She gave 57 years to 11,000 students. Retiring professor Sandy Doe was one of MSU Denver’s first faculty members.

During her 57 years of teaching roughly 11,000 students, retiring Metropolitan State University of Denver English professor Sandy Doe, 81, rolled with changes in public higher education and how it is done.

Now as she and an older generation of tenured veterans around the nation start to step out, challenges are multiplying over finance, affordability, freedom of speech, even the purpose of education in relation to jobs. And she shared her perspectives, in an interview, for navigating an uncertain future. She advocates an emphasis on producing well-rounded thinkers.

“Is the sky falling? No,” she said. “But it might.”

Her career began in the freewheeling days around 1965. She was one of the first teachers when what became MSU Denver emerged as an “opportunity school” devoted to the mission of giving people from all walks a chance at a college education.  Back then, students dodged traffic racing to classes scattered in rented downtown basements and diners. The classes then were “more interactive,” sometimes extended over beers, with an age- and ideologically-diverse mix of students including Vietnam war veterans, Doe said.

She wasn’t much older than her students. There was a World War II veteran who turned in an essay about how he survived the Bataan Death March.

Today MSU Denver’s mission remains the same —  more than 20,000 students enrolled this year — on a campus that opened in 1976. It was built as urban renewal, displacing the mostly Hispanic, low-income Auraria neighborhood. Doe regards this as a “cultural genocide” and has deployed writing students to investigate.

The school has evolved into what she and other faculty members describe as “corporate” — administrators devoted to marketing, formal “rubrics” for grading, and students who often seem “distanced” and brittle. “Now, it is very hard to pull responses out of people,” she said.

Norms of correctness lead to self-censorship. “These days, we worry about saying the right thing. And, because we worry, we don’t say much.” A beer with students would be “unseemly.”

She adapted through the COVID pandemic to “a Zoom era” where connectivity invariably hiccups and “we have to make rules that you have to have your camera on, and at least your face and eyes have to be present, even if your mind is not.”

Now curriculums increasingly are designed to meet company workforce needs. MSU Denver is pioneering this approach, routing students into engineering, cybersecurity and health programs that incorporate apprenticeship pathways to jobs.

This past week, Amazon announced a partnership in which the company will finance training for workers.

“We in the humanities have never been training anybody for the workforce, except that we make people flexible and able to think critically,” Doe said.

Yet she has embraced the idea of higher education as workforce training — as long as this means broad studies encouraging independent thinking.

“You need humanity, compassion, the ability to communicate, to do the task, and to ask questions if you have questions,” she said. “In ‘workforce training’ you may learn to fly an airplane. That’s job training. But you also have to be able to know that Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ and that Tom Wolfe portrayed a pilot in ‘The Right Stuff.’”

The Amazon partnership presents “an interesting opportunity,” she said, suggesting a literary dimension drawing on writers such as Sinclair Lewis who chronicled workplace suffering.

“It is curious that Amazon should want an educated workforce. Every time I go for jury selection, they don’t seem to want an educated juror.”

Doe plans to retire in May after completing her current course on creative non-fiction writing.

Former students remember her fondly.

Among them, novelist and short story-writer Kali Fajardo-Anstine won an American Book Award.

Doe “inspired me to be a better human,” said Christina Angel, 50, who took her writing courses in the 1990s and became an MSU Denver English senior lecturer teaching medieval and early modern British literature.

She “teaches from her soul,” sometimes giving a student approaching her in the classroom “a tiny bow of respect,” English Department colleague Mikkilynn Olmsted said.

Doe treated literature, writing, dance and drama as “essential skills for life,” especially important now, she said, in the midst of a “great resignation” where workers quit jobs they find meaningless. “I don’t see any point in going for the money if you are not happy, if you don’t feel satisfied, if you don’t feel you are making a contribution for the betterment of people and the world.”

She prioritized robust discussion. Her courses carried students as far as the Niobrara River in canoes for “Literature and Landscape of the Nebraska Sandhills.”

In teaching modern poetry, Doe entered her classroom wearing a black cape and tricorn hat to take on the persona of legendary poet Marianne Moore, talking about “ ‘creating imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ ”