Great Chemistry

When James F. Bonk started teaching chemistry at Duke, Old Chem was simply the Chemistry Building. Edens and Cameron were the president and athletics director, not yet the names of Duke landmarks. Mathematical calculations were done on slide rules, and tennis -- Bonk's other great love -- was played with wooden racquets.

Fifty years after his arrival in the late summer of 1959, much has changed, but Bonk, 78, is still an active member of the faculty and serves as the department's director of undergraduate studies. "I have no plans to retire," he says. "I will go on till it's over."

Bonk was already an experienced teacher when he came to Durham with a Ph.D. from Ohio State University (OSU). "My mentor, Al Garrett, was one of the giants in chemical teaching," Bonk says. "He had me teach summers at Muskingam College in New Concord, Ohio, where he was on the Board of Trustees. I became head teaching TA at OSU, got a Dupont Lecturing Fellowship, and then became an instructor. So even as a graduate student, I had two lecture sections of 250 students each."

The eventual teacher of some 30,000 Duke students over 40 years in the introductory chemistry class that came to be known as "Bonkistry," Bonk worked big rooms from the start.

"Al told me ‘You should never teach a class that has fewer than 200 students,' Bonk says. ‘Big-time lecturers are hard to come by.' I've taught smaller classes and seminars, but at the height of my career here, I actually in one semester had 923 students. Al would have been proud of me."

The winner in 2001 of Duke's David and Janet Vaughn Brooks Distinguished Teaching Award, Bonk was inspired by Leslie Erwin, his high school teacher in Menominee, Mich.

"Les was really remarkable," Bonk says. "Although he'd majored in English and minored in history, he taught us chemistry, physics, and mathematics. In the back woods of Upper Michigan you don't expect someone of his intellectual capacity. He was there because he liked hunting and fishing. The school couldn't possibly have recruited him otherwise."

Bonk is also long-time volunteer assistant coach of Duke's men's tennis team. Sickly as a child and adolescent ("I nearly died of a mysterious infection when I was in the first grade"), Bonk took up tennis as an undergrad at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis.

"I wasn't strong enough for regular PE," he says. "There were three other fellows like me and the instructor didn't want to waste time with us, so he gave us tennis racquets and balls and said ‘Get out of here.' I taught myself, and by the time I was a senior, played on the college team."

"At a Duke newcomers' luncheon," Bonk says, "I mentioned Ohio State coach John Hendrix, who had been the previous Duke head coach and who had talked me into coaching a high school team. Bob Cox, the then-current coach, was down at the other end of the table, but I have a booming voice -- from all the big lecturing I've done -- and before I could take another bite, Bob was standing beside me, wanting to know how I knew John.

"I told him that I'd done some coaching, and he said, ‘How'd you like to coach with me?' Bob was the backfield coach on the football team and in the fall was focused on football. So as far as Eddie Cameron, the athletics director, was concerned, my helping out with tennis in the fall was great. In time, there were other volunteer coaches in other sports. I eventually became the first faculty member appointed by the administration to run the tutoring program for athletes."

Asked how things have changed over the last 50 years, Bonk offers several thoughts:

· Chemistry: "The advent of the computer absolutely revolutionized what we do and can do in chemistry. A calculation by hand that today is a morning's work used to take you four years. Those calculations are the foundation of theoretical chemistry."

· Chemistry majors: "Med schools when I first started insisted on a chem major or a biology major and we had groups of 200 to 300 majors in those days. Today, we graduate 50 to 60 majors a year. Medical schools now have no defined major, while still having a defined core of courses, including chemistry."

· Duke: "Again, it's a sea change. Duke back then was a regional university and primarily a teaching institution. Now, of course, we've become a world-class research university. Another big change we've seen is integration of the university. And after integration came globalization."

· Durham: "Durham has gone through the same changes. I've seen it, more than anything else, through my connection with tennis. I successfully directed the first integrated city tennis tournament in the mid-1960s -- though I did have to go to the hospital emergency room after the first day when my blood pressure went way up."

· Bonk himself: "I don't play tennis anymore. My shoulder is totally destroyed and arthritic, unfortunately. Otherwise, I don't know that I have changed that much. I made a decision very early on not to drink or smoke. I could see no value in either and I've never changed my mind about it. I never married. I told my parents I didn't want to ruin two happy lives. In the past 32 years, I've had two cars -- a Datsun for 14 and a Nissan Sentra for 18. I now have a 2009 Nissan Versa."

Alvin L. Crumbliss, professor of chemistry and dean of the natural sciences, says Bonk has changed more than he admits.

"Jim's teaching style has changed significantly through the years," Crumbliss says. "He went from lecturing on the blackboard in 350-seat, twice-a-week lectures to being the first to use transparencies to using a computer to manage large lecture classes and post content on the Web. He used videos to project demonstrations to the back of the class and to take the uncertainly out of the demonstration actually working he pre-taped them.

"In addition, he helped design the lecture hall and laboratories in Gross Chem 40 years ago and more recently the laboratories in French Family Science Center. He's director of undergraduate studies and has been for a huge fraction of his time here. Jim has developed and taught courses for majors and non-majors, advises students, and manages our independent study program. His service contributions to the university have been truly significant, as well. He's a wonderful colleague, a great guy to work with."

Is he the last of his kind?

"Jim Bonk comes from an era when you could become a tenured faculty member because you were a gifted teacher, without a significant research component," says Warren S. Warren, professor and chair of chemistry. "That era has long since gone at all Research I universities. You still find people who have good research careers, then find that teaching is their mission, and become primarily teachers. But hiring someone onto the regular faculty because of his teaching ability, even someone who's made extraordinary contributions like Jim -- it's hard to see that fitting in to the modern system."