UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 10, Page 3
November 3, 1994
A deleicate balance; Prof. focuses on being as complete as possible

     It's been a year since John L. Burmeister, associate chairperson
and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, was selected the
University's second Alumni Distinguished Professor.
     "It was the busiest of my 30 years at Delaware," he says,
referring to the service and speaking opportunities that came with the
honor, the latest in a string of awards recognizing Burmeister's
outstanding teaching.
     It also was the year of Burmeister's hospitalization for
intestinal surgery.  "Having a major operation puts things in a
different light," he reflects.  "Life physically is wonderful again,
but I remember the feeling of vulnerability in there." Burmeister's
pause for introspection provides an opportune moment for a look at the
man behind the awards.
     Some might take him for someone who can do it all.  His career
has encompassed research, teaching and administration at the highest
levels.  "I've focused on being as complete a professor as I can," he
says.  "It sounds like being a jack of all trades, but you can do it,
if you pick and choose carefully."
     He also hikes, cycles, represents Delaware at the NCAA and has a
long-standing commitment to his church.
     But, Burmeister is more of an Augustan than a Renaissance man.
Perpetually in pursuit of a "golden mean," his personality encompasses
a series of delicate balances between conflicting forces or values:
past and future, physical and mental, solidity and flux, strictness
and compassion, reason and emotion.
     Take his religion.  Burmeister, who briefly considered a career
in the ministry, describes the Old Testament as a panoply of rules,
punishments and stern authority; the New Testament as a hymn to love,
compassion and forgiveness; and himself as being somewhere in between.
     "That's what I am," he says, "and I suppose it's the same in my
teaching."
     In his teaching, he's a stickler for standards.  His mentors were
quiet, undemonstrative chemists who motivated through criticism more
than encouragement. And he, too, has little time for complacent
students who expect to be handed knowledge on a plate or rewarded
merely for effort.  On the other hand, he's renowned as a ferociously
committed teacher and counselor, innovative and adaptable in his
pedagogy. He pioneered "self-paced" learning at Delaware, for
instance, and advocated the use of video technology.
     "I'm both reactionary and innovative.  Yet, I'm only innovative
when I see a need to innovate, when I see an opportunity to make
something better,"  he explains. Nevertheless, one has to embrace new
conditions, Burmeister insists.  "Colleagues of mine are literally
distraught because nothing works in the classroom anymore, because
they can't command attention, and it's because they haven't adapted."
     Then, there's his home.  When he and his wife moved into the
area, Covered Bridge Farms was rural and woody.  Not any more.
Burmeister, the son of a farm laborer with an ingrained love of the
country, regrets the loss, as he mourns the loss of each fallen elm on
the Mall.  But, he knows new residents move in for the good reasons he
did. He knows diseased elms must go.
     "That part of me," he says, "the part that likes tradition,
solidity, is always at war with the pragmatic part that likes to see
things get better."
     And then, there is sport.  Burmeister is chairperson of the
University's Athletic Governing Board. As part of his duties, he
represents Delaware as its voting member before the NCAA. To him,
exercise is a necessary part of the human equilibrium.  "I'm a firm
believer in sound body, sound mind," he says.
     And politics. A registered Republican, Burmeister voted for
McGovern.
     The tension between these forces perhaps accounts for his
prodigious energy.  Burmeister says his recent operation re-energized
and rejuvenated him, but the prospect of "Burmeister Unbound" is a
scary one.  This, after all, is the man with the 54-page resume, the
roving pedagogue who's given over 270 lectures at more than 200
schools, the husband who poured out 359 love letters in nine months
away from his fiance.
     In case you're wondering where we got such information, remember
this is also the man who compulsively accumulates, tabulates and
disseminates data-on his courses, his department, his University, his
golf.  The man who does his own filing.  And yes, he and his wife
still have the letters.
     Burmeister's is a managed energy, of course, a fierce but
controlled combustibility.  His conversation is effervescent, almost
unstoppable, but finally tethered to the point.  Indeed, Burmeister
considers himself too structured, and if the office offers a window to
the inhabitant's soul, he may be right.
     Although Burmeister's office looks cluttered, it is in fact a
monument to order.  Euclid could have worked in this office. It's
stacked high with manila folders, journals, books and print-outs. But
all these are regimented stacks-of measured height, in logical
arrays-and with paper piled so precisely you can run your finger down
the corner-edge and feel the neat purr of an exactly aligned factory-
produced stack.
     It doesn't take a Dostoyevsky to see Burmeister's method is
counterpoint to a certain anarchic madness.  "There's a bit of the
arch procrastinator in me," he concedes.  Translation: He never once
met a college writing deadline.
     An undergraduate story underlines the point.  When Burmeister
attended Franklin and Marshall on full scholarship, he made a
conscious decision to justify the honor and consecrated his life to
chemistry.  As a high school senior, Burmeister had run the gamut of
youthful pleasures: acting, singing, writing, organizing church
festivities, lettering in all available sports. As a freshman in
college, he became an academic ascetic, with an extremism that made
for straight A's and sheer misery.  You name it, he didn't do it.
     "Then, the next year, and equally unfortunately, I over-corrected
the other way," he remembered.  He partied, skipped work, dropped
grades: chaos raised its un-Augustan head.
     Then, it was time to recover that golden mean.
     "Consequently, I'm much more understanding of students than I
otherwise would be," Burmeister says, recalling his lapse.  It also
taught him to listen to his intuition about proper balance.  He
considers those years one of his two great mistakes in life and puts
them down to momentary over-dependence on one side of his nature, the
calculating side.
     The other mistake was deciding on economic grounds to live apart
from his fiancee for the first year of graduate school, and we know
what happened there: 359 odes to melancholy.
     Otherwise, Burmeister's choices catered to the whole of his
personality and were, accordingly, more successful, the moves to
Delaware and to academia-rather than industry-being exemplary.
     "I knew what I liked.  It was an easy call.  Do what you want,"
he urges, "not what you think you should."
                                                      -Steven O'Connor