A new calendar available at Calvin College features 17 playful photos of female faculty in their academic garb.
The idea for So Far from Cheesecake came up at a birthday party for one of the professors at the Grand Rapids (Mich.) college.
“We started talking about all the men’s pictures up on the wall at Calvin and how fun it would be to have women’s pictures with them,” said Janel Curry, dean for research and scholarship.
So Marie Curry Roper photographed several of the college’s female faculty to hang alongside the mostly male faculty pictured in Calvin’s historical photos.
“It really was a celebration of the number of senior women faculty across campus,” said Curry. Today almost 30 percent of Calvin’s faculty is female.
The photos were also used in a calendar that was sold to raise funds for a local women’s drop-in center.
Reactions to the photos have been positive. “We were going to take down the pictures from our ‘wall of history’ when the calendar version came out . . . but everyone wanted to keep them up,” said Curry.
