Written by Aerial Whiting
After nearly 45 years of serving on the Harding faculty, Dr. Dennis Organ, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and executive director of Alpha Chi College Honor Society, will retire from the university at the end of the semester.
Organ will continue to work one more year for Alpha Chi. Several factors influenced his decision to retire from Harding this year, including a desire on the part of him and his wife, Sherry Organ, to spend more time with their family. Dennis Organ said they will likely do a lot of traveling as well, since they loved working with the study abroad programs in Italy, England and Greece.
From the time he arrived in 1962, Organ has played an active role in the Harding community. A math major, he joined the Bison staff during his freshman year; sang first in the non-audition chorus group Chorale, then in A Cappella Chorus and Belles and Beaux; played on the bowling team (which went to nationals when he was a freshman); and joined Beta Phi Kappa, a now-dissolved men’s social club that also featured other future leaders of Harding like President David Burks.
During his junior and senior years, Organ worked as editor of the Bison, and during the intervening summer, Dr. Clifton Ganus Jr., who was about to become president, invited him to work in Harding’s public relations office after graduation.
“That [job offer] kind of was an answered prayer for me in terms of what I was going to do,” Organ said. “I had already kind of decided that I didn’t love math enough to do much with it. I thought I would like to teach at Harding.”
It was also during his senior year that Organ dated Sherry, an English major whom he had met in chemistry his sophomore year. He graduated in 1966, and when he went to the University of Missouri to pursue a master’s in journalism, she was completing her senior year, so the two wrote letters daily. They married in August of 1967 and began teaching at Harding that fall, he part time in the journalism department and she in the English department.
So as not to be drafted into the Vietnam War, Dennis Organ said he decided he wanted a “more substantial” teaching assignment. Harding did not require more journalism instruction but allowed him to teach English on what was essentially an adjunct basis. A couple years later, Organ determined that he wanted to teach full time.
Between the summer of ’72 and fall of ’74, Organ did his doctoral work in English at Texas Tech University. This was also his “family growing time”‘; he and his wife had adopted their first son before moving to Lubbock, Texas, and their family expanded to include three children, all of whom would later attend Harding.
After finishing at Texas Tech, Organ returned to Harding to teach. He became adviser to the Bison newspaper and worked with such staff members as Jerry “Boo” Mitchell, whose post-grad investigative reporting helped lead to the conviction of four Ku Klux Klan members for murders they committed in the 1960s. Organ said he is “really, really proud” of Mitchell. Organ served as the Bison adviser for three to five years, he said.
In 1976 because of his journalism experience, Organ took over putting together the Alpha Chi newsletter for Dr. Joseph Pryor, who was then the executive director of the honor society. Pryor decided to retire in 1993, and Organ succeeded him as executive director in 1994.
Organ also became chair of the English department in 1982 and served in that position until 2004, the year that he became dean of the humanities college. He said he enjoys administrative work because he likes problem solving — figuring out schedules and assignments, organizing things — and he enjoys the camaraderie of the English faculty.
“We have always had a good ‘collegial spirit’ in the department,” Organ said. “We just all were friends and got along well. … The human side of it was a joy to me.”
Likewise, Organ said he has enjoyed academic advising. Between advising and teaching, he has had the opportunity to work with nearly every English major who has passed through the department in the past few years.
Organ has taught numerous classes in mass communications and English, including public relations, editing, literature survey courses and British novel. He said teaching literature has been especially rewarding.
“Most people read literature, at least for pleasure, and so the teaching of literature is something that is kind of enriching in and of itself,” Organ said. “It’s like its aesthetic beauty is its excuse for being. … The study of literature is the study of how human beings have thought about themselves in their world and in their relationship to it and have expressed their God-given creative facilities, so it has to do with beauty, and it has to do with values and thought. I love literature because it combines the aesthetic and the instructional.”
