Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 31, 1994 TAG: 9403300068
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Maybe economic growth and global warming have changed things on the east coast of Scotland since then, but back in 1980 the town was isolated, the air damp and cold, and the populace an odd mix of stereotypically reticent Scots and rich American golfers.
West was there as an exchange student from the College of William and Mary, an art history and English major who had planned to spend her third year of school studying at St. Andrews University.
When she arrived at the railroad station, no one was there to meet her. She was alone, an ocean away from home, in a sleepy, wet, isolated town called St. Andrews.
West did the only thing logical under the circumstances: She fell in love with it.
"It must be Puritan masochism, really," said West, now a professor of art history at the University of Leicester in England. "But it captured my romantic imagination a lot."
Whether romanticism or masochism _ or some strange combination of the two - something kept West at St. Andrews University for a year of study and brought her back again to get her doctorate after she graduated from William and Mary.
Since then she has become, she said, completely Anglicized, down to her accent.
"Somewhere in my psyche, I always wanted to live in Britain," said West, 34, who became a British subject in 1985.
Through her work with American students at the University of Leicester, she has discovered that there are two types of exchange students: those who will be American until the day they die and those who possess what she calls a "wandering instinct" and always will try to find ways to return overseas. And West herself? Definitely the latter.
"I've really not felt terribly homesick," she said. "It was much harder for my mother, I'm sure. But she's been incredibly understanding about it."
Her mother, Natalie West - "a very patriotic American," daughter Shearer said - still lives in Rocky Mount. Natalie West remembers the day her daughter left the States, never completely to return:
"I saw that little thing driving with her daddy to go to the airport," Natalie West said. "She looked so tiny."
Tiny, maybe, but determined. According to people who knew her back in Franklin County, Shearer West was never one to take the easy way out in school. She was, after all, the one who read "War and Peace" in seventh grade, while her classmates were engrossed in teen romances.
"She was extremely well-motivated," said John Moore, West's high school English teacher, whom West credited in her dissertation with teaching her how to work. She was always trying to expand her knowledge of the world, he said, and always looking into things very deeply.
West said she still likes to dig when she finds topics that excite her. And now that she's an established professor and researcher with academia's "publish or perish" creed hanging over her head, she usually ends up writing about her discoveries.
With three books and numerous essays and reviews to her credit, it's clear that curiosity continues to propel West. And the directions her studies have taken are wildly diverse: 18th-century portraiture, women artists in Weimar Germany, Italian art. Her most recent book, published last year, is a study of the fin de siecle - meaning "end of the century" - phenomenon in European art.
"In the academic world, this kind of skipping around isn't very respected," West admitted. "I'm sort of a pariah."
Although her specialty is 18th-century art, West said limiting her writing to that topic would bore her out of her mind.
"It's a bit self-indulgent, but one day maybe I'll grow up and settle down," she said.
While her wide range of interests may not particularly ingratiate her to the Leicester powers that be, West believes it has helped her avoid some of the narrowmindedness that the British educational system seems to encourage. British students usually know from their first day at university what their course of study is going to be, she said. During most of the time they spend at the university, they take only classes in their majors, which gives them a strong background in their field of interest but a very limited view of the rest of world.
The structured British educational system is in the midst of an overhaul, however, as the American ideas of semesters and broad-based programs gain in popularity.
Although the trend toward Americanization may sound like a good idea, and in theory could go a long way toward opening up the narrowly focused British universities, West foresees failure.
"I think it's going to be a disaster," she said matter-of-factly. "I feel like a voice in the wilderness, trying to warn them about it."
The plan looks wonderful on paper, she said, but what works so well in America is going to lose its effectiveness in the translation.
"If they would do it the American way and do it whole hog, there could be advantages," she said. Instead, British administrators are trying to fit square pegs - selected bits and pieces of the American system - into the round holes of the British educational tradition. "This is a cultural problem," she said. "What the English understand as the American system isn't really the American system."
Although she has had considerable experience with American education, West said she has been approached only perfunctorily by the Leicester hierarchy that is overseeing the university's overhaul. She is, after all, a young woman in a country where middle-aged white males remain dominant.
"These chaps over 50 who run the university think they know all the answers," she said. "They've been to America a few times, so...."
She still finds it frustrating to cope with the British academia's entrenched chauvinism, but West said she has no immediate plans to move on. She has been accepted into the university community, she said, and no longer is viewed with the suspicion typically reserved for foreigners working in Britain.
And she has her home in Leicester, a "fairly anonymous sort of town" about 100 miles from London, where she can escape her office, if not her academic responsibilities, which she often brings home with her.
Her husband, Nicholas Davidson, is a history lecturer at Leicester. They do their school work together at night, after they put their 14-month-old daughter, Eleanor, to bed.
Eleanor's grandmother back in Rocky Mount doesn't get to see much of her granddaughter - or her daughter, for that matter. West said they're planning to come back to Franklin County for a visit after Christmas, their first in a year and a half.
Someday, she would like to come back to the States to teach on a fellowship, she said. But for now her administrative and teaching duties keep her tied to Leicester, a long way from Franklin County but not so far that old friends don't still claim her.
"We at school are very, very proud of her," said Ruth Hunt, a former Franklin County High School teacher and neighbor of West's family. "I'm so proud of my little next-door neighbor."
Keywords:
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by CNB