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Northern Illinois University

NIU Office of Public Affairs


News Release

Contact: Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472

July 13, 2004

NIU professor John A. Niemi remembered
for love of students, teaching

DeKalb — John A. Niemi spent 50 of his 71 years as a teacher, collecting myriad honors during a storied career as what colleagues call the exemplary “professor as student advocate.”

He rose from humble beginnings, studied and taught around the world, and found friends for himself and partners for his university along the way. During his eight years teaching at the University of British Columbia, he met and married his wife, Muriel, who holds a doctorate in English from Harvard University.

Yet Niemi, a 29-year professor in the Northern Illinois University Department of Counseling, Adult and Higher Education who died Tuesday, July 6, desired one simple legacy.

“(I would like) to have people remember that I cared,” he said during an interview five years ago. “I cared about students.”

Niemi’s passion for adult and continuing education – his field since 1954 – is responsible for bringing hundreds of students to NIU for graduate studies in the College of Education while taking NIU courses off-campus for countless others.

His tireless decades of work with military personnel, beginning in Alaska a half-century ago when he taught functionally illiterate men enlisted in the U.S. Army, paved the way for the 25-year partnership between NIU and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Its commander, Rear Admiral Ann M. Rondeau, is pursuing an Ed.D. in adult continuing education at NIU.

His love of international travel – especially Finland, the homeland of his ancestors, where he visited 20 times – opened doors to countless educational experiences for students here and abroad.

The lasting image many will remember, though, is of Niemi and the bear. Their picture hangs prominently on the door to his Gabel Hall office, the lovable bear planting a kiss on the blushing and obviously delighted Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Candles, flowers and a sign reading “May the Giant Rest in Peace” were placed outside his office Wednesday.

“John was very gregarious, and by that I mean with a big smile. He had this nickname of ‘Bear Voice’ that he was given in his small community in Michigan,” said colleague Gene Roth, a professor in the Department of Counseling, Adult and Higher Education. “He had that booming voice and that big smile, and wherever he went, which was all around the world, people would always remember him.”

“John exemplified for me what it means to be a true ‘professor as student advocate.’ John was tireless in his dedication to help students succeed,” said Paul Ilsley, a professor in the department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment.

“He was instrumental in placing many students into professorships, and kept track of their careers and knew where they were. He kept up with them, and cared for them well beyond their time at NIU,” Ilsley added. “Northern has placed more professors than any other graduate program in adult education, and John was just a dynamo in ensuring that they continue to succeed. He was very proud of that, as he should have been.”

Department Chair Lemuel Watson called Niemi “the icon” and “a rock” for fellow faculty.

“He’s just been someone who’s totally touched my life: his laughter, his persistence, his commitment to come in when he wasn’t feeling well,” Watson said. “This man was just the determination of commitment to serving students and his colleagues, the epitome of what ‘the professor’ should be.”

Niemi’s grandparents came to the United States from a poor area of Finland, where they were tenant-farmers, hoping to escape Finland’s infertile soil and to find a better place to farm.

Unfortunately, they settled in the northern regions of Wisconsin and Michigan, where they discovered that the ground was equally barren. They became marginal farmers, raising dairy cattle and producing hay on their land. Both grandfathers also worked in the iron ore mines.

His mother, a homemaker, and his father, who also labored in the mines, had only an eighth-grade education. However, Niemi grew up among mostly Finnish immigrants who stressed schooling and instilled in him a lifelong fascination and love for the old country.

Niemi earned an associate’s degree from Gogebic Community College in his hometown of Ironwood, Mich., where he graduated in 1952. (Gogebic bestowed its Distinguished Alumnus of the Year award upon Niemi in 1999).

After finishing at Gogebic, where he studied liberal arts, Niemi went to Michigan State in East Lansing where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1954.

Niemi later pursued advanced studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, completed a master’s degree at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and earned his doctorate at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1967. During a stint as assistant to the president at the University of Alaska that began in 1961, Niemi was part of a team that drafted the blueprint for continuing education in Alaska and later implemented those programs.

In 2001, Niemi was awarded the insignia of the Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland. Instituted Sept. 11, 1942, and conferred by the president of the Republic of Finland as Grand Master of the Order, the decoration is bestowed to persons who, by their exceptional activities, have developed political, economic or cultural relations between Finland and their country.

Niemi’s major contribution was made at the University of Helsinki, where he was a Fulbright Professor of Adult Education in the fall of 1981. Niemi taught a graduate course there and helped to start the graduate program, returning as a visiting professor in 1988.

He also was involved in launching the Univeristy of Helsinki’s Research and Training Center at Lahti, located about 60 miles north of the main campus, devoted to advancing adult education from the bachelor’s level to post-retirement programs.

Lahti also serves as a center for research in adult education and, in this venue, Niemi organized several conferences which brought together NIU colleagues and graduate students, including former NIU President John La Tourette, and their Finnish counterparts to explore the subject. La Tourette’s visit to this center in 1990 provided a working model for planning what eventually became NIU’s first off-campus center built in Hoffman Estates.

The University of Helsinki awarded Niemi an honorary Ph.D. in 1986, allowing him to wear unique ceremonial garb to NIU commencements: black tails, black top hat and a sword, which hangs above the doorway to the Niemi kitchen.

“John was quite well-revered and loved in Finland among the people he interacted with,” La Tourette said. “He always carried around with him a large notebook which contained business cards of people he met. Among those business cards were all the key people in adult education in Finland.”

But much of his teaching philosophy took shape on these shores: in Alaska, where he located in 1954 to work as a school teacher and coach as well as a teacher for the U.S. Army.

Treating the military students as worthy human beings capable of learning produced tremendous results, Niemi once recalled. Some of the men told him they were the first in their families to earn high school equivalency certificates. “I told them not to stop there,” Niemi said, “but to take University of Alaska classes, and many did.”

That philosophy never left him.

“He was an unbelievable recruiter of students. He’d get in a conversation with them, and get them talking about themselves, and the next thing you’d know, he’d say, ‘You should be studying adult education because it sounds like that’s what your work is all about,’ ” Roth said. “We had jokes about him doing that when he was in the hospital. He’d be ready to go into an operation, and he’d be talking to the nurse about why she should consider adult education.”

Hundreds of U.S. students traveled to Finland through Niemi’s mentoring, and dozens of Finns and Russians came to the United States.

“The long-term effect of this is that it’s cumulative,” Ilsley said. “John’s work overseas, especially in Finland and in Russia, became increasingly sophisticated, way beyond mere cultural curiosities toward lasting partnership connections. Those connections will be felt forever and will outlive us all.”

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