Written for The Argo by Sadie Sparks

Sporting an oversized, long-sleeved, dark green button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khakis, Professor Thomas Kinsella of Stockton University is roughly 70-years-old. His wired glasses on the tip of his nose frame his one blue and one brown eye as he leans back in his loud squeaky desk chair, stacks of books closing in on him. His office is a minimalist’s nightmare. The bookshelves on either side of the room have been filled, and so the remaining books require space in boxes on the floor inside and outside his office next to the door. Earthquakes would be especially dangerous. The unorthodox filing system proves effective as Kinsella is reminded of a title and effortlessly reaches for it in the rubble without a second thought.

Kinsella’s 36 years of teaching literature courses at Stockton have helped him to build a thorough collection. His bookshelves display a wide range of titles, including the hefty Heart of the Pines alongside Man Alone, a book republished by the South Jersey Culture & History Center, a local publishing press run by Kinsella.

An intern at his press, Elena Suarez, explains what she thinks makes Kinsella special, “Kinsella has this special way of telling a story that feels so genuine and meaningful,” Suarez said, “I’ve personally never met someone so passionate about telling the stories that many would overlook or take for granted.”

His love of storytelling and literature becoming a teaching career surprised no one except Kinsella.

“I went to graduate school, not because I wanted to be a professor but because I wasn’t done with structured reading. I wanted to do more reading,” He explains with his Rochester accent, “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll get the PhD and then I’ll go to Wall Street and make some money or something.”

He speaks easily and endlessly about the arc of Stockton’s history and the pine barrens, but grows almost shy when it circles back to him. “Most of us are, it’s not a big deal,” is all he says about being a Doctor of Literature.

Leaned back in his chair, his legs crossed, and talking with his hands, he describes the difficulties of moving to a new office, where he was given only three shelves instead of the eight he previously had. After requesting more and exchanging emails with administrators, he was eventually called to the vice president’s office.

Kinsella describes the exchange with the previous vice president of Stockton. “She said, ‘Here’s an interesting idea: Ask yourself why you need so many books.’ I just sat back and thought, ‘Don’t answer.’ I got my bookshelves, but she had no understanding of the life of the mind—that you want books because you’ve read them and may need to refer to them.” 

This vice president no longer works at Stockton University: one of the many changes that occurred since Professor Kinsella began his career. When he arrived at the University, there were no computers until late into his first year. Technology was not yet integrated into the curriculum.

Now his wrap-around desk is equipped with three desktops, and is crowded with odds and ends, mostly books. Kinsella switches between the screens and maneuvers through design software as naturally as he pulls volumes off the shelves. 

Kinsella recalls the decades with a clarity that make the “other world” sound recent. A time when the pine barrens, Lake Fred, and uninterrupted learning took center stage.

“The culture certainly grew out of the 60s. A lot of the faculty were relatively young and if they weren’t hippies, they were exposed to the hippie culture,” Kinsella said, “It was standard to work very closely with the faculty members. Really mixing together that your professor was your friend.”  

Over time, increasing enrollment, expanding programs, and new layers of administration reshaped the small, close-knit campus he once knew. The student population has doubled since he began at the university, growing from an estimated 5,000 students to about 10,000 today, Kinsella said. 

“It’s gone now. The old Stockton is gone. We’ve turned over and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s nobody from the old days that I can think of,” he said. “It’s new, it’s more corporate. We’ve got an entirely different perspective from the administration, which maybe we need to have.”

Being among the last of the university’s early faculty gives Kinsella a rare point of view on both change and continuity. The students are one of the aspects at Stockton that Kinsella insists has been the most consistent. He said the student body has always been made up mostly of local South Jersey students, many of them the first in their families to attend college.

He added that while the campus has transformed over the decades, the pine barrens and Lake Fred remain much the same as they were when he first arrived.

The heart of his work also remains unchanged. “I like literature. I like thinking about literature. I like working with students, having them start to read and think about literature,” Kinsella said. “I think that’s a useful thing in your intellectual development.”