By Traude Gomez Rhine
CONTRIBUTOR
When Catherine Allgor flew from the East Coast to Southern California in 2001 to interview for a history professorship at UC Riverside, a faculty member picked her up at the airport and took her to lunch in Claremont. Next on the agenda; a visit to The Huntington to see what riches it provides for scholars.
Over the 12 years that Allgor worked at UC Riverside, she became extremely familiar with one aspect of The Huntington in particular; its classrooms, where she attended many scholarly lectures and seminars.
“I spent many Saturday mornings sitting in a room with 15 other people, discussing some aspect of scholarship or meeting a brilliant scholar – there was so much talent coming through,” she said.
“Brilliant” and “talented” are surely words used to describe Allgor and her significant accomplishments. With a Ph.D. from Yale University, she established herself at UC Riverside as a leading historian of first ladies, particularly Dolley Madison, Abigail Adams and Louisa Adams. Her book, “A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation,” served as the basis for a PBS-produced film.
As a UC Presidential Chair appointment, from 2009 to 2012, Allgor created and taught courses on women’s history, American history, the history of race and slavery, and political history.
Yet, despite her success within academia, Allgor still had more to give. “I felt I had the ability to talk with other audiences, to work with a staff and with the community, and to engage in a much more public conversation regarding the importance of the humanities within education, and what museums can do to help out our public schools,” she stated.
When The Huntington posted an ad in 2012 seeking a new Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education to succeed the departing Sue Lafferty, Allgor was already on a path that seemed to point toward this position, as unusual as it was.
“When you are a professor there is usually no next step, you remain a professor but I was feeling that I could affect audiences larger than my classroom,” Allgor said. She is grateful that former Huntington President Steve Koblik took a chance and hired her in early 2013, because she was not a normal hire.
“Not many people in academia make this kind of switch,” said Allgor, who has also taught at Claremont McKenna College, Harvard University and Simmons College.
At The Huntington, Allgor is responsible for nearly 20 staff members working on a range of projects, from school tours to teacher training to school partnerships with the Pasadena Unified and Los Angeles Unified School Districts. She also oversees more than a thousand volunteers, including 400 docents who provide enrichment for students and adult visitors touring the art, botanical and library collections as well as select temporary exhibitions.
During her time, the education department has made great strides, some in new territory, such as just hiring its first-ever public school specialist. It has also continued its longtime educational partnership with Rockdale Elementary School and added newer ones, with Esteban E. Torres High School Academies, PUSD’s Eliot Middle School and the Arroyo Seco Museum Magnet School.
Allgor says the long-term projects that take students from these partnerships deep into The Huntington’s collections pay off in extraordinary results. For instance, Torres Academies, who worked with the institution to stage a Shakespeare play, has an 85 percent graduation rate in an area with a typically 30 percent graduation rate.
“We can say that we were part of that success,” said Allgor.
