Though he gave up the theatre years ago, Eugene Saxe would be every directors’ dream of the quintessential Shakespeare professor.

Courtly and mannered, Saxe, a professor of English who serves as the Faculty Trustee on Metro’s board, joined the teaching staff part-time in 1966, the second year of Metro’s existence. In 1967 he was hired full-time and has remained at Metro every since.

The early days at Metro, Saxe says, were filled with possibility. Lacking lecture series and cultural events, faculty found ways to enrich the students’ extracurricular lives by purchasing theatre tickets and giving them to students, many of whom had never before seen a play. They launched a literary magazine. And, given that it was the Sixties, students created a regular stir in the student newspaper with incendiary pieces of journalism and controversial photography.

“It was exhilarating,” he says. “You knew everyone and the students were wonderful.”

Saxe holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Denver along with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Indiana State University. Though he specialized in directing, he found it didn’t suit him. “There are too many ways of failing,” he says. “Plus, theatre people work night after night and I wanted to have a family.”

At Metro State, Saxe teaches dramatic literature and Shakespeare and especially enjoys exposing the Bard to first-year and second-year students. “For people who have never read drama or had experience with Shakespeare before or never read lyric poetry and never had any affinity for it, it can be exciting to help people learn to access it.”

Over the years, Saxe has made institutional service a hallmark of his tenure at Metro State. In the mid 1980s Saxe served as the assistant vice president for Academic Affairs, was president of the College's Faculty Senate from 1995 to 1997 and was the Faculty Trustee to the Board of Trustees for the State Colleges of Colorado in 2001. He is the recipient of the College's Golden Key Excellence for Teaching Award (2000-01) and the Distinguished Service Award (1989-90).

As a Faculty Trustee, Saxe is a non-voting member of the Board of Trustees and says that it is his role to serve as a resource to the board as a whole, bringing with him the faculty perspective and his years of experience at the institution. Though the last three budgetary years have been hard, he acknowledges, he has seen the College weather tough times before, pointing to the layoff of tenure-track faculty in the early Seventies.

“The last three years have not been particularly kind,” he says. “We’ve had people retire and go elsewhere. But we’re hoping that with the announcement Dr. Jordan has made (about faculty hiring), we’re coming to an end with that. But we’re here for the long run. We’ve experienced difficulties before.”