One of a Kind: Horticulture Professor Takes Unusual Approach to Teaching, Life

By: Jamie Creamer

Look up the word "unique" in the dictionary, and it might say, "being the only one," or "being without a like or equal." Or, then again, it might just have a picture of Raymond Kessler.

Kessler is without dispute unique.

In the College of Agriculture, for instance, the associate professor of horticulture is the only faculty member who wears suspenders seven days a week, 365 days a year; the only one you're apt to spot unicycling down a rural Lee County road; and the only one whom you'll ever find lecturing classes dressed in wizard's garb.

"I guess it's the kid in me, the part of me that never grew up," Kessler says of his eccentricities. "I enjoy doing things out of the ordinary and not necessarily what people are expecting."

The wizard outfit would fall into that category. He arrived on campus last Oct. 31 clad as a wizard and by day's end had proclaimed it would become a Halloween tradition.

"Sure, I got a lot of strange looks and stares—and I loved it," Kessler says.

Doing the unexpected is an approach to life that carries over into his teaching.

"I'm not an easy professor," Kessler says. "I give tons of information, and through the years, I've learned to read my students and recognize when there's a lull and I'm losing them. That's when it's time to come up with something, to interject some comedy or something a little bit off the wall."

As a college professor of horticultural science and floriculture, Kessler has found his niche, but he wasn't one of those people who knew from an early age what he wanted to do in life. In fact, the Clayton native was basically clueless up through his first two years at Auburn in the mid-1970s.

"I was a chemistry major, but I had absolutely no idea why, or what I was going to do with that (degree)," Kessler says.

His "aha!" moment for the future came at the end of his sophomore year, when he went to see an occupational counselor on campus.

"The best thing that counselor did was to sit me down with an encyclopedia of careers," Kessler says.

Flipping through that book, he found his calling, under the G's.

"There was a section on greenhouses and greenhouse managers, and when I saw that picture of a greenhouse, something about the idea of controlling the environment struck me, and it all clicked," Kessler says. "I had never set foot in a greenhouse, but I left from that building with my mind made up that I was going to major in horticulture, in nursery and greenhouses."

And so he did. He got his bachelor's in horticulture's nursery and greenhouse track in 1978, and went on to earn his master's in nursery and greenhouse management from Mississippi State University in 1980. He then worked for several years for a North Carolina company, managing almost three acres of greenhouses and growing 2.5 million African violets annually.

It was in this job, incidentally, that suspenders became Kessler's trademark.

"The plants were grown in containers on the floor, so I was bending down all day, and belts pinched my belly," he says. "One day I tried a pair of suspenders, and that was it. Wearing suspenders isn't a fashion statement; it was born of comfort and necessity."

In the late 1980s, Kessler left that position to pursue a doctorate degree, earning that in 1989 from the University of Georgia. He returned to work in the private sector for several years, before finally landing a position as greenhouse and floriculture professor back at Auburn in 1995.

"I had applied for so many faculty jobs and none of them ever worked out, so that I had given up," Kessler says. "But it all worked out because Auburn's where I'd wanted to be."

Kessler believes that, as a professor, his years of working in the industry are invaluable. In fact, he says that real-world experience is another thing that sets him apart from most faculty members.

"In the classroom, I'm not just giving students theories," he says. "I can stand in the classroom and say, ‘This is what your day is really like as a greenhouse manager.'"

At Auburn, Kessler's position is divided 60/40 between teaching and Extension. That means he's teaching every semester—herbaceous ornamentals every spring and summer and greenhouse management science each fall—while at the same time serving as Extension greenhouse specialist for the entire state of Alabama. Balancing his time between the two areas has been the biggest challenge of his career at Auburn.

"Because I'm always teaching, I can't travel the state and go visit individual growers the way your typical Extension agent does," Kessler says.

The solution: He goes for the mass approach.

"I spend my Extension time writing brochures and circulars, most of them on greenhouse production of various species," says Kessler, who has 26 publications to his credit, the second largest number of Extension publications in the College.

He also serves as educational planning committee chairman of the Southeast Greenhouse Conference and Trade Show, an annual event that brings together 3,300 growers and managers from Alabama and surrounding states for the largest greenhouse-only educational program in the country.

Back in the classroom, Kessler says his goal with every class is to establish a rapport with the students.

"I find that students react better if you're personable and approachable," Kessler says. "I get to class early to talk with the students and let them get to know me and vice versa, and I stay afterward for the same reason. That's important to me."

Kessler acknowledges that he's probably a borderline workaholic, but that's largely because he's so into his job and the whole greenhouse scene—which he says is "technologically, the most advanced form of agriculture in the world."

And when he isn't on campus, you'll likely find him working on his 40-acre farm in nearby Notasulga, where wife Teresa has eight acres of pastures and four horses and he has four acres of orchards and vegetable gardens as well as an arboretum area.

But does the greenhouse enthusiast have a greenhouse?

"No, I don't have a greenhouse at home," Kessler says. "It's kind of like the house painter who's got the house with the paint peeling."

<< TOP