Staff Spotlight — Linus Owens

Linus Owens had a plan for his life. And then, things changed.

We will start this story from the end: As many of you know, Owens is an assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College. He teaches a large array of classes in this department, and is himself a sociologist. But how did he get here?

“I originally was training to be a physicist,” said Owens. “During my first year at college I started co-authoring with my professors and received all these fellowships.”

After his second year at Florida State, Owens was offered a prestigious grant (one typically awarded to graduate students) to work in Switzerland.

“I’m not really sure how I got it,” said Owens. But Owens seized the opportunity and took his first trip to Europe from his home in Northern Florida. It was in Switzerland that Owens had his life-changing epiphany.

“I liked physics in class, and throwing things off buildings,” said Owens. But after doing true field work, Owens came to a surprisingly simple but significant realization about his career in physics: “I didn’t like it.”

Owens returned from Europe with the intention to finish his degree, but soon realized it was not worth spending all of the time and energy on something for which he no longer felt a passion.

“I dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco,” said Owens. “I was unemployed for a while, and I started to read books that my roommate had written on sociology. That’s when I realized that I was interested in people and politics.”

“It’s a weird discipline,” said Owens. “It’s not quite a science because you’re studying people and social relations, so there’s no precision which I like. It’s interpreting texts, but the text is society. It’s creative but bounded by real life.”

Owens returned to school to earn his sociology degree and completed graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But from there it was not a straight shot to Vermont. First, he taught at Wesleyan University.

After his first year, the professor for whom he was filling in decided not to return to Wesleyan, and Owens continued to work for the school. However, Wesleyan has a three-year maximum for visiting professors, so after his third year teaching, he had no choice but to move on.

“I had always been at big state schools,” said Owens, “but at Wesleyan I liked that you could teach and also have relationships with the students and I could also research.”

In 2007, when Owens decided to apply to schools similar to Wesleyan, Middlebury happened to be hiring sociology professors.

“I was lucky,” he said. “When I told my Wesleyan students I was going to Middlebury, they said, ‘Middlebury kids are so boring,’” Owens remembers. “On my first day here I saw some students walking to a softball game. I don’t know if that’s really what they were doing, but that’s what I imagined, and I thought, ‘Wow, they really are boring.’ But I’ve found that that isn’t true.”

“I was more culturally similar to Wesleyan students, like in my taste in music and style of clothing,” said Owens.

Owens definitely has his own style, and it is not what one would typically imagine when picturing a Middlebury professor. For one thing, Owens wears strictly black and white.

“I feel that if I put on a red shirt … it would be like how your body reacts when it rejects a kidney.”And yet his originality is a large part of what makes him a favorite among students and fellow faculty members.

“I guess it’s a stage of adolescence I never grew out of,” said Owens. “I was a sort-of punk rocker anarchist, and I’m remaining politically and culturally committed.”

Owens attributes his unique sense of style to his willingness to be different.

“I am comfortable in spaces of marginality,” he said. “I don’t feel comfortable with normal, so it’s easier to mark oneself as not normal. This way, no one invites you to those parties you didn’t want to go to in the first place.”

Chances are, you will not see Owens in a flannel swinging his Nalgene low or wearing a Top Gun pinny and a backwards hat. But this does not affect his ability to teach Midd Kids. In fact, in many ways, it makes the experience all the more exciting.

“Kids are different here, but they’re open to listening,” he said. “Students come here so well prepared, and I know they’ll be fine regardless, so I can open up the possibilities of other ways of thinking.”

I want them to imagine different worlds,” said Owens, “but I don’t push things on them. I get to play around with things. I get to take things a little less seriously.”

Inertia is a fundamental principle of physics: the tendency of a body to preserve its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. While physics was not his calling, Owens, a man who clearly embraces change, allowed his experiences to alter his life path, find a love for sociology and end up teaching at Middlebury. But, whatever the reason may be, Middlebury is certainly the more fortunate for this change.

---