, though, dive into more personal topics – relationships and dating, assertiveness, and delectable titles like “For Whom the Belles Toil … What’s Happening to Women and Work.”
A 1964 graduate of Fargo Cen-tral High School, Patty headed to Colorado College to study psychology, then returned to NDSU to get a teaching certificate. There, her lifelong mentor, Dr. Joy Query inspired her to switch course into the field of sociology and go on to complete a master’s degree. Then, when her husband, Bill Corwin Jr., was assigned to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, she taught sociology and psychology at the College of Great Falls. They returned to Fargo after his discharge.
“I needed to find a job,” she reports. “One day then-Sgt. Henry McCormack spoke to our class about the Fargo Police Department and happened to mention they were taking applications for a woman detective. He added, ‘But you hardly look the type.’ I knew I wasn’t, but I went down and applied anyway.” She was the last of 140 applicants. “The chief leaned over to his assistant and said, ‘Well, should we hire her?’” Patty adds, “By that time, I think they were bored to tears by so many interviews.”
The young plain-clothes detective spent the next year working with detectives Ted Economon and Cal Eggers. She had little formal training – “I learned the basics from ‘Cagney and Lacey,’” she confides – but absorbed police procedure from the men and women with whom she worked. Along with the day-to-day cases, she was frequently tapped to offer safety talks to local businesses.
She and her husband moved to Bismarck in 1971, where she was hired to teach at United Tribes Technical College. A year later they were back in Fargo with an infant daughter, Katie, soon to be joined by little brother Ben.
Then her mentor, Dr. Query, stepped back into her life. “She called me and said, ‘I want you to come back to teach,’” Patty recalls. “While I was in grad school back in 1968, I was asked to teach some classes in the old clapboard Festival Hall. When I stood up on that stage in front of 800 students and started my lecture, I was thinking, ‘I really enjoy doing this.’” The rest is history.
She became a full-time lecturer in the Department of Sociology, assigned to teach the enormous first-year Introduction to Sociology classes. She taught two back-to-back sections per semester, each with as many as 340 students.
There, in the packed Askanase Hall auditorium, her passion for her students continued to take shape. Looking back, she points to two initiatives that began there that she considers her greatest achievements – what would later come to be known as “service learning” and an innovative program in which her most talented students got to sample the real world of teaching.
Her service learning project began as a way to help struggling students improve their grades in her classes while gaining real-world insight into the subjects they studied. Students were invited to put in volunteer hours with Fargo social service agencies, beginning with the Salvation Army. Representatives visited her classes to introduce the young men and women to what they would be doing; then they spent a set number of hours doing the jobs that were assigned them.
She calculates that from the early 1980s through about 2020, her students put in about 115,000 hours working for F-M agencies – all at absolutely no cost to the nonprofits or the university. “Rarely do you find a teaching tool that serves all who are involved so simply, memorably and effectively,” she observes. “The students gain work experience. The agencies receive much-needed help, and the university strengthens its ties with the community. It’s clearly a win-win-win.”
Her second innovation was to offer her best graduate students – considering a future in education – an opportunity to experience the highs and lows of teaching in the real world before committing themselves to the profession. She chose 10 or 12 excellent students each semester to teach breakout sessions of her introductory class on six consecutive Fridays. They were responsible for lectures, assignments and grading their sub-units of 30 to 35
undergraduates.
“They’d come back for a final lunch meeting to discuss their experiences,” Patty says. “For some, it was wonderful. One woman, Leretta Smith, told me, ‘I love this! This is the best thing that’s happened to me.’ Now a doctor of social sciences, she’s still teaching at NDSU today.
“Others would realize it wasn’t what they had expected. They would say, ‘I don’t like this at all. I am so boring. I can’t do it.’ It was a valuable lesson at no cost, other than a little time.
“About 250 young people got a chance to try out teaching at the college level – again, at no cost to themselves or the university. I call that another win-win-win.”
Many of Patty’s tens of thousands of past students may remember her best for her teaching style, telling stories of her experiences as a detective and in other roles to illustrate the scholarly material they were learning. Her style, too, was focused with emotional interactions … led by the “happy hellos” and “happy goodbyes” that began and ended every class. “I’d welcome everybody with ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ Then I’d end with, ‘Happy goodbye, everyone,’” she explains. “If I forgot to do one or the other, the students would remind me.”
Along with her years in the classroom, Patty was involved in other campus pursuits. She spent 38 years as the faculty advisor to the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, once struggling socially and academically. She helped the few remaining members turn the Greek organization’s reputation inside out, becoming a leading campus organization. The transformation was so complete that it was spotlighted in a feature in The Forum in 2000 headlined “From Animal House to Penthouse.”
She serves on the advisory committee of the Northern Plains Ethics Institute, a university-based organization established by the state Board of Higher Education. According to its website, the 24-year-old body’s mission is “engaging citizens in various discussions focusing on what kind of society they want to live in and how they go about creating it.” She is also the development and finance
chair of Humanities North Dakota, the statewide nonprofit that sponsors in-person and classes and events on topics related (again, from its website) to its core values of kindness, humility, good faith engagement, the free exchange of ideas, and intellectual curiosity.
Patty’s formal retirement from the classroom came in May 2023. Since then, as she carries on her public speaking and research into sociology topics that engage her, she has had time to reflect on a career spent exploring “the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior,” as her field is defined. She is currently immersed in the connections between food, behavior and violence.
All in all, Patty has made – continues to make – a difference. She and her students have, she hopes, helped make the world a better place. And it all blossomed from the seed her grandma planted in that sunny garden so many years ago.
“Teaching at NDSU with so many dedicated, talented faculty and staff has been a privilege and an honor and a great learning experience – a wonderful career,” she reflects. “I’m grateful I have had the opportunity to be a teacher.”