“But Mom, they have cows there! What am I gonna do with cows?” When Dr. Katie Cruger applied to college, even full rides to rural schools couldn’t lure her out of the city. The Chatham Communications professor grew up as a musician and dancer; she was ready for the full New York experience at Marymount Manhattan College. “I either wanted to be a magazine editor or a brilliant filmmaker, and Marymount was this really great place where you got to think about communication theory and you got to learn all about racism and sexism and oppression…They let you take video production classes, and I got to take sound design classes and magazine editing.”
The artistic environment drew her in, but calling the East 71st Street campus home was a serious plus. “It’s so wonderful there. People have these really interesting ideas about what the city is like, so they think that the people are going to be mean to you or that it’s really impersonal, but I actually had the opposite experience.” Looking back, she says it feels a lot like Pittsburgh. “Every different neighborhood in New York is its own sort of little world, but then you know your neighbors…. There [were] these really adorable elderly women who sat at the Laundromat with me every Saturday morning, and I had my pizza guy and my video store,” she says. “It’s just like this…little small town in just a couple of blocks.”
It wasn’t all a walk in Central Park, though; she worked nearly the whole time she was studying. “Actually, I didn’t go to my graduation ceremony because…I had to work that day,” she says. Holding a job in college is hard enough, but it’s way more difficult in the Big Apple. “There’s a bizarre work week in New York…. You have to be in the office by 8:30, and generally you’re there until 8:30 or so. When I stopped having to take classes at night…it was like, Oh my gosh! I only have a fifty-hour workweek. That’s just so great! Which is just crazy…. Don’t think that that is the norm. That is not the norm. It’s just the New York norm.”
Long hours weren’t the only complicating factor. “I worked in an advertising agency with people whom I really loved. They were great, they were creative, they…were kind and goodhearted, and what we were doing was actively working to sell people things that they didn’t need, and that bothered me a bit.” Ethical concerns forced her to rethink her career. “I think that we…get these ideas about what we want our career to be, and everyone does it, just based on the movies that we watch and the stories that we hear, the books that we read, and what sounds interesting to us.” She says that while college is a great time to think and question, it doesn’t always provide final answers. “I think a lot of people find that…they don’t necessarily like that thing that they thought they liked, or they might be more interested in something else…. I think that working first, even just for a little bit, helps you figure some of that stuff out.”
For her, the next step was graduate school. “I applied to Communication programs in New York. I didn’t really want to leave New York,” she says. “And then, on a whim, I applied to the University of Colorado at Boulder.” Drawn by the promise of a stunning landscape and an assistantship, Cruger moved out west. “It turned out to be perfect. I loved my professors, I loved the courses that I took, my students were pretty good, too, and it worked out really well.” She followed her Master’s degree with a Ph.D., all the while connecting to the naturalist movement prominent in Colorado. A serious dedication to vegetarianism sparked a budding interest in activism. “I had a blog where I did all these crazy sustainability things. I turned off the power in my apartment briefly and I tried to do all these weird things. The power came back on pretty quickly because refrigeration was really the problem there, but I did start eating locally and I got this little bin with red wiggler worms so I could make my own compost.” Her “worm apartment” was stolen, but her sustainable attitude stuck. “I think that the commitments that you have in your own life inspire your work no matter what you do, and so then I started getting interested in doing research into environmental communication.”
After nearly 6 years in Colorado, Cruger hoped to reconnect with family and return to city life. A short search led her to Chatham; she’s a full-time faculty member in Communications, teaching undergrads and helping to shape the department’s new graduate program. “The campus is gorgeous, there’s this really nice energy here,” she says. She calls the women’s college a “good, empowering space,” later adding, “The students are enthusiastic, and they made a decision to come to a women’s college in 2012 which I think is a significant thing, and so I was excited to be a part of that.”
Luckily, Chatham allows Cruger to stay totally connected to nature. “I’m interested in how people talk about this thing called the environment and media representations of climate change and sustainability and what that word means and how we construct its meaning.” Writing curriculum provides an excellent opportunity to challenge students’ environmental thinking. “Sustainability can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” she says, “and I’m not necessarily as concerned about telling students what I think that word should mean as I am concerned about…having them come up with what they think that word should mean.”
Chatham’s Environmental Communications track puts her advertising experience to work. “I’m interested in helping students become ethical communications professionals.” Moral dilemmas aren’t easy; her advice is simple but challenging. “Do the right thing…. It’s hard.” Cruger’s career didn’t go the way she thought it would, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Ironically, I’m now really excited,” she says. “I wish I had a cow.”
Dr. Cruger is Her Campus Chatham’s new faculty advisor.