Power Couples: Jeff and Diane Munroe

Just moments after sitting down for an interview, it was immediately clear: the story of how Jeff and Diane Munroe first met would be a good one. Exchanging a glance and a good-natured chuckle, Diane, Middlebury’s coordinator for community-based environmental studies, and Jeff, associate professor of geology, agreed: “It’s kind of a funny story.”

Diane, who grew up in the Philadelphia area, and Jeff, of Beverly, Mass met at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. When Diane began her Master’s program in the geology department, Jeff was off campus, teaching in between his Masters and Ph.D. studies. At the department’s annual holiday party the following year, Diane, president of the Geology Club, mistook him for a newcomer.

“It’s part of the tradition that the newest faculty member had to play the role of a Santa to give out gifts, and the tallest and shortest of the new graduate students had to be elves to help Santa,” she said. Naturally, Jeff caught her eye, and she asked him to play the tall elf. He was quick to set her straight: “He definitely told me that he wasn’t a new grad student.”

“I did not want to dress up as an elf,” Jeff said flatly.

“So that was our first interaction,” Diane said. “And then, through mutual friends and gatherings, we slowly got together, and that was that.”

The couple lived in Madison until the last year and a half of Jeff’s PhD., when they moved to northern Wisconsin for Diane to work as a watershed basin educator at an extension of the university.

By the time Jeff was finishing his graduate work, the prospect of coming to Middlebury had become a real and exciting possibility.

“When I left Bowdoin,” he said, “I knew that I wanted to try to be a professor at a college that did a lot of research and also was really a great school with … students who were capable of doing research at the undergraduate level. That was my dream all the way through grad school.”

He applied for the newly opened position in the geology department at Middlebury, confident despite the competition that he would be a good fit. Sure enough, he was hired for what would soon become a tenure-track position, and he and Diane moved east.

“I was very fortunate that I could move into a teaching position right out of grad school without having to do a post-doctorate or being in a holding pattern for a couple of years, as is really common,” he said.

Meanwhile, having acquired both work experience and a second master’s degree in water resources management, Diane was in the process of finding work in Vermont. From Lake Champlain’s basin program to the state offices in Waterbury, she was considering commutes of up to an hour and a half when Middlebury presented a prime opportunity.

“The environmental studies program had just received a grant from the Mellon foundation to do a couple of things to enhance the curriculum,” she said, “and one of them was to develop this service-learning, community-connected approach for the senior seminar and other classes within the program.”

Much like her last position in Wisconsin, the job would allow her to help groups of students address environmental issues facing the local community. She was hired just a month after the move, “which was perfect just to unpack and set up our house and get used to being in a new place,” she said.

The pair appreciates the numerous advantages of working at the college, beginning with the opportunity to get to know the same students.

“Jeff sees a lot of [environmental studies] majors when they come through Environmental Geology as first-years, and I tend to see them as seniors in the senior seminar,” Diane said.

They enjoy enhancing these shared connections by meeting students for meals and attending their performances and sporting events.

Jeff pointed out that working in different departments has related benefits.

“What I think is really neat,” he said, “is that we certainly interact with overlapping groups of students and colleagues through geology and environmental studies, but also, there are groups that don’t overlap as much. It’s a real benefit that we’re able to talk about and with people from these different components of our time ... I think it’s great, the way that we’re able to get to know so much of the campus through the realms that we inhabit.”

As Diane works 10 months of the year, she is often able to join Jeff in the Western United States for his summer field research.

“I’m hiking all the time,” Jeff said. “I spend 70 to 100 nights a year camping in the mountains … It’s not uncommon to finish two or three months of field work and then meet up with Diane and go on a backpacking trip to cap off the summer. It kind of sounds ridiculous, but that’s what I love to do.”

These trips allow the couple to get to know students even better, as the groups live and work together for weeks at a time and often get together later on to catch up. In fact, the pair recently had dinner with a 2004 thesis student.

In addition to regular hiking trips, Diane particularly enjoys running; Jeff, cross-country skiing.

“Being in this place in general is just perfect for us,” Diane said. “We feel really fortunate for that, too, that not only are we working together in this incredible institution but we’re in such a fantastic state and beautiful place.”