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From 2004 to 2017, Professor Nancy Sharp carried Syracuse University’s silver mace at the university convocations and commencement ceremonies. In full academic regalia attire and in front of thousands of people in the Dome, Nancy Sharp led the academic procession, and despite the pressure of thousands of people watching, she never faltered, said David Rubin, former dean of the Newhouse School Of Public Communications.

Nancy Sharp died on Feb. 12 at the age of 86 after a lifelong career in journalism which colleagues described as pioneering. She was one of the first women to be hired as faculty at Newhouse in the 1970s, and in addition to serving as SU’s mace bearer, she was a professor of newspaper journalism and as associate dean for graduate and professional studies.

She first moved to Syracuse with her husband, Professor Emerita James Roger Sharp, in August 1966, when he was hired by SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs to teach in and eventually chair the Department of History. They later had two children, Sandy and Matt.

The two met in the spring of their sophomore year at the University of Missouri, James Sharp said, and married in December of their senior year. He said Nancy graduated top of her class, and was always a strong writer.

“She did very, very well, and she just came to (writing) very naturally. She taught me to write and she taught me how to swim,” James Sharp said.

Early in her career Nancy worked as a news and feature writer for several newspapers and publications, from a small Oklahoma newspaper when she first married James Sharp to later writing for the Missouri Historical Society. When the couple moved to California, Nancy began working for The Oakland Tribune, where she continued as a correspondent after moving to Washington, D.C. and produced a series of publications with her husband entitled “American Legislative Leaders: 1911-1994.”

James Sharp remembers Nancy continually supporting him throughout the writing and editing process, which took five years. Now, he’s editing her manuscript about holistic health and medicine and hopes to have it published posthumously.

The two also worked together frequently when James Sharp was writing history papers for his degree. He said he would give her 12-page papers to proofread late at night, and she would reliably point out areas to improve on. He said she always took a “mountain of time” to grade student papers, and she was sure to do the same for him.

“I was so tired and that was the last thing I wanted to hear. The only thing I wanted to hear was it’s genius, it’s fabulous,” James Sharp said. “But she was brave enough, brave enough to say she wanted the best for me.”

As one of Newhouse’s first woman faculty members, she served as a mentor for many other women colleagues, said Barbara Croll Fought, a former professor of broadcast journalism at SU.

“I always admired her. She was a very positive person, always very upbeat, and yet she was really good about helping other women faculty understand the importance of work-life balance, which is hard for faculty women,” Fought said.

In the early 2000s, Nancy Sharp and Fought were both assigned to teach courses in London for an early iteration of SU’s abroad program. Fought said as she grew closer to Nancy there, she saw her commitment to students and journalism firsthand.

“She was a lot of fun, she was always ready for something new. She was always ready for new innovations, new challenges, new things to do outside of work,” Fought said. “She was a joy to be with, a very loving spirit, a very joyful spirit.”

Among Nancy’s many legacies at Newhouse is the Graduate Newspaper Fellowship for Minorities program. Rubin, who Nancy helped to hire, said that after discussing the lack of diversity in newsrooms across the country with Steve Rogers, former publisher of the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, Nancy worked to create a program that recruited minority graduate students to SU.

After students in the program graduated from SU, they were matched with a job at one of the Newhouse-affiliated papers across the country. The program is still in place today.

“This program proved to be quite successful and there are many young people who ended up in the journalism field and working in newsrooms and increasing Black representation in newsrooms,” Rubin said. “Nancy lit a fire under this to get it going, so we have a lot to thank her for there.”

Professor Roy Gutterman said he continues to see the benefits of the Graduate Newspaper Fellowship as a faculty member today. Gutterman, an SU alum, had Nancy Sharp as his Newhouse faculty advisor and took a history class taught by James Sharp.

“We’ve had some really amazing students come through here who might not have been able to come through here had it not been for that program,” Gutterman said. “The program is still in place, and we continue to reap the benefits of that vision.”

Joel Kaplan, who currently serves as associate dean for graduate programs at Newhouse, pointed to the fact that Nancy was the one to change all graduate programs to be one year long instead of two. She identified the summer as a time to begin graduate programs early in the form of a “bootcamp.”

Kaplan said Nancy’s efforts to incorporate students into the Newhouse community expanded from the graduate program to include international students as well. He recalled that she would host potluck dinners where international students could bring traditional dishes from their home countries.

“It was really a wonderful way to welcome international students to Syracuse. It was very warm, she was always an incredibly warm and affectionate person and really, always very, very positive,” Kaplan said.

Both James Sharp and Nancy Sharp’s colleagues described her as a supportive coworker who was dedicated to her students and helping those around her. They said her contributions shaped Newhouse during her time at SU and had a lasting impact.

“She and her husband were real pillars of the university community. They were part of the fabric of the university and it means a lot to have people like that here for long term,” Gutterman said.

Throughout her years as a faculty member at SU, Nancy Sharp continued as a contributing medical and science reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard. Her husband said that many of her assignments were to write about lectures at SUNY Upstate Medical University; after publishing her pieces, the lecturers would frequently say her writing described their ideas better than they had themselves.

“Even though they were experts in this field, and were trying to explain it, Nancy had a way of sort of distilling the true sense and explanation of whatever this person was talking about,” James Sharp said. “She heard that many, many times.”

Published on March 23, 2023 at 12:45 am

Contact Stephanie: spwright@syr.edu