Longwood Magazine Online


Dr. Jane, page 2

She arrives at the Longwood Alumni House with just enough time for an admiring look at every room in the house and a light meal; then Dr. Jane holds a six o'clock press conference. Reporters from WFLO radio, The Farmville Herald and the PBS program Virginia Currents record her responses. She has a quick walk to Jarman Theatre and several minutes alone.
  On stage at Jarman, Longwood President Dr. Patricia Cormier thanks student Yared Fubusa for Dr. Jane's coming, then greets Dr. Jim Jordan who introduces a capacity audience to a four-year-old Jane, who went to sleep with earthworms under her pillow and told her mother "I want to go to Africa and watch animals." Then the 1957 Jane, who went to work as a waitress and saved her money to make the trip to Africa where she met Dr. Louis Leakey. In 1960 Leakey, because of, rather than in spite of, her fresh perspective and lack of formal training, sent her to a place called Gombe on Lake Tanganyika. Says Jordan, "Today it stands as the longest unbroken study of any animal group in the wild."
  After beginning field observations, Jane made a trip back to England, to Cambridge, and that university made a "decision it had made only seven times in 790 years ­ that the intellectual promise of a student's research . . . was so great, that that student would be admitted to the Ph.D. program directly, without studying for the bachelor's or master's degrees.² In 1965 she became Dr. Jane Goodall.

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