After 30 years in Wyoming, professor of veterinary sciences and Faculty Senate chair Donal O’Toole said he is “three-quarters a Wyomingite” and still struck by the state’s differences from his home country of Ireland.
With a bachelor of veterinary medicine degree from Trinity College in Dublin and a doctorate from Colorado State University, O’Toole crossed back over the Atlantic and settled in Laramie after a pathologist position opened at UW.
Much of his time is focused on investigating causes of illness and death in animals, which he said is “smelly but important work.” At the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory, O’Toole said he remains impressed during his teaching hours by the knowledge his students have when it comes to one of those key cultural differences.
“In Ireland, the only people who own a horse are extremely wealthy people,” O’Toole said. “In Wyoming, many of the students in the class own their own horses, and they’re not wealthy. It’s a wonderful class to teach because I learn a lot from the students in the class, and just seeing the horses continue to be used as working animals is wonderful, is amazing — there’s not many countries in the world where that happens.”
The rest of his professional time is invested in his role as Faculty Senate chair. Even now, faculty are “scrambling” to hash out legislation related to the recent decision to implement a general studies degree. For faculty senators, especially the one who bears the burden of leadership, that scramble is nothing new.
“It’s not a job that many people want because they know it’s a fair amount of work,” O’Toole said. “I guess I did it because it was kind of my turn.”
His approach to dealing with the inner workings of the university and rubbing elbows with its higher-ups comes down to regarding it more as a duty than a privilege. He takes inspiration from a quote of Henry David Thoreau’s to the effect that the only people who should have power and responsibility are the people who do not want it, which he called “very true.”
As chair, O’Toole is responsible for representing the University’s faculty to coordination between the senate and the administration, along with the Board of Trustees. Each of these factions has different experiences and perspectives of how smoothly (or not) life at the University is, and don’t always see eye to eye.
“You are sometimes bursting bubbles, or impinging on bubbles,” O’Toole said. “Sometimes those are easy conversations, and sometimes they’re not. The important thing is that they be honest conversations.”
Back in the classroom, O’Toole sometimes finds his own bubble being prodded — often for the better.
“Rural Wyoming ranch students come to [UW] with an enormous amount of experience, from which I think everybody benefits. I benefit, and the rest of the class benefits,” O’Toole said. “And they’ll correct me. If I say something wrong they’ll say ‘No no, that’s not right, this is what we do.’ I mean, I don’t want it happening all the time, but it is gratifying.”
Such an outlook on students questioning authority reflects something about the U.S. that O’Toole finds striking.
“You sometimes don’t know how good you have it. In many ways this is an amazing, astonishing country,” O’Toole said. “The fact that it’s steeped in the democratic tradition is — we sometimes take it for granted, and we sometimes see the flaws too much. But that people can get up at a meeting and criticize a politician, and not get into trouble, is a relatively rare thing. People should be extraordinarily grateful for that, that they have that in this country. Even I take it for granted sometimes.”
O’Toole recalls living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a period of civil war, defined by national politics and religion, between separatist Catholics and loyalist Protestants.
“One of the pleasant things about the United States is, for the most part, most people don’t care what your religion or ethnicity is,” O’Toole said. “There may be a bunch of white male privilege there, but for the most part you are judged on your merits. Can you do your damn job and can you do it well? That is not true for every place in the world, and certainly not true in Ireland.”
In his own time, O’Toole has an affinity for biographies and other non-fiction reading (“I have to be in a very strange mood to read fiction”) and, when the weather is right for it, gardening and walking, along with “a teeny bit” of cooking. His son Patrick also lives in Laramie and works at UW, and “is a heck of a lot smarter than his old man.”
