The president’s husband is perhaps a less known figure around campus, but Dr. Tim Nichols has founded the University’s First Gentleman’s Book Club, a literary circle for the students and staff at the Honors College.
“It’s a group of mostly students and a few faculties, who gather each semester to read a book for fun, essentially,” Nichols, husband of UW president Laurie Nichols, said. Nichols is also a professor of criminal justice and sociology at UW.
The club gathers twice each semester, the first time for an introduction of the literature and a social gathering of all the members, and the second time to discuss the book more in depth.
“It seems to work pretty well,” Nichols said. “It’s not too demanding on students’ schedules, and yet it provides that opportunity for engagement.”
“I think it provides a good balance between the assigned reading I have and the book that I get to read at my own pace for my own advantage. I also joined because it was recommended to me by my teacher Dr. Nichols. He was so excited about the book club, and I was excited that he asked that I join in for the semester. I saw it as a great opportunity to meet new people and discuss a common idea that the whole group would be focused on,” freshman Physiology major, Emily Hill, said.
Before the Nichols came to Laramie, they were both at South Dakota State University (SDSU) and what inspired Nichols to start the First Gentleman’s Club was the SDSU First Lady Masha Chicoine’s book club.
“It was a wonderful experience, we did it for many years, and just had a real positive and meaningful experience with that,” Nichols said. “So when we came here, I was thinking about and sort of wondering ‘what can I do?’ or ‘what can I bring?’ in this role, as being married to the president? And the [club] was something that I thought, ‘that’s a no-brainer.’”
“Sometimes being in academia can be really lonely, and I think when there’s an opportunity to get together and share ideas about something without worrying about a grade, it allows people to maybe explore ideas that they might not otherwise explore,” visiting Assistant Professor, Erin Abraham, said.
The books the group has read so far are Viktor Frankl’s A Man’s Search for Meaning, and George Orwell’s 1984.
“Last spring we read Viktor Frankl’s A Man’s Search for Meaning, which is my all-time favorite book, and so I thought that would be a good one to start with,” Nichols said.
The circle is reading 1984 for the fall semester, a suggestion by Dr. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, who contacted Nichols about a program called One Book, Many Conversations, which is a national effort to encourage literacy. The piece that the national program is doing now is 1984, and so the First Gentleman’s Club became a Wyoming iteration of the national conversation on 1984.
“I think what the book club will do is sort of select books that may be like 1984, the classics, but there might be some other ones that essentially challenge students to think about things in the context of how we’re living now,” Dean of the Honors College, Donal Skinner, said.
“Again we’re reading for fun and out of our shared interest in trying to learn from a text,” said Nichols. “And my hope is by doing that, we’ll also create a sense of community, strength in relationships, and have an enriching educational experience.”
