Ben Smidt

After 30 years of teaching media courses at colleges in Boston, Miami, Madison, the Chicago area and Eau Claire, the Communication and Journalism department chair is ready to travel some more.

Yet, this time it won’t be due to work but rather for pure enjoyment during retirement.

A. David Gordon, the CJ department chair at UW-Eau Claire since he joined the university in the summer of 1997, will retire after this spring semester.

Along with his plans to do more traveling with his wife, Sue, and “excavate the office” once he retires, Gordon said the first thing he will do is recuperate.

The 67-year-old former reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal deserves the down time, his department’s faculty said, considering the work he has done during his tenure.

“I think he’s really done a commendable job and that’s a fact,” said David Hansen, a CJ associate professor.

Gordon’s involvement in helping start The Washington Post’s annual Ann Devroy Fellowship for the university’s CJ majors and strengthening the department’s relationship with Wisconsin Newspapers Association was very effective, Hansen said.

“What he did was really neat,” said Hansen, who also highlighted Gordon’s role in bringing area CJ-related professionals in to teach courses and promote diversity through the Knight journalist in residence program.

Gordon also helped re-establish the CJ Advisory Board, start the Communication Journalism Organization student group and improve the department after the combining of the communication and journalism majors.

Overall, Gordon said he enjoyed “helping students develop to the point where they can think critically.”

Senior Heidi Johnson, former president of CJO, which Gordon advised, said he always addressed the students’ concerns about the department well.

“He really cares about what the students have to say,” said Johnson, an organizational communication major.

Karen Kremer, a CJ associate professor, said she found Gordon to be a very supportive chair, considering the large size of the CJ department.

“His support came for different occasions, different reasons but all of them with very positive results,” said Kremer, who highlighted Gordon’s support of student/faculty research projects and travels to conferences.

She said Gordon “did an amazingly fine job” of entering the department and managing the endless number of tasks within it.

It is a possibility that he could come back to the department later in some way, Gordon said, because he will miss working with students and faculty.

Gordon, who grew up in Philadelphia and Madison, will remain in the area at his Altoona home. A big reason he came to Eau Claire is because he has relatives in the Twin Cities and Duluth, Minn.

“We never lived here,” Gordon said, “but it kind of felt like home because you’re in the middle of everything.”