Professor Emerita of History and Anthropology, Dr. Border died February 12, 2022 of a long illness. For forty years, she taught students at Berkshire Community College, where she met her late husband Professor James D. Border. He passed away in 2013 after a very happy marriage of four decades.
Before BCC, Dr. Border had been a professor at Bard College/Simon’s Rock and Miss Hall’s School, where she was the head of the History Department. She also had been an adjunct professor at Skidmore College. At Berkshire, she worked closely with the nontraditional admissions programs at Smith and Mt. Holyoke. To her delight, a considerable number of students, of both genders, transferred to highly prestigious schools, where they did better than students who had been admitted there as freshmen. She believed very strongly in the community college ideal, and that the best educational opportunity should be available to students who could not afford the high cost of private schools. Berkshire Community College was the perfect place to provide them with the emotional caring and the professional excellence that were what true education meant to her.
Born in Pittsfield to Robert Blake and Esther Nicholson Canfield and educated in the public schools, she was a National Merit Scholar and went to UMass/Amherst as a Commonwealth Scholar in the Centennial Class of 1963. While there, Dr. Border was the director of the Distinguished Visitors Program, director of the Operetta Guild, had leading roles in many campus productions, and was tapped as a Mortar Board, the senior women’s leadership group.
She was selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in American College and Universities, and in her senior year won a national Woodrow Wilson/Ford Foundation Fellowship for PhD funding at any US college.
Choosing Harvard, Prof. Border was in the first very small group of women to be admitted to the Graduate School, ten years before any Affirmative Action initiatives, and encountered serious resistance there to the idea that any woman should be allowed to receive a Harvard degree. The experience was shocking, but toughened her up so that, years later, she could initiate a suit against the Commonwealth of Mass. Board of Higher Education for gender discrimination in pay. With former Pittsfield mayor and fellow faculty member Anne Everest Wojtkowski, and six other seriously underpaid women, after years of litigation they won the largest sex-equity settlement in academic history, “Border vs. the Massachusetts Board of High Education”. While at BCC, she was very active as an officer of the community college union, the MCCC, which improved working conditions for faculty and professional staff.
With a grandmother who was a suffragette and strong female figures in her family, she was particularly interested in seeing that women could take their place as equals in a society that was anything but welcoming when she started her career. Over the years, she helped many of her female students to be admitted to the most competitive colleges. Teaching women’s studies courses and working for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, she was later tapped for Britain’s Oxford Circle multinational conference on women’s rights in Africa.
With degrees in history, anthropology, English, and psychology and a minor in geology, Dr. Border was interested in many subjects. Certified in clinical hypnotherapy, she was on the board of several therapeutic organizations; fascinated by the archaeological past, she was head of the Berkshire Archaeological Board and worked with archaeologists from all over New England. Following the subject of prehistoric transatlantic contact between America and Europe in the Megalithic (Stonehenge-era) Period, she and her husband received the first-ever Media Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities given to community-college faculty. This took them to the British Isles and France to consult with the eminent archaeologists and prehistorians and to film sites that were very similar to rock structures found in New England. Later, she received another grant from the National Endowment to put together a seminar on the Puritans for faculty members, led by her Harvard classmate John Putman Demos, a top Puritan expert.
Growing up in a psychic family, Karen Canfield Border studied this phenomenon throughout her life, coming to a deep appreciation of the reality of ‘other worlds’ and states of consciousness from her own experiences in those realms. A reincarnationalist, she felt that the soul was eternal and that its awareness would continue from one life to another, making her comfortable with the issue of death.
Visitations from her late husband Jim intensified her belief in immortality. Her first mystic experience of transcendence happened at age 16, which profoundly shaped her life and spirituality, and which made her feel that religions were far too narrow and contradictory. She believed in love and in joy, and asks this of you: rather to send flowers or money to a charity, she would like to you do a significant good deed to a person who needs help, and ask the recipient to “pay it forward” to another person, so that an ever-widening ripple of kindness will spread. Karen cared very much about the people she encountered in her life. She would like that caring to be her legacy and her remembrance.
Blessed with wonderful family and friends, Karen leaves two adored sisters: Donna Canfield Arnold of Pittsfield, Heather Canfield McCaul and her husband Dr. Edward McCaul of Richmond, NH, and her ‘adoptive family’ including Philip Allessio, Joyce Kellar, George Moran III, Sean Maxwell, Joseph Durwin, Allison Dolan Hall, Valerie Dean Tallet, Dan and Chrissy Reed, among others. She also had beloved in-laws and dear friends to enrich her life.
A memorial service will be held in May. Date and time to be announced at a later date.