David Krohne’s students and friends know it would never be his idea to sit down in front of a video camera and talk about himself. He’s doing us a favor by even agreeing to this interview marking his retirement from the College.
But he is surprisingly comfortable on camera, wearing a Patagonia T-shirt, sandals, and shorts and leaning back in his chair. He describes the “Berkeley attitude” embraced at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jim Patton, who became one of his graduate school mentors. Patton attended receptions wearing a T-shirt, sandals, and shorts, and at one such occasion spotted a professor from Harvard dressed in a three-piece suit and wingtips.
“Geez, man. Did you just come from a funeral?” Patton asked.
“This is the way I show respect for my students,” the Harvard man replied indignantly.
“I show respect for my students by knowing what the f*ck I’m talking about,” said Patton.
The story brings a smile to Krohne’s face.
The award-winning teacher is more than generous with his answers as we cover ground from the fishing outings of his youth to his research on Indiana prairie fragments. He’s almost enjoying it, in fact.
Then I ask him about his interactions with students. As his friend and colleague David Polley points out, no teacher at Wabash has led more students into the field than Krohne.
He sits up in his chair.
“You know, that’s probably where I need to draw the line,” Dave Krohne says.
But until then, the interview is going great.
Who first interested him in the outdoors? His mom and a bunch of uncles. She was an amateur naturalist and they were outdoorsmen—one was chief cartographer for National Geographic.
There was his grandfather—a botanist who “was interested in everything natural” and in 1894 wrote the first paper on the orientation of leaves on the compass plant, a prairie plant. He was a book collector, too, an expert on the literature of the American West.
“There’s a room dedicated to his collection at the University of Missouri,” Krohne says. “I grew up with these books. I got in trouble at school when we were reading Huckleberry Finn because I didn’t bring the book to school, the reason being that I was reading the first edition, signed by Mark Twain, and wasn’t allowed to take it out of the house.”
When Krohne started at Knox College he planned to study molecular biology, until he ran into Pete Schramm, the ecologist whose research, teaching acumen, and legendary annual spring prairie burns were the reason the school changed its mascot from “the Old Siwash” to “the Prairie Fire” in 1993.
“In my first field trip with Pete, he pulled over to the side of the road by some railroad tracks on our way out of town. I thought someone had a flat tire! But Pete had taken us to a room-sized prairie remnant,” remembers Krohne, who would make prairie remnants in Indiana one focus of his research at Wabash. “He talked to us about the plants there for two hours. He really had us.”
Schramm gave Krohne the template for his own career: Teach at a small liberal arts college where you can really engage the students; take them into the field to see the big picture; make time for the other things that give you life, and bring that back to your students. Schramm took his young protégé duck hunting at Crystal Lake, IL, where he was friends with the Leopolds, including A Sand County Almanac author Aldo Leopold.
Dave and Sheryl were married his senior year at Knox, and their honeymoon was a 300-mile canoe trip in northern Ontario. It was the first adventure in a life together punctuated by such journeys—to Greenland, Antarctica, the Cascades, and the Sierra Nevada of California.
Their month-long trek across Alaska’s Brooks Range from the Arctic Ocean had stalled at a swollen river because the couple didn’t know how to scale a glacier. Never again. They learned to climb—two summers of weekends spent with their fingers clinging to the crags and faces of the Sierras.
Photography would come in those grad school days too, inspired by conversations and correspondence with mountaineer/photographer Galen Rowell.
On their last big trip before the move east—crossing the Sierras on skis—they got snowed in and spent four days in a tent trying to decide whether Dave should take the job he’d been offered at Wabash College in Indiana.
How would they live without the mountains?
And all this time, the science.
“When you’re an ecologist, everything outdoors is relevant,” Krohne says. The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley where he worked as a grad student had a blackboard students had to sign whenever they were away from the office. The tradition went back to the early 20th century and the museum’s first director, seminal American field biologist Joseph Grinnell, who insisted that his assistants sign out just to go to the bathroom.
Whether Krohne was out gathering specimens, studying the land, reading the water, climbing, photographing, or simply reveling in the solitude and beauty of the American outdoors, he’d always sign out the same way: “In the field.”
He calls his predecessor at Wabash, Professor Eliot Williams H’53, “a prince.” Williams had taught the ecology course for years.
“He never tried to get in the way of what I was doing, but he was always willing to offer any field sites he knew of. He essentially said, ‘I’m at your service, but ecology is now yours.’ He was generous without making me feel bad about taking it. A classy guy.”
But Krohne would not have come to Wabash if David Polley hadn’t been here, and he wouldn’t have stayed if Professor John Munford hadn’t arrived.
“When I got here, biology was good, but it was time to change. Dave, John, and I had each other to figure it all out—three rookies had the entire core of biology to figure out together. It was great, it was difficult.”
The rest is Wabash history.
“How does one sum up a distinguished career in a brief tribute?” Professor Polley wrote in a resolution read as the Wabash faculty marked Krohne’s retirement. “Perhaps, for Dave, it is in the three words written on a three-by-five notecard often found taped to his office door—‘In the field.’ Those words conjure up images of the physical work and long hours required for collecting the data that are essential to an ecologist’s research. But I think Dave would also say that being in the field is essential to his teaching; it is where some of the very best and most important student learning occurs.
“It is a measure of his love of the science and his enthusiasm for teaching that he has never tired of taking students on these trips or missed an opportunity to work with them in the field.”
Near the end of our interview, I ask, “What’s the one essential thing that Wabash can never lose?”
“A certain kind of student,” he says. “There’s a mythology about the Wabash student that turns out to have some truth: the kid who is inherently curious, who is bright enough, has the work ethic and the discipline and the willingness to be coached. Our success is derived from the history of having a bunch of students with those characteristics.
“Our programs and particular teachers are all important, but none of it works if you don’t have those guys. The day they go away, we’re done.”
I ask him to describe some memorable moments with those students.
And that’s when we hit the wall.
“You know, I can talk about the other people, but it’s ultimately all about the students, and that’s just too personal to talk about,” Krohne says. “That’s between them and me.”
I’ve asked this same question dozens of times during 15 years at Wabash College. No one has ever responded like this.
Then I realize that he’s not drawn a line, but a picture. Of all he has seen and all the beauty he has photographed and written about—from the prairie flowers to fireweed in the Yellowstone, from paddling in Greenland to the view from the top of Mount McKinley—the only wonders he won’t touch with words are those teachable moments with students.
Last winter, his friend John Munford told a class that Krohne is to the Wabash biology department what Bill Placher ’70 was to religion and philosophy. And come to think of it, Bill would never cite those student interactions either.
“They’re personal,” Krohne says. “And they should probably stay personal.”
“They’re sacred?” I ask. It’s not a word he offers himself. But he nods in silence.
Dave Krohne cleaned out his Hays Hall office for the last time in May. He took down the photographs posted on the bulletin board beside his door from his latest trips, studies, and wanderings. He took home the painting of the imagined Grand Prairie in Northern Indiana that hung like a dream above his desk.
He left the office as clean as he’d found it and taped a card to the window that read: “In the field.”
Photo: Professor Krohne teaches Jeff Austen '09 during the 2008 Advanced Ecology Study in the Everglades.
