Tatsuya Hidano, junior

Aaron Gurley recalled his first encounter with Gretchen Eick at a political rally: “I thought she was kind of off the wall.”

“She's got this big hair. She always wears ethnic clothing around, so I figured she's kind of wild, out of this world,” said Gurley, a junior majoring in political science.

His image of this nontraditional history professor quickly changed when he first walked into Eick's class, Gurley said.

“I realized she was a brilliant, brilliant woman,” he said. “She knows like everything.”

A professor of history at Friends University since ’93, Eick loves teaching. She welcomes questions about history with a big smile and answers them with many colorful tales. She shares historical events with students as if they happened yesterday.

Raised mainly by her single father who was a pastor with a passion to make the world a better place, Eick's upbringing was not common in the 1940s and ’50s.

“When I was a very small child, I remember one time he took us to the black beach because there were still segregated beaches at the time.

“He didn't say anything, but we started looking around. ‘How come we are the only white people here?’

“Then he was able to say, ‘Well, this is one of the things that is wrong with this country, that we separate people by race.’”

After arriving at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich., as a history major, Eick participated in the college’s new program in which all students were required to study abroad for six months. Eick went to West Africa. She was 19.

“That changed my life. I had such an amazing experience and fell in love with Africa.”

After returning to the U.S., her professor encouraged her to apply for a national fellowship.

“I didn't think I was smart enough,” Eick said, noting that she did not know many women who had a doctorate at the time. “You have to be extraordinary to get a national fellowship.”

Then she got it.

She pursued master's degrees in history and African studies at Northwestern University, but again she doubted her potential.

“I decided right away that I wasn't smart enough to do a Ph.D.”

She returned the rest of the scholarship and left school.

“Which is interesting to think about that now,” she said. “That was stupid of me, to think I couldn't do it, and have such little, such thin faith in me, and to think only men are smart enough to do it.”

She got married, met people who were involved with the civil rights movement in the 1960s and took a teaching job at a newly integrated school in New Haven, Conn., where she wrote a curriculum.

“I had a chance to try to figure out how we could tell this American history in a way that included everybody, that didn't only talk about white men and political leaders and military leaders.”

After moving to Washington, D.C., with her husband, she left work and stayed home to raise her children, as most women did in 1970s. She, however, still felt strongly about the world and tried to connect to it. She volunteered with a group of people against apartheid in South Africa.

As a volunteer, Eick organized the first successful campaign against a bank involved in the investment on apartheid. She became the first woman hired by church agencies on Capitol Hill to work on foreign and military policies. Through her new work, she also traveled to about 40 countries.

Lobbying on Capitol Hill for 14 years, her work ranged widely, from publishing a book on how to lobby to hosting a local TV talk show. 

Then as the lobby director she proposed a merger of two organizations, without her in the picture. Around this time, the marriage to her first husband ended. She decided to move on.

She met her second husband Michael, and they decided to relocate in Kansas.

But she could not find a job.

“I was unemployed for six months and going crazy.”

When she finally got a job at the University of Kansas as a research assistant, her easy work load allowed her to go back to school. She pursued a doctorate in American studies.

Then there was an opening at Friends University.

Bill Allan, associate professor of family life, remembered when she interviewed for the position.

“Scholarly,” Allan said as he recalled his impression of her and that she was highly recommended by her reference: her predecessor.

Friends hired her. Her husband, a pastor, also found a job in Wichita.

After about four years of teaching full-time and working on the doctorate, she finished a dissertation, which would become an award-winning book in 2002: “Dissent in Wichita.” The book talks about the civil rights movements in the Midwest that started in Wichita.

“I really love teaching,” Eick said.

Her background is a tremendous resource for students.

“If they really wanna know about history,” Allan said, “they wanna take her class.”

He also warns students.

“Be ready for a hard class because she is difficult, and she expects a lot,” he said.

But she also gives students an enormous amount of not just book-learning but all of her experiences, Allan said.

Gurley agrees. Impressed with her expertise in history, Gurley began to seek her advice on many things school-related and beyond. Eick became his mentor.

Eick leads her students to analyze and see how different things in life connect with one another, he said.

“You have all the pieces of a puzzle,” Gurley said. “But she helps you figure out how to put the puzzle together.”

Eick’s to-do list is quite lengthy. It includes teaching history abroad and writing a few more books, but for now her focus stays with her students. 

“I’m not ready to retire,” Eick said as she wonders how she is doing at teaching and how students like her class.

“It’s a wonderful thing to have,” she said, “a job like this, where you interact with so many students and great colleagues.”