Founding Faculty Bob Barnard

Dr. Robert Barnard died February 26, 2014 at his Cooper Point home.

Bob was a pioneer, in the Greener sense of the word, in the use of media in teaching chemistry. He built the first closed circuit TV system at Montana State University in 1958 and used it for teaching. Years of work in the field culminated in his 1966 textbook Television for the Modern Chemistry Classroom. Two years later he came to Olympia, having been selected by Governor Dan Evans to be a planning faculty member of The Evergreen State College. He taught at Evergreen until 1980.

Much of my life has been tied together with film-splicing cement. My original goal was to be a research chemist, but I spent too much time admiring the exotic equipment and beautiful pure symmetrical crystals and chemical compounds. It was almost instinctive to take pictures of the systems. I was also attracted by the natural curiosity of other students towards looking at films or images in which they saw things they had never seen before. This… [gave] me a particular interest in finding new ways for students and teachers with limited resources to see chemistry as it is. Making films and TV tapes in chemistry is a good way to generate lots of lumps.

—Bob Barnard