by Tim Tevault
Staff Writer
Upon entering the office of Michael Frantz, one’s eyes would not be drawn to a particular object, but instead would furiously race from one eccentricity to the next.
On the left, there is a dry erase board filled with math equations in progress. To the right, there is a shelf that reaches from floor to ceiling filled with books. On the desk in the middle of the room are numerous knick-knacks surrounding stacks of papers.
On the computer screen are numerous neon yellow post-it notes. Behind the desk, on the window sill, are house plants. On the floor are even more stacks of papers. It is the kind of office that can rightfully earn the title “lived in,” and it is obvious that it has been occupied for quite some time.
Before Frantz began teaching at the University of La Verne roughly 18 years ago, he was a student here when the University was still called La Verne College.
Raised in the towns of Des Moines, Iowa and Naperville, Illinois (where he graduated high school), Frantz came to a crossroads in his life. After finishing high school a year early in 1973, his main choices for furthering his education were schools in Kansas, which he was not too fond of, and Indiana, which was too close to home. So, after talking with his high school counselor who referred him to ULV, he ended up in California that fall.
A main reason Frantz enjoyed ULV was because of its pass/fail system. The University had not yet adopted the traditional grading system used now. He came to ULV for one reason: education. Nothing else really mattered to him.
Here, Frantz once again began soaking up knowledge, taking challenging courses such as German and logic, and also took a real interest in math. He took full loads practically every semester and was also able to pull off a college degree in mathematics (with two minors in computer science and German) in three years, just as in high school. This was a big deal because he was able to save his parents a year’s cost of tuition.
“I was actually only here on campus for five semesters,” he said. His final semester was spent at Argon National Laboratory in Illinois, participating in the Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program where he spent three months working in the Applied Math division.
Getting his degree in math seemed to be a given for Frantz. “We tend to gravitate toward areas that we find relatively easy,” he explained. “Math has always been easy for me; it’s always been fun. I didn’t even have to really think much about doing problems that other kids had to struggle with.”
“I remember in high school, there were four of us who sat in the back corner of the room and all of us aced all of the tests and the teacher realized that pretty quickly and basically we’d just sit back there and talk quietly amongst ourselves and fly paper airplanes out the window and all kinds of crazy things. He [the teacher] didn’t care because he knew it didn’t matter if we paid any attention to him at all because we were going to get 100s on the tests,” he recalled.
However, trying to discover what he wanted to do in life did not come as easily as math did to him. “When I went to college here, I had no idea what my major was going to be,” he said.
The turning point was in his junior year in a computer class. The teacher was going to be gone for a couple of days and asked Frantz to run the class while he was gone. “The students seemed to get it a lot faster from me,” he said. “There were times when I saw a light come on; this student finally got a complicated concept and I was doing it in such a way where they finally understood it.
“It was that sort of feeling of seeing the light come on when you finally get something through to somebody like that made me decide that this is what I want to do; I want to teach,” he explained. “And it was at that point right then basically I made the career decision to teach.”
After making that life decision, Frantz decided to pursue an advanced degree to start teaching mathematics.
“After I graduated from here, I’d had it with the smog,” he said. “It was much worse back then. On a bad day you’d go out and ride your bicycle for a mile and it hurt to breathe for the next three hours.”
So off Frantz went to the University of New Hampshire to pursue a master’s degree. “I went from one coast to the other.” There he stayed in a 300-year old farmhouse in an added wing, three miles from town. He commuted from the farmhouse to school and back– but not in a conventional way. “I could either walk to school through the woods or in the winter time I could cross-country ski,” he said.
Frantz remained at UNH for two years, until he grew weary of the lack of applied math they were using there. “I got tired of beating my head against the wall for some really esoteric problems,” he said. “Most of the time when I was working at that level, the concepts that we were working with meant absolutely nothing to anybody outside of an advanced math degree.”
So he left UNH and applied to Wichita State for a teaching job. He was subsequently hired in the fall of 1978 (at the age of 22) and remained there until the spring of 1983, where he taught subjects such as college algebra and multidimensional calculus.
A main reason Frantz left WSU was fate. His former calculus teacher from ULV, Al Herbst, was sitting a row behind him at a conference. The two got to talking and Herbst mentioned how he was getting ready to retire and offered Frantz his job. This was a great opportunity for Frantz.
“La Verne was always the kind of place that I decided long ago that I would like to teach at someday because of the culture, the family feeling, the way in which faculty interacted with students. I had some great professors,” he proclaimed.
One year later, Frantz got the call telling him Herbst was retiring and they wanted to interview him for for the position. He flew out there ready to take the job. “The last time the people at the college had seen me, I had hair down to the middle of my back and they didn’t quite know what to expect,” he said jokingly. “As it turned out, they liked what I did and they hired me.”
But before starting to teach at his alma mater, Frantz and his other long-haired friend at the time took a bike ride from Peoria, Ill., to Fresno, Calif. “It was a nice trip, took about three months,” he said. “We averaged close to a hundred miles a day.”
However, he ran into trouble during the trip. “I found out that eastern Utah is pretty conservative, putting it mildly,” he chuckled. While camping out on the side of the road one night during the trip, a cop pulled up along side their tent and told them that if they didn’t leave town within 15 minutes, he’d have them in jail and their hair cut off. Frantz said that they were out of there in no time.
Upon starting work in the fall of 1983, Frantz was given courses like advanced engineering math, calculus and vector calculus to teach. “That was a pretty heavy load for a first-time teacher,” he said.
After all, in addition to teaching a full load at ULV, Frantz was pursuing a doctorate. in applied mathematics at Claremont Graduate University and all the while trying to help maintain a family with his wife Suzanne (who worked at WSU as a math department secretary) and their daughter Melissa (currently a sophomore at UCI). They later had a son, Chris, who is now a freshman at Claremont High School.
“That was very rough; there were many, many nights I’d be up till three in the morning with a combination of paper grading from work and doing homework myself to turn in to my professors,” said Frantz.
Despite the challenges life threw his way, Frantz maintained his cool. Although, he had this advice, “Anyone who is going to go through this process of getting a degree-get the degree first, and then get a family.” He says that he gave up way too much time from his family to spend on his studies.
Because of all of the other events going on in his life, he had to spread his time at CGU over a course of ten years. In 1994, he finally earned his Ph.D.
All in all, Frantz is enjoying his time at ULV.
“If you could take this school and lift it up and transport it maybe to southwest Colorado or Idaho or Montana, I’d love it even more. That would be ideal,” he said.
The students are another factor that help make his job enjoyable. Last year, Frantz was the recipient of the “You Make a Difference Award,” offered to him by the senior class of last year. “That really touched me,” he said.
In addition to teaching, Frantz enjoys a good game of volleyball. When he first began teaching, himself and fellow math professor Rick Simon started a three-time-a-week volleyball scrimmage in the Old Gym, open to anyone and everyone. It was a time to let loose on the court. The tradition was going on strong until this year, when everyone started to get very busy, and the games had to be cut down to once or twice a week.
He also enjoys his co-workers. “In finding another department and group of people like this at some other school would be a low probability,” he commented. “This is a very special group of people here.”
