Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Brophy, Gerald

Gerry Brophy taught geology at Amherst for forty-three years.  He passed away at the age of eighty-seven on April 2, 2014.   Born in Kansas City, he was raised in New Rochelle, New York.  Upon graduation from Iona Preparatory School in 1944, Gerry served in the U.S. Maritime Service in the North Atlantic until the end of the war.  He then attended Columbia University, completing his B.A. and then a Ph.D. in 1954.

 The Samuel A. Hitchcock Professor of Mineralogy and Geology, Gerry taught at Amherst College from 1954 to 1998, with Introduction to Geology, Mineralogy, and Economic Geology as his signature courses.  He was instrumental in the hiring of Emeritus Professor Ed Belt in 1966, myself in 1975, and Peter Crowley, and Tekla Harms—both in 1986. So, of the current five tenure-line faculty members in our department, Gerry hired and trained three.  In this way, Gerry’s legacy as an educator has been felt for decades after his retirement and continues after his passing.

We three faculty came to Amherst from research universities—Wisconsin, MIT, and Arizona—and only Tekla had actually attended a liberal arts college.  So, it fell largely to Gerry to help us learn how to teach, and how to teach at a liberal arts college, and specifically how to teach at Amherst. 

Gerry taught us how to teach an introductory science class—Geology 11—to all students at the College while at the same time providing an education that would serve as a foundation for those who wanted to major in geology. Few students come to Amherst as geology majors.   Majors are typically born in Geo 11—students are drawn in by the allure of new and exciting concepts offered by friendly and enthusiastic faculty—and ultimately become hooked on the subject through the now-famous Final Project.

As conceptualized by Pete Foose but perfected by Gerry, the Geology 11 Final Project is a virtual-mapping exercise based on more than one hundred rock samples laid out in a grid on the lab floor. This is one exam that is seemingly remembered and revered by all who have survived it.  More about the Final Project a bit later.

Gerry understood the power of field trips both to educate and to provide a lifetime of enjoyment and appreciation as graduates of Geology 11 traveled around the earth throughout their lives. Field trips are still woven into the course’s weekly labs, and there is also an all-day Saturday or Sunday trip, all with the purpose of educating students about the geologic evolution that has occurred over the past one billion years in the area now occupied by the Connecticut River Valley.

Gerry decided that teaching should be fun.  He believed that if faculty are having fun and are enjoying what they are doing, then students will enjoy what they are learning.  Personalizing interactions with students was a hallmark of Gerry’s teaching style.  Called by his first name by many students, even at a time when many faculty called students by their last names, Gerry generously shared stories about his geologic travels around the globe, not to mention his Friday morning report of the previous evening’s poker results.

Gerry’s impact on the discipline of geology and his contributions to Earth science education reach well beyond Amherst College.

While a graduate student at Columbia, Gerry studied uranium ore deposits in central Utah with the support of the Atomic Energy Commission.  During his long career, he worked as a consultant to several mining companies in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa.  Gerry also worked in Pakistan, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mexico.  From 1978 to 1980, while on leave from Amherst, Gerry managed the Department of Energy programs for potential geothermal resources in the lower forty-eight contiguous United States.

 For many summers, Gerry was an instructor in and served as counselor and president of, the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association, a field station in Red Lodge, Montana, where students from around the U.S. come for summer field courses in geology.

Gerry was also instrumental in Amherst’s participation in WAMSIP, an acronym for Williams-Amherst-Mount Holyoke-Smith Interinstitutional Project in Geology, a program created in the late-1960s to promote and support undergraduate research in geology.  This program served as a model for the KECK Geology consortium for undergraduate research, which began in 1987 and continues to the present day.

Gerry worked with the Geological Society of America, our most prestigious professional organization, to establish both an undergraduate membership program and a regional section of the society to serve the unique geology of the northeastern U.S. and Canada.  To this day, Amherst geology majors present their honors research results at the annual Spring Northeast Section meeting as student society members.

 The new Beneski Earth Sciences Building and Museum of Natural History opened in 2006.  This wonderful new facility was built around the concept of a teaching lab that integrates lab and lecture components of a course, a concept modeled on Gerry’s mineralogy lab in the old Pratt Building.  In fact, the current mineralogy lab still uses many of the same mineral and rock storage trays designed by Gerry; some still have their original color scheme.  Moreover, the new intro-teaching lab bears a striking resemblance to the old Geo 11 lab in Pratt, with one significant improvement.  Gerry used to set up the final project by first laying out a 26-by-26 block grid on the lab floor with masking tape, requiring him—and later us—to spend several quality hours on our hands and knees at the end of every semester.  We are so convinced of the ongoing positive value of Gerry’s conception of the final project that we had the grid permanently built into the tiles of the Beneski intro lab. 

Gerry served as the director of the Pratt Museum for twenty years, from 1968 to 1987. As director of the museum, in so far as possible, Gerry implemented a philosophy of letting visitors encounter the wonder of the museum’s collections at close range.   This vision continues to this day in the new Beneski Museum, with the location of the mineral collections along the main corridors and the prominent beltway of drawers within the galleries that visitors can open to engage with representative material from the collections—the stuff behind the closed doors.

To take a walk around Beneski is indeed to take a walk with Gerry.  The department’s program, its people, and the facilities all bear his indelible mark.  Each year, a stellar Amherst geology student is awarded the Belt-Brophy Prize, which consists of a Brunton Compass with field case, the most versatile field tool of the geologist.  And two of Gerry’s three children graduated from Amherst, James, Class of ’77 in geology, and Tom, Class of ’84 in political science.

I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence and entered into the records of the college and that a copy be sent to Professor Brophy’s family.

Respectfully submitted,

Edward S. Belt   
Jack Cheney   
Peter Crowley   
Tekla Harms