Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Andrew Hodlofski.  He was born in Denver, Colorado, but his family moved when he was two years old to Blackwood, New Jersey.  His father was a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), and his mother was a registered nurse (RN).  He has one younger brother.  His wife Diana is a former Family Care Nurse Practitioner and is a professor of nursing.  They have two children Henry age 10 and Robert age 8. 

He attended Gloucester Township public schools and graduated from Highland High School in 1992.  After graduating from high school, he began college at Rutgers-Camden.  He withdrew from Rutgers after a year because he felt aimless and lost, without real academic or career goals. 

After a period of working part-time jobs, in 1994, he enrolled at the Restaurant School--a culinary program in Philadelphia, following his love of fine food and cooking.  This was a classic French culinary program, based on strict discipline and high-performance expectations.  He had to adapt to the military-like regimen, which taught him to internalize discipline, structure, and order into his life.  While in school, he took a position as a Sous Chef at Beau Rivage, a French restaurant Medford, NJ, which he kept after graduation. 

Even though he enjoyed his job as a chef, he realized that he would eventually become bored and wanted to continue his education.  Believing that he ultimately wanted to get a business degree and get into restaurant management, Andrew decided to enroll at Gloucester County Community College (GCCC)--partially because he was able to work to pay for all the tuition himself.  He did very well at GCCC, and he transferred to Rowan in the Fall of 1997, very pleased to find that all of his credits transferred.  After graduating in the Spring of 2000 with honors and majors in history and secondary education, he taught high school at his alma mater, Highland High School, for six years.  In addition to teaching, he was the vice-president for his local branch of the National Education Association, serving as a contract negotiator and on several state-level committees.  He also coached mock trial and oversaw stage crew while at Highland.  

Andrew’s experience with the NEA led him to interact and work with many lawyers, and he thought that law school would be another “interesting” intellectual challenge.  In 2006, he accepted a full scholarship to the Drexel University College of Law.  He graduated with a Juris Doctorate in 2009 and joined the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Bars that fall.

Weeks after taking the Bar exams in July 2009, Andrew and his wife sold their home in Philadelphia and moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada where he had been offered a graduate research faculty position in a post-graduate LLM program at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.  His studies and research in this program focused on International Law and Law of Armed Conflict with a focus on Arctic Strategic Policy.  He received his LLM in the Spring of 2010.      

In October 2010, Andrew was commissioned as a First Lieutenant in the United States Army Judge Advocate General’s Corp.  He attended Officer Basic Training at Ft. Lee, VA and the home of the JAG Regiment at Charlottesville, VA.  His first duty station was with U.S. Army Alaska (USARAK) in Anchorage, Alaska, where he served as an Operational Law Judge Advocate for USARAK, then as a Trial Counsel (Prosecuting Attorney) and Brigade Judge Advocate with the 2nd Engineer Brigade.  In 2014, he and his family were stationed at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY where he served as the Senior Administrative Law attorney.  From 2016-2018 CPT Hodlofski served as the Senior Defense Counsel for Ft. Irwin and the National Training Center just west of Death Valley, CA.  In August 2018, looking for more stability for his family that an Army life allows, Andrew accepted a position with the Alaska Attorney General’s office in Anchorage, AK.  In 2019, he returned to the US Army as a Civilian employee with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alaska District.  Andrew is currently the Deputy District Counsel for the Alaska District.  He is also a major in the US Army Reserves, representing soldiers as a criminal defense attorney.

*****

I came to Rowan based on a recommendation from a friend.  At GCCC, I briefly dated a dynamic woman who was a high school English teacher.  Her love of teaching and the joy she got helping her students convinced me that I wanted to teach.  She told me that if I wanted to teach in NJ, I should attend Rowan, as it had one of the best, if not the best, education programs in the state of New Jersey.  I got similar advice from others--so I applied.  Turns out that she was right, in my career as an educator most of the best teachers I knew came from Rowan.

I had always loved history and loved studying history on my own. Mostly, I love the story of humanity, loved learning how people thought, and believed that history was more than just dates and facts to be memorized--it was a complex and engaging story. Authors such as Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn convinced me that the decisions and actions of normal people mattered, and I thought that I would really enjoy teaching with that perspective.

When I began at Glassboro, Rowan’s campus was much smaller than today, very quiet and quite rural--very pretty, actually.  At that time, Rowan was still surrounded by farm fields and orchards.  However, one of the nicest things about Rowan was that I felt welcomed, embraced, and encouraged by members of the faculty from the very beginning.   

My first real experience with the History Department came in the form of a meeting with Dr. Richard Porterfield before I began classes in Fall when I met with him for the required transfer student class advisement meeting.  Dr. Porterfield was a giant of a man with a great big beard, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway.  Quite an impressive figure and more than a bit intimidating.  I remember one moment about that meeting in his office quite vividly.  Nervous to be a new student and unsure even what it meant to be a History major, I asked him what classes I should or needed to take.  He put down his pencil, leaned back in his chair, sighing, and said, “At some point, you are going to have to take classes you are actually interested in.  So start there.”  That advice influenced my decisions on courses for the rest of my college career.  Not only did I take the history courses that interested me, I also took other classes, like “Introduction to Ceramics” and “Introduction to Photography” that I really enjoyed but might not have taken without this advice-- classes which expanded my world view and enriched my college experience immeasurably.  Among the history classes I took because they interested me were Porterfield’s “Imperialism and Colonialism” and Dr. Kress’s course on United States History between 1917 and 1945. 

Some of my professors were influential in ways that went far beyond the classroom.  Dr. Janet Lindman changed the way that I saw history and even humanity.  When I started at Rowan, she was new to the Department and I think fairly new to teaching.  The first thing which was obvious about Dr. Lindman was that she was incredibly enthusiastic about history and teaching, which was followed by a very quick realization that her classes were going to be exceptionally challenging.  If you took a course taught by Dr. Lindman, you were going to work hard.  She assigned a huge amount of reading, most of it in the form of published collections of primary source documents.  The first course I took offered by Dr. Lindman was on women’s history, a subject I felt I did not know enough about.  I enjoyed it so much that I took almost every class she offered from that point forward.  In class session after class session, she pushed us through the use of primary documents, analytical readings and class discussions to reconsider our world view, to challenge the status quo.  We were expected to ask WHY we believed certain things or WHY we saw the world a certain way.  She openly challenged us in the classroom to move beyond our comfort zone and to engage in honest intellectual dialogue with those around us.  She then implicitly challenged us to continue asking questions outside of the classroom.  It was so exciting to be inspired by an educator like that.  In retrospect, my classroom experiences with Dr. Lindman opened my eyes to world views outside of my own and freed me to seek out perspectives I had never considered before.  I think that I’m probably a more aware and better person because of the way she taught.  I do know that when I was in the classroom, I wanted to emulate her style more than anyone else, because I wanted to inspire my students in the same way.

I was very involved in Phi Alpha Theta.  Al Beaver and I were both Presidents, sharing the duties perhaps because of our student teaching schedules.  I remember Dawn O’Leary and Megan Dakers, two other officers, who were important leaders during this period.  One of the things that we did was to reorganize the Department library. We also sponsored a couple of outside speakers, though I can’t remember specifics at this point. As a small group of students, we also just spent a lot of time hanging out in the Department continuing the intellectual debates we had started in the classroom.  It was a safe and open environment to discuss issues and grow as people.  I have such great memories our time together.  Some of the students I knew at Rowan became colleagues and then lifelong friends.  History majors Al Beaver and J. Senft were in classes at Rowan together, started our careers as educators together, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since.  J. Senft and I even shared a classroom for a few years, as we both taught Social Studies at the same high school.  We had a real sense of Rowan pride in that classroom to be sure. 

In my senior year, I presented a paper that I had written on the last ten years of Hawaii’s independence.  I had done archival research for this paper at the National Archives branch in Philadelphia.  The paper was written for Lee Kress’s Senior Seminar.  I presented the paper before a panel of professors at William Paterson College.  I was nervous, but I loved the experience.  I had done so much work on that paper, work that could not actually be included in the text, and I loved being able to answer their questions.  During the closing ceremony, I received the award for best paper of the conference.

Looking back all these years later, my six semesters at Rowan were the most intellectually challenging and rewarding years of my entire life.  Even though I lived in Haddon Heights, I tried to drive down every single day, about 40 miles round trip, even when I didn’t have class.  I did so because I just loved hanging out in the History Department, talking to my fellow history majors and the faculty members wherever they might be -- in the history suite, in the hallways, or in faculty offices.  I also liked reading, working, and preparing for class surrounded by a core group of like-minded students, each one working just as hard as I was.  The professors were all so friendly, inspiring, and engaging.  It really came across that they loved teaching and loved working with students.  At the same time, they were also so challenging.  They pushed me to do more than I thought I could do.  However, I wanted to meet their expectations, so I worked hard.  I would take notes in class, then go home each night and rewrite them, expanding them to fill in gaps or flesh out concepts.  Working on research papers and looking for primary documents meant that I probably spent thousands of hours in regional libraries, from the Rowan library to the National Archives, the Free Public Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania library, and the David Library of the American Revolution.  I even once took a day trip down to the Library of Congress.  Universally, History Department professors gave me such detailed comments and feedback on my papers that my writing greatly improved.  Eventually, I discovered that with enough work, I could reach their expectations, and this led me to believe in myself.  After Rowan, I had great confidence in my own ability to improve and rise to challenges. Without the confidence gained during my experience at Rowan, I don’t think I would have been able to quit teaching and go to law school.

*****

This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University. 

• Register for the Reunion on October 20^th:  rowan.edu/historyreunion2023.
• Link to Project 100 on the Web: https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/
• Link to Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/251485937221524. 
• Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions. Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.