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Nina Pollard Anticipates Travel, New VP Wells Takes Her Post
Story and Photo by Megan Trasport
Dr. Nina Pollard, on the verge of a new experience. |
Nina Pollard will be returning to a favorite pastime after her pending retirement this spring – traveling.
Pollard, the vice president of academic and student affairs, said she believes that traveling has given her a better appreciation for the differences found among people and said it has helped her throughout her life, especially during her time at Mars Hill College.
Pollard's post will be assumed by Dr. John Wells, the provost for academic affairs of Young Harris College. His appointment, to start this summer, was announced to faculty last week.
Pollard's experiences around the world, broad to say the least, have shaped her awareness of diversity, which she has tried to promote an understanding of at MHC.
As part of this promotion, Pollard recently helped the school start a new program, Difficult Dialogues, by getting a $60,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.
Through this program, workshops and other programs will be offered to the faculty and students of MHC to help them understand and become more aware of the importance of differences among students.
“When we say ‘diversity,’ we have to realize that we are all part of what diversity means,” Pollard said in a news release. “We tend to think that white, male Christians are the standard and people who do not fit that mold are the definition of ‘diversity.’ But that’s not the case. Diversity is not ‘us’ and ‘them,’ it’s all of us.”
Pollard, better known as Dr. P to many students, joked in an interview with The Hilltop that she “got [a] multicultural experience before it was ever even a word.”
She gained this experience at age 13, when her family moved from rural Denham Springs, Louisiana, to lively Bombay, now called Bomba, India.
When asked what it was like moving to India, Pollard responded: “That was really, really different because I went from a very small town in Louisiana to a city, Bombay.”
“I was in a small town, and we had enough land that we could get out and play baseball or football in our front yard,” she said.
“We went to school from July until April because the students that lived around where I did had to be out to help pick strawberries in late April,” she said. “We started back to school in July when it was hot, hot, hot in south Louisiana.”
India, however, was a very different place. Bombay, the capital, is a large city, which was something Pollard was not used to, growing up in the small town of Dunham Springs.
“It was a very different experience. The schools were very different, very strict, very regimented,” Pollard said. Her time in India was an “eye-opening experience.”
“The only way we could get around was to ride the buses or taxi cabs,” she said, something she had not experienced in Louisiana.
Pollard said that living in India for a year and a half gave her a very different perspective because she went to school with girls from 26 separate nationalities.
She said she did not know it at the time, but the best lesson she learned in India was “an appreciation of diversity and people – diversity of nationality, language, religion, culture, color.”
India is not the only place Pollard has traveled. She took some time off from getting her undergrad education at Louisiana College and lived in Australia for approximately seven months while her father opened an oil refinery for Exxon in Melbourne.
While overseas, she went scuba-diving for the first time at the Great Barrier Reef, and as she puts it, “just enjoyed being down there.”
Before returning to the states, Pollard had the opportunity to take a ship around the world and upon her upcoming retirement, she hopes to do a bit more traveling.
“I’ve always wanted to do a photographic Safari in Africa,” Pollard explained, “[but] for a little while I just want to enjoy not having to do much of anything."
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