Dr. Poland. Photo by: Arch Scurlock

By: Arch Scurlock

Dr. Charles Poland, history professor at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale campus, is the recipient of a 2012 Virginia Outstanding Faculty award. He is one of 12 faculty members at Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities who were so honored for 2012. There were 125 nominations for the honor, and Dr. Poland was the only professor chosen from a Virginia two-year college.

“On behalf of the NOVA community, we would like to express our congratulations to Dr. Poland for being selected as a recipient of this prestigious award, said NOVA President Robert G. Templin Jr. “Dr. Poland has touched the lives of thousands of students since he began at the College in 1967. Students have embraced and praised his hands-on approach in directly engaging history and its artifacts. This is evidenced by the mobile Civil War museum now installed at NOVA that includes hundreds of historical documents and objects.”

The Outstanding Faculty Award program is administered by the Virginia Fellowship for Higher Education, and is the Commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty at the collegiate and university level. It recognizes excellence in teaching, research, knowledge integration, and public service, and is the Commonwealth’s highest honor for its faculty.

To win this award requires successfully traversing a highly competitive selection process. First, each institution is allowed a number of nominations based on its number of faculty. A campus-wide nomination committee makes the selections, and a nominee packet is generated which includes an executive statement highlighting the nominee’s accomplishments, a personal statement from each nominee, and descriptive and evaluative statements from students, faculty, and colleagues.

Next a panel of peer reviewers, including previous award winners and chief academic officers, studies the nominations and selects a pool of finalist nominations. From there the final 12 selections are made by a committee of State Council and education, business, and community leaders.

After the award announcement, the 12 honorees went to Richmond in February for the awarding ceremonies. First they were introduced to the House of Delegates, after which a reception was held. The honorees and their families and Council personnel then attended a dinner at Richmond’s historic Jefferson Hotel, at which Governor McDonnell gave an address. Afterwards, each honoree was presented with his or her award, which included a commemorative glass engraved award and a $5,000 cash award.

In March, a reception was held on the NOVA Annandale campus to honor Dr. Poland. Those offering their congratulations included Dr. Robert Templin, Jr., NOVA President, Dr. Bruce Mann, Dean of Annandale Liberal Arts Division, Dr. William Kinsella Assistant Dean of History at Annandale, and 2010 Faculty winner and history professor Dr.Terry Alford. Dr. Barbara Saperstone, Annandale provost, then spoke at length and acknowledged Dr. Poland’s teaching excellence, including mentioning the popularity of his courses with students. She then presented him with some gifts.

Dr. Poland then acknowledged their compliments, especially thanking his wife for steadfastly and patiently accompanying him on the many miles covered for his Civil War field trip courses. Also present at the reception were many of his Civil War field trip “Campaigners” as well as surprise guest Charlie Harrell, who drove Dr. Poland’s truck van from 1983-1985 which housed the NOVA Civil War museum and was a part of the Dr. Poland’s lectures, serving as a Civil War re-enactor. Charlie, much to Dr. Poland’s delight, is now a history teacher in Spotsylvania County and an author of a history book.

Dr. Poland’s award was the seventh year in a row that NOVA has had a faculty member honored, and he was the eleventh member overall selected from NOVA since the award’s introduction in 1986. Three of those honorees have been history professors, while five have been science professors.

As the State Council announced, “Dr. Poland’s teaching career spans more than five decades, touching the lives of thousands of students and community members of Northern Virginia. He has appeared on television and radio and made countless presentations to historic, civic, and educational groups on the Civil War and on the impact of unfettered development in Northern Virginia.”

Dr. Poland teaches six courses per semester at the Annandale campus in U.S. and local history, Western Civilization, and the Civil War. In the past he has also taught courses on the history of Virginia, the intellectual history of the United States, Reconstruction, and life in 19th century Virginia. He teaches courses on campus as well as through the Extended Learning Institute. He also gives historical lectures to the Lifetime Learning Institute of Northern Virginia and Elderhostel, which both provide education for older adults. He has been on the faculty of NOVA since 1967, and has taught over 14,000 students during that 45 year span.

During the summers he conducts his celebrated Civil War field-trip course to major and minor battlefields of the Civil War, visiting a different set each year. In this course, which he began in 1977, he has traveled with his trusty companion, his wife Betty, more than 120,000 miles to battlefields from Alexandria to the Ohio River and from Gettysburg to Appomattox, giving lectures to students varying in age from teenagers to senior citizens. Dr. Poland’s course has developed a core of “campaigners”, many of whom have taken the course for 15-20 years.

At NOVA, Dr. Poland created the NOVA Mobile Civil War Museum, which is now installed as a permanent museum in the Annandale campus library. He first gathered hundreds of rare Civil War artifacts and documents in the early 1980s and then outfitted a large truck van to display this collection. He worked on these exhibits over many months, developing narratives for the collection. Then in 1983 he began traveling one day a week to countless public schools and nursing homes, giving lectures on the Civil War before tours of the van. As he related in his personal statement, Dr. Poland even one time together had a young boy ask him to list the Civil War battles in which he fought. The museum traveled the countryside until the van gave out in 1996.

Dr. Poland has received numerous awards for his teaching excellence, including being voted by Annandale NOVA students as “Most Outstanding Faculty Member” in 1983, being cited as “Outstanding Faculty Member” on the Annandale campus in 1987, and being named “NVCC Alumni Federation Faculty of the Year, Annandale Campus” in 2008, for which nominations were made by students. His earliest honor was winning an essay contest for his “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address” while a student at American University.

Along with his teaching duties, Dr. Poland has served as Assistant Chair of Social Sciences Division for History and Sociology from 1969-1974 and as the Chair of Social Sciences Division-NVCC from 1974-1979, before returning full-time to teaching. He has also served on numerous college and campus committees.

Dr. Poland in his personal statement remarks that his initial interest in history was sparked by a biography of Abraham Lincoln given him by his family’s minister, and to Civil War history in particular when his American history high school teacher took the class to Civil War battlefields.

He earned his BA in History in 1957 from American University and started out on a ten year high school teaching career at Loudoun County High School, where he did double duty as a school bus driver, and then to Herndon High School. He had planned on going to law school, but found teaching to be rewarding and challenging and completed his MA History degree at American in 1961.

In 1967 he switched to college teaching, starting at the NOVA campus at Bailey’s Crossroads and briefly at then George Mason College. He moved to the new NOVA Annandale campus when it opened in the spring of 1968 and has been there ever since. He earned his doctorate in American History from Western Colorado University in 1974.

Dr. Poland remembers the opening quarter at Annandale, when, before the present concept of computer registration, the lines for registration snaked out of the buildings down into the parking lot, a site so unique that local television stations dispatched camera crews to record it. In those early years, Dr. Poland remembers having to go to local high schools to recruit students for the new NOVA which was not initially held in high regard.

Dr. Poland is familiar with the dramatic increase in size and diversity of NOVA over the years and the increased breadth of the curriculum and expansion of such areas as the Extended Learning Institute. He sees a continuing promising future for NOVA, as it holds the attraction of offering a quality two year education at a reasonable cost for students looking for just a two year degree and for those desiring to continue to a four year college.

The proudest moment for Dr. Poland in his teaching career is when he visits with past students who have gone on to success academically and in careers, hoping that he had something to do with their achievements and learning about their experiences.

In addition to his teaching interests, Dr. Poland, who grew up in a farming area of then rural Loudoun County, has developed a strong interest in the problems associated with the urbanization of Northern Virginia. He had called attention to the consequences of indiscriminate transformation of fertile farmland into subdivisions.by attended meetings and speaking before zoning boards and boards of supervisors to save farm land and local historical structures.

Along with those activities, Dr. Poland has served on the Loudoun County Open Space Committee, the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historical Park Commission, and the advisory board for the Loudoun County Heritage Farm Museum, as well as numerous other committees.

In connection with these interests and his ancestors’ almost 200 year history of living in Loudoun County, Dr. Poland has written several publications, including the books From Frontier to Suburbia: One of America’s Fastest Growing Counties, and the soon to be released A Forgotten Way of Life, which will relate the rural past of Northern Virginia. He also co-authored the Lure of Loudoun: Centuries of Change in Virginia’s Emerald County.

Including those publications, Dr. Poland has written seven books in all, including An Introductory Outline of American History published in 1971 and a Civil War book entitled The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861, published in 2004. As Dr. Poland relates, “it places special emphasis …on little known military activities and now forgotten heroes who dominated public opinion in 1861. It reveals citizen soldiers’ romanticized expectations of glory and their dreams shattered by cruel realities of war.” He is currently working on a book about John Brown of pre-Civil War fame.

Dr. Poland has no future plans to step down from teaching at NOVA, except to perhaps lessen his load during the summers due to his wife’s continued requests. He has been unable recently to fulfill his passion for golf as his home duties have increased in recent years, as he works a 30 acre farm, the remainder of the family 220 acre farm, and cares for an ailing parent. However, he still takes time to exercise strenuously in the gym set up in his garage.

Dr. Poland lives with his wife, with whom he has two daughters, on one of the family parcels in Loudoun County. Despite the encroachment of a large service station and subdivision nearby, the Polands’ spot on the public Poland Road still has largely a rural setting, with fields stretching to the west and the Bull Run Mountains in the distance. However, the Poland families along the road have decreased from as many as 22 in the past to now only two.

As Annandale NOVA Provost Dr. Saperstone related about Dr. Poland in her letter of support, “One might think that having taught for so many years, he would lose energy for the classroom and/or scholarly pursuits. Instead, Dr. Poland’s commitment to his student and his love of his discipline stay strong.”

By: Arch Scurlock

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