by Chuck Gordon
Dr. Sylvia Little-Sweat ’61 was a 19-year-old eyeing a career in medicine when she found her true calling. She’d aced two semesters of Latin under C.C. Burris, an aging but much-loved former Wingate Junior College president whose popularity as a professor created an oversubscribed Latin class in the fall of 1960. Little-Sweat – Sylvia Pierce at the time – was asked to step in as an instructor. She was only a sophomore.
“He gave me complete freedom to do the test, to write the exam, to grade the papers,” she says. “Now, that’s unorthodox, but it really happened.”
Mustering as much self-confidence as she could, Little-Sweat drove in from her home in rural Marshville to teach a difficult subject to wide-eyed freshmen, students essentially her age. Her command of scientific subjects – she would win the chemistry award her sophomore year and was also a biology lab assistant – made her a natural to teach Latin. Her love of school itself made her a natural simply to teach.
Little-Sweat had formulated plans to one day attend medical school, but here she was, like Frost’s traveler, being shown a potentially different path.
Six decades later, she recalls the feeling of standing in front of her peers, authoritatively bringing a dead language to life. “It wasn’t easy, but it was momentous,” she says. “That experience taught me two things: I would never teach Latin again, but I loved the teaching part.”
And she’s never stopped loving it. In 1963, after two years away in Chapel Hill (studying) and Burlington (teaching), Little-Sweat came back to Wingate to teach English, and she’s occupied the same office in Burris overlooking the amphitheater ever since, teaching Wordsworth and Hawthorne and subject-verb agreement to Wingate students year after year, decade after decade, for a remarkable 60 years.
This spring, Little-Sweat was honored for her six-decade run in the English Department with a celebratory event in LaVerne Banquet Hall, complete with panels of colleagues and former students regaling attendees with vignettes highlighting Little-Sweat’s career. She won’t call it a retirement party. She’ll turn 82 in August, but her mind is as sharp as when she first started teaching freshmen the ins and outs of English composition. She’s considered demanding but fair, and, just as much today as when she returned to campus six decades ago, she strives to shape her charges into better students and, especially, better thinkers.
“She’s not only giving you lessons about the content, but she’s giving life lessons too,” says Erin Griffin ’22, who took four Little-Sweat classes in two years, including an independent study a year ago. “It’s captivating, really.”
Little-Sweat has more institutional knowledge than perhaps anyone ever to have set foot on the Wingate campus. She’s been a part of campus life for nearly half of its 127 years, and for over 60 percent of its life as an institution of higher education. As a precocious young girl in the late ’40s, Little-Sweat would visit her favorite uncle, Rommie Pierce, in Alumni Dormitory, where he lived while teaching English and helming the Glee Club and Men’s Chorus. As an older teen she attended Wingate Junior College (while getting that first taste of teaching), and she not only has been employed at Wingate for six decades but has written two histories of the school: one, The Chalk Dust Chronicle, a standard prose account, in 1995, as Wingate was making the move from college to university status; and another, The Dream Sustained: A Poetic Journey Through Wingate University’s History, a quarter century later.
“In my consciousness, this place has always existed,” she says.
If that sounds like a line from a poem, perhaps that’s because poetry, specifically the 19th-century heyday version, has consumed much of Little-Sweat’s thought and time and energy over the years. She refers casually to “Emily,” as if she had recently had lunch with Miss Dickinson. (“‘Hope’ is the Thing With Feathers” could sum up the career of someone who has taught in the same building for six decades.) In conversation, she quotes lines of poetry to make a point. Although her official title now is “writer-in-residence,” she prefers “poet-in-residence,” which is how students sometimes mistakenly refer to her.
Being an active writer, Little-Sweat can empathize with her students. Oscar Montero ’68 came to the United States from Cuba in his early teens. He was fluent in English by the time he enrolled at Wingate, but although he loved reading and writing, his English composition needed fine-tuning. Little-Sweat helped him, he says, “to understand the limitations and the possibilities of language.”
“I think that would certainly be something that she, as a writer herself, is living and practicing,” says Montero, who went on to a long career teaching Latin American literature at several universities, including Princeton and Columbia, as well as writing and translating. “That’s an important lesson. There are always limits to writing, but there are also possibilities. If you’re a writer, and you’re stuck, you’ve got to find a way out.”
“The most transformative experience for me in her class was in poetry and creative writing,” Griffin says. “She really pushed me not only to think beyond the page but to grow as a person.”
Teaching as transference of love
Little-Sweat is a sharer. Her students get to know about her life – her Nashville-based drummer son, Wes; her daughter, Ashley, a college registrar; the various creatures that populate the woods around her College Park home – because, she says, they need to know her in order to get the most out of her class.
“They can’t trust what I say unless they trust me as a person,” she says. “If they don’t see me as an authentic person, then I’ve already failed to do any kind of teaching that might stick with them.”
Often, that teaching comes in the form of a little red pen, the memory of which often does stick, for years. Little-Sweat has been known to bleed (metaphorically) all over papers. Comma splices, sentence fragments and, especially, subject-verb disagreements – they all get the red-pen treatment.
There’s no malice in it. As perhaps your parents told you once or twice, it’s for your own good.
“It’s not punitive,” says Morgan Rosser Hess ’91, who worked as Little-Sweat’s office assistant and was her student during a semester in London. “It’s definitely because she wants you to become better: a better writer, a better thinker. I appreciate that.”
Put another way: Bad grammar gets in the way of good thought.
“If I had to put it in a priority order, I would put critical thinking first,” Little-Sweat says. “I would put expressiveness – how well you can say things – second. And I would put grammar on down the list. But if you have horrific grammar, it just distorts the impression that the paper makes.
“Really what I want to do is refine their minds, not just grammatically. I want the writing to show more sophistication, more critical thinking, more attention to style, and not have somebody else’s style. Have your own style, your own voice, your own agenda.”
(What she thinks of this piece, perhaps we don’t need to find out.)
Wingate’s president, Dr. Rhett Brown ’89, took Little-Sweat’s Literature & Film class during his last semester. “All these years later, the books and the films just stand out,” he says. “I remember that class unlike any other.”
"What I want to do is refine their minds. I want the writing to show more sophistication, more critical thinking, more attention to style."
Although Little-Sweat admits that she’s experienced a “softening of the heart” the longer she’s taught, she continues to command the classroom, now conducting her lessons almost exclusively from a seated position at the front of the class. She often flashes a wry smile and punctuates her lessons with a sardonic wit.
“Despite her warm personality, she was just in control of the class and made it so you could learn and interact, but with her leading the pack,” Montero says.
“She brings everything to life, because it’s her love,” Hess says. “Everything she loves she transfers onto you. I think that’s part of her gift, and how she’s stayed so relevant all these years.”
Little-Sweat still teaches the classics – Hawthorne, the Brontës, Shelley – but she sprinkles in books that, when she started her career, were years from being published: Alias Grace, One Foot in Eden, Where the Crawdads Sing. She likes to stay current, she likes to mix things up a bit, and she likes young people (“They don’t talk about their ailments,” she says). But she also believes, deep down, that literature and poetry are timeless, that they reveal universal truths that transcend their eras.
Living history
Little-Sweat will ultimately transcend her era(s) as well. She stayed at Wingate over the years for several reasons: She became a single parent in the 1980s and didn’t want to move her children too far away from family; she was given opportunities, especially to travel, that might not have been afforded her at other institutions; and she simply loves Wingate and all it stands for, even though the University has undergone massive changes since her first visit to Alumni to see Uncle Rommie.
She’s had a front-row seat as the institution has moved to the four-year ranks and then attained university status. She’s seen buildings come and go (Sanders-Sikes Gymnasium was christened the year she entered as a freshman; it was torn down in 2015). She’s seen the health sciences become the University’s calling card, while the liberal arts have continued to underpin Wingate’s mission.
She was hired by Budd Smith and has steadfastly continued to trek through the Quad to her office in Burris like the proverbial mail carrier, no matter the weather, through four subsequent presidents. (Only a pandemic could keep her home, and even then she taught via Zoom.)
As the longest-serving faculty member, for years she carried the University mace at Commencement, until the pandemic and a bad back kept her from fulfilling that duty in recent years.
“It’s remarkable how involved she’s been in chronicling the history of the university while at the same time being a part of that history as well,” Brown says. “Whether it’s her Chalk Dust Chronicle or her book of poetry, she’s writing to preserve the history of this place and give people a sense of what makes it special. No one’s probably seen more change than Sylvia Little-Sweat.”
After 60 years – it still seems incredible to write that – Little-Sweat still has enthusiasm for her work. Even now, she gets energized when one of her students has a novel take on a piece of literature. “I really perk up – oh, I really perk up – when I get a paper that just grabs my attention,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll read that paper twice. That just does my heart good.”
Little-Sweat is a part-time employee now, teaching two classes each semester. A few years ago she went from full-time in the classroom to teaching two classes while writing The Dream Sustained. When she finished that book in 2019, she kept her two-courses-a-semester schedule and just started writing whatever she wanted to, whenever she felt like it.
She won’t say when she will give up her classroom for good. There’s still work to do. She continues to try to make Wingate – a small school that she’s seen grow and change and morph into a different place, but with the same values at heart – the best place it can be.
“I really believe, as a basic part of who I am, that you ought to leave a place better than you found it, and that your efforts are not in vain,” she says.
She has, and they’re not.
“Maybe the fact that I’ve been here this long shows that if I can last this long, the school can last,” she says. “Not because of me, but because of the things that we mutually believe in.
“If anybody wonders how I could have been at this, in this place, for 60 years and still have enthusiasm, they’re not going to believe my answer, but it’s the honest truth: It’s the activity of minds, either on paper or in person. It is that kind of exchange. There’s just nothing like it.”