Dr. Mary Harlan ’65 has dedicated 38 years of her life to serving the University of Central Arkansas in one form or another. As chair of the UCA Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, Harlan describes her time on campus as “the best moments of her life.”
Harlan received her Bachelor of Science in Education from UCA and later went to the University of Arkansas, where she earned a Master of Education, an Educational Specialist degree and a Doctorate of Education with an emphasis in nutrition. “I wanted to be a teacher all my life,” Harlan said. “I can’t say enough good things about UCA. I’ve loved every minute here. I will say there’ve been a few challenges along the way, but I’ve always had wonderful administrative support and wonderful colleagues to work with.”
Other than teaching, Harlan says her true calling is service. “I look at anything and everything I can do to help people and help the department,” she said. “Whatever I can do to help the University, I see that as my purpose: service above self!” This is made evident in the many projects Harlan has been a part of in her long line of special achievements while working at UCA.
“One of my favorite things that I’ve been able to do during my time here to enhance the University and to help the students as well as our department was create the UCA Family and Consumer Sciences Alumni Luncheon,” Harlan said. “We started that 28 years ago and it started out small, but it’s grown so much. Within about the second or third year of that, I thought, it’d be great if we could establish a scholarship program too, that the alums might contribute to and that our students would benefit from the scholarships.”
That’s when Harlan established the Adams-Lindsay-Webb endowed scholarship fund as part of her alumni committee service project to help undergraduates pursuing a course of study in the family and consumer sciences field.
“We named it Adams-Linsday-Webb because those three professors had just retired, and they had all been my former teachers when I was here,” Harlan said with a smile. “They retired from a long service from this department and for the University. And that all started with $400. Now that scholarship fund is well over $80,000… so that started the whole process. Now we have 12 scholarships.” The total value of those 12 scholarship funds is now more than $1,000,000.
“I think I get something back from all of it,” Harlan said. “You see that it helps people and that they benefit, and you see the joy they receive from it, and therefore it thrills me. I think that’s what’s so fun about service. It just warms my heart to see that people want to give to the scholarship funds. It warms my heart to see the students receive that recognition.”