Classics Professor Owen Cramer has taught at Colorado College for over 60 years, and in that time he has made some long-lasting impacts on the school.
Cramer, best known for his Latin and ancient Greek classes, was on the committee alongside Professor Tim Fuller to develop the Block Plan that students all know today. He was also recruited by the college to restart the Classics Department, which had been without full-time faculty since the early 1950s. Cramer was also a part of developing the Comparative Literature Department on campus.
Cramer has been at the forefront of educational development at CC. However, CC was not Cramer’s first introduction to the liberal arts. He spent his college years studying at Oberlin College, a private liberal arts institute in Ohio.
Cramer had planned to pursue his education in chemistry but eventually changed course. During undergrad, Cramer was tasked with reading many academic articles in the field and found that the more interesting and in-depth ones were in German. Therefore, he took introductory courses in order to read the papers. This accelerated his love for the language and Cramer ended up taking a comparative literature course in German. Being his professor’s prized pupil, Cramer ended up taking inspiration from that class to start the Comparative Literature Department here at CC.
German is not the only language that Cramer knows. He is also fluent in Latin, Greek, French and English. He also knows a small amount of Japanese from speaking with his grandchildren who reside in Japan.
“But my approach to language is kind of the Humpty Dumpty approach, you know?” Cramer says, “I use words the way I want to and if I want to extend its meaning I’d pay it more.”
Colorado College recruited Cramer through a published list of honorary fellows from the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a program in the late 1960s that gave funding to humanities research and was run out of Princeton. When he first heard of the opportunity, he knew nothing of Colorado Springs and was only 23 years old.
At the start of his career at CC, Cramer was juggling teaching students who were almost his age and in their early twenties while raising a son at the same time. In his early years, he found himself growing alongside the students he was teaching and learning from his older colleagues.
In the late 1960s, CC was dissatisfied with its accomplishments, not wanting to teach the same content they had always been teaching and the world was in a troublesome place. There was a large effort to make CC better than it was and to create a small community within a larger society.
“We were building a utopia in a certain way,” Cramer said.
Cramer has done a lot of experimentation with education throughout his entire teaching career. While at CC, Professor Cramer was working with fruit flies in the biology department studying their traits. He also worked in the mathematics department, teaching the history of maths.
Cramer’s reach was long and wide, taking in every aspect that CC had to offer inside and outside of the classroom. This includes singing, although not at the moment, in the CC Choir. Cramer also spent time as a draft counselor and participated as a member of the El Paso County Democratic General Committee. During that time, he also served on CC’s Academic Program Committee, which sought to establish goals for the school in the 1970s. Cramer also led numerous students, up to 36 at a time, on independent study blocks.
“We were trying to make human life thrive,” Cramer said.
Originally from Chicago, Cramer had been surrounded by academia since he was little. His father was a professor at the University of Chicago. At the age of three, Cramer observed his father studying “The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories” edited by Robert B. Strassler, so naturally he did the same. When the day came for Cramer’s father to go in and teach the material, little Cramer followed.
Professor Cramer now lives at home alone with his four children spread across the West and East coasts and eight grandchildren around the country. When he is not teaching, Cramer takes care of himself by going to physical therapy and ordering DoorDash from his favorite Italian Restaurant in the Springs, The Roman Villa, where he has known the past four generations of owners. He travels occasionally; last year, he visited his daughter, who was teaching in Siena, Italy and taught a class in European Politics there.
For now, Professor Ownen Cramer sits in his office, teaching students Latin and ancient Greek history, with no plans to retire.