Sally (Stueber) Merrill

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Biography

Sarah Bishop Merrill, M.S., Ph.D. learned to sing in church and with her Presbyterian grandmother, and to listen to people with interesting ethical challenges when she was drafted to accompany her father, an old-fashioned doctor, on winter house calls and emergencies in medically-underserved parts of Ohio. She developed an interest in bio-medical ethics through listening to the many people she met in hospitals while waiting for him, and when working briefly during the summers in his Keith Building office in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. At home, she and her siblings, seldom over-programmed and thus having lots of time to observe construction in their neighborhood, watched with baited breath and admiring smiles as their mother’s heroes, a smiling, blue-eyed contractor with a name that sounded like “Geronimo!” and his assistant, “Bob,” repaired, remodeled, and constructed parts of their old house, a “model home” of the 1950’s built on a former Shaker farm. She also grew up during the summers of the 1960's, sailing, and shoveling manure (a great preparation for an extensive career in higher education, attempting to publish but perishing anyhow, and mentoring/radicalizing thousands of students through teaching as a subversive activity, with useful skills,) and carrying water to her white horse on an island in Lake Erie, and driving and riding her mare all over the island, in the land around the quarries, and with the surrey with the fringe on top, to and from the ferry boat dock. She studied at Laurel School for Girls, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Skidmore College, Georgetown University (M.S.) & Universität Hamburg, and earned her Ph.D. (1987) at the University at Albany. She retooled for three experimental years in K-12 Education and research in assessment at the University of Chicago and Calumet College of St. Joseph whose Grand Calumet Task Force was environmentally crucial in NW Indiana near Chicago. Honored for her volunteer work for quality child care (and organic foods in her coop) in communities in upstate New York when her children were young, she was selected as among the first Agency Fellows in Women and Public Policy of the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society. In this role, she served in the Office of Intergovernmental Relations of the NYS Dept. of Social Services during the Mario Cuomo Administration in 1986, and later in a statewide role to prevent and document domestic violence. In her first professorship at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, she was fortunate to have faculty “spies” sent to her Engineering Ethics classes, where she plied the trade taught to her by other pioneers in the 1970’s and ’80’s, such as the case study method developed using small groups during radical organizing of the civil rights and peace movement, Quaker practices, and Feminist pedagogy. Co-teaching applied ethics across the curriculum at Kansas State, with colleagues in the Veterinary Medical College, Engineering, Architecture, Planning, and Computer Science, she had to resist the rather Victorian role of “Moral Guardian” often assigned to “nice ladies,” and just listen actively with good questions. She won the AGC Education and Research Foundation Klinger Prize for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education and taught special Ethics courses she developed for the Architectural Engineering and Construction Science (Management) students at Kansas State, thanks to many cooperating colleagues, construction contractors, the university attorney at the time, and students. After 12 years in university and K-12 teaching near Chicago, she has lived since 2003 in the lovely Lower Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican Border.

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Sarah Anne Stueber Bishop Merrill, at registration.