Gregory Pierce

Psychology Professor, (1991-2019)

Memorial Minute for Gregory Pierce, Professor of Psychology emeritus, presented by Professors of Psychology Jen Borton and Tara McKee on December 3, 2019.

Gregory Richard Pierce, Professor of Psychology Emeritus, passed away on October 9, 2019. He was born on July 23, 1962, in Springfield, Illinois, where he spent his early childhood years with his two brothers and parents before they all moved to Tacoma, Washington. Greg earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington, working at a moving company to help pay for his education. We both benefited from that experience when he took charge of packing up the U-Haul when each of us moved into our first homes many years ago.

While an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Greg met Irwin and Barbara Sarason who became his research mentors. He went on to earn both his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Washington before joining the Hamilton faculty in 1991. Greg’s research focused on social and personality psychology, in particular stress and coping and the effect of negative thoughts on performance in areas ranging from academics to athletics. Greg was extremely collaborative in his research, often including students as co-authors on papers. He also maintained long-time collaborations throughout his Hamilton career with the Sarasons as well as JT Ptacek, a colleague at Bucknell University who was his friend from graduate school. I actually first met Greg when I was an undergraduate at Bucknell and he visited JT and gave a research talk to the department. Who knew that years later he would become my colleague and friend?

Greg authored dozens of papers and publications that reflected his expertise in supportive relationships and cognitive interference. His interest in and knowledge of psychometrics also resulted in his creating and publishing several measures of personality and personal relationships.

His work has appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (the flagship journal in his field), as well as the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, among others. Greg was an extremely productive scholar, yet he also helped foster productivity among his colleagues. Not only did he want to work together on mutually engaging topics with his colleagues, but he also regularly attended research meetings with junior colleagues, solely for the purpose of giving constructive feedback on projects. He was always willing to help flesh out an idea, to read an early draft of a manuscript, and to give those ever-important words of encouragement to colleagues who were going through the review process. He encouraged us to discuss our research and to find ways to incorporate it into our teaching. He also promoted a departmental scholarly community, occasionally placing copies of interesting or engaging articles in our mailboxes.

Jen Borton offered the following remarks:
Greg taught a variety of courses at Hamilton, including Introductory Psychology, Research Methods, Statistics, Social Psychology, Personality, and his lab course on Individual Differences. As a teacher, Greg’s strength was in engaging his students in discussion, and he was able to do so with classes of any size. He had a way of putting students at ease by joking around and teasing them good-naturedly. He did have a pet peeve about cell phones in class, though, and tol students that if their phone rang during class, he would answer it. True to his word, when a student’s phone went off one morning, he took it. “Hey! Is this Jill’s mom? Hi! This is Greg Pierce, her Statistics professor. She’s in class right now, so she can’t talk. She’ll call you back later.” It was all in good fun, but that was the last time a phone went off in class that semester.

Both Tara and I team-taught our department’s Statistics and Research Methods course with Greg for many years. Greg had a deep understanding of and facility with statistics that we both benefited from. His excitement about stats was palpable, particularly his love of the Central Limit Theorem, which—Tara and I confessed to each other privately—neither of us had fully and deeply understood until we team-taught the class with him. Each semester, on the day we introduced the Central Limit Theorem, Greg would say, “If we didn’t have the CLT, this course would be over now and you could all just go home.” He spoke of the eloquent beauty of the theory and encouraged the students to have it tattooed on their foreheads or to embroider it onto their pillowcases. One semester, we even had the students make CLT t-shirts and took a picture of them all wearing them. To this day, Tara and I can still feel Greg’s presence in the room when we teach the Central Limit Theorem to our students, and of course we invite them to tattoo it on their foreheads and embroider it on their pillowcases.

Given Greg’s appreciation of statistics and probability, it likely comes as no surprise that he loved poker. One year, he asked Steve Pullman, the Science Center shop technician, to build a bunch of large poker, roulette, and blackjack tables. For several years, as our first “get to know you” lab in Statistics, Greg would round up previous students and even his own children to deal Texas Hold’em and run the tables, and our students, in small groups, would make the rounds from table to table, playing poker and other casino games. Greg talked a little about probability and pointed out the various ways that the house always had the advantage, but mostly it was a way for us to learn the students’ names in a comfortable environment. The winner always received a Café Opus gift card.

Greg loved statistics so much that he somehow found a way to incorporate statistical concepts and terms into every conversation. Departmental discussions about resources were always framed in terms of “degrees of freedom,” and any time he was talking about the importance of different factors in a decision, he spoke in terms of their betaweights...Tara continued, Greg was able to combine his love of statistics with service to the College by conducting the data analyses from the annual survey study conducted for the Alcohol Coalition Committee and by serving as a statistical consultant (with Jen) on the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation assessment project on student learning in the early 2000s. Greg was an active member of the campus community in other ways, at various times serving on the Committee on Academic Standing, the Planning Committee for New Student Orientation, the Committee on Student Activities, the J Board, the then-Harassment Grievance Board, the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board (which he chaired), the Quantitative Literacy Committee, and the Levitt Center Advisory Board. Greg also served as Psychology Department chair in the mid-2000s, during which time he promoted our having daylong department retreats to give us more time to think about important issues facing us. He always made visiting faculty feel welcome and made sure to solicit input from junior and senior faculty alike. As department chair, he was committed to finding ways for our students to develop a collective psychology identity. He regularly proposed ways to bring students together for academic and non-academic activities. His efforts were met with increased efforts on the part of the students for proposing such activities.

Through these and other experiences, Greg formed a strong interest in the academic development of students, which led to his appointment as Associate Dean of Students for Academics in 1998. Greg put his own particular stamp on this role, and during his tenure, decided that, when students missed deadlines, rather than having them write an essay about the importance of deadlines, which was the typical consequence at the time, he would have them all read Radio Mystery Theater plays together! At the time, Greg was very into old-time radio shows and was eager to share his infatuation with others. He was also an avid collector of books, classical music, and movies, and enjoyed sharing his resources with others, including donating a large collection of Western books to the Kirkland Town Library.

There is one particular infatuation that anyone who knew Greg knew about: that was his deep affection for Sherlock Holmes. Above his office door hung a 221B sign, which is the address on Baker St. where Sherlock lived, and his bulletin boards were covered with pictures of Sherlock Holmes drawn by his students and kids. When I interviewed for this job Greg mentioned his love of Sherlock while driving to dinner the first night. I excitedly told him that my husband also liked Sherlock Holmes and, at the time, was into reading pastiches, to which Greg replied that he was delighted to know another person who even knew that term! He then said, if your husband is a true Sherlock Holmes fan then he should know how many steps lead up to 221B Baker St. Sure enough, when he picked me up the next morning and I told him 17 steps, he knew he had found a fellow Sherlock aficionado and I wouldn’t be surprised if that helped me get the job! Jen continued, one strong memory we have of Greg was that he could never pass a student in the hallway without engaging in some kind of jovial banter or asking about their lives. When Greg was promoted to full professor in 2004, then Dean of Faculty David Paris wrote, “Students have high praise for his teaching but also note his contact with them outside of his classes and his interest in their nonacademic endeavors.” Greg attended sporting events and performances, invited students to his home, and regularly ate meals with them. He had a knack for making students feel that their lives both in and outside of the classroom were important to him. Greg was always very thoughtful and generous with his time, whether it was with students, his colleagues, or his friends. He loved to host departmental gatherings and parties such as ice cream socials with students, meals with prospective faculty members, and potluck dinners with the department. Tara and I both have fond memories of these events with Greg’s three kids — Katie, Sun-Ly, and Liam — providing wonderful entertainment for all of the young children of faculty so that their parents could enjoy some adult conversation. Greg also had a particular affection for young children. Doug Weldon recalls that Greg had a warm and encouraging way with children and his two daughters have wonderful memories of spending time with Greg in the first few years after he arrived in Clinton. Shortly after my first daughter, Eva, was born, Chuck and I were feeling that new-parent one-two punch of being overwhelmed and exhausted, and Greg offered to come watch Eva for awhile so Chuck and I could get out of the house and go have a nice dinner together. When we hesitated, he assured us that he LOVED babies, and would be happy as a clam to bring over his slippers and a movie and give us a bit of a break. So when Eva was less than a month old, Greg became her very first babysitter. We weren’t gone very long, but when we got back it was clear that Greg had spent the entire time holding Eva and bouncing around the house soothing her, and that he’d been perfectly happy to do so.

Greg was a devoted mentor, colleague, and friend, and we will feel his influence for many years to come. We thought we would close with Greg’s classic mode of ending a conversation: “Bye, now.”