The office of Institute Dean Thomas Phelan is tucked away on the bottom floor of the Russell Sage Laboratory, and you might not notice it as you walk by. Once I stepped inside I felt as if I had entered a different world. A neatly appointed, comfortable office adorned with pictures and artifacts surrounded the form of the bearded man seated at a desk. He welcomed me in with a broad smile, and we began our talk. It was then that I realized I was in the presence of a great man.

Reverend Phelan was born in Albany, N.Y. His father was a country doctor and his mother was a country nurse. He went on to the College of the Holy Cross at a fairly young age and studied English there. His college career was accelerated due to World War II.

After graduating, he joined the navy. "I spent the last months of 1946 in the Pacific, in places like Okinawa and Iwo Jima," remembered Phelan. "[In the navy], I was a tactical radar officer, but we were kids. I went to the Pacific when I was just 18, and we were just crazy kids. Which, in a way, you have to be to let somebody shoot at you."

Although he worked for a short while after the war, he eventually attended the seminary at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. "Before I went to the Pacific, I had made up my mind that this was something I might like to do because it was a way of serving people’s needs, and I felt like that was my job," said Phelan. He received ordination in 1951. Returning to New York, he spent his first summer in the Catskills and then went to Herkimer, N.Y. After one year he found himself back in Troy, raising money to build Catholic Central High School.

Soon after, he became chaplain at Rensselaer. "I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. I wanted to teach, but I came here in 1959, and I’ve been here ever since," said Phelan, with a grin.

During his tenure, he constructed the Chapel and Cultural Center on campus in 1968. "We saw this was a ‘cultural wasteland.’ The Players and the Glee Club were it. There was nothing else," he mentioned. Together with Herb Hodgson, the Protestant chaplain at the time, they planned a center for religious services and cultural and artistic pursuits in the community. "It won a number of awards at the time, and got a great deal of notice, even in Europe," recalls Phelan.

By the mid-seventies, Phelan had been teaching for a number of years and was invited to be dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. "We wanted to make the school as good as the others, and we thought the way to do that would be to focus on what RPI did best, which was science and engineering," he explained. During his 23 years as humanities and social sciences dean, he helped to bring prominence to the arts and created science and technology studies formally on campus.

Phelan’s love of history drew him to the community during this time. "I saw that Troy people didn’t have a high regard for Troy, and I thought, ‘maybe if they understood their history, they’d feel better,’" he stated. His history book, Hudson Mohawk Gateway (whose name is also that of a local historical society with which Phelan has been involved), was just printed in a second edition.

Another prominent work of Phelan’s is Rensselaer: Where Imagination Achieves the Impossible. "There are several histories of RPI; the most recent was 30 years old. We thought it was time to have something a little more popular, so the illustrated history was our answer to that," he said. Phelan, in collaboration with several other experts, published it in the mid-’90s. It is available in the Rensselaer Union Bookstore.

Phelan’s goals for Rensselaer can summed up in two parts: "Number one, trying to make the city a better place for everyone, and secondly to open up RPI to a little bit of the humanistic side of things, so that students would come out of here with not only the knowledge of their field, but also with some kind of guidelines that they would understand," he says.

Today, as Institute dean and historian, his work revolves around the history of RPI and he is currently working with the author of a biography of Amos Eaton.

"During my time here, I have enjoyed being around such bright young people. When all is said and done, most of us would put that as the number one reason for hanging around. It’s important for students to understand their social context, and for them to become broader. They have to be able to deal with people as well as organizations," said Phelan, as his advice to students. "I went to college during a war, but we still found time for what would be called ‘extracurriculars.’"

Dean Phelan can be reached at phelan@rpi.edu.