“Encouragement.”
It’s a word Edgar and Barbara Farmer bring up a lot as they describe their life together.
Both grew up attending segregated schools in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. Both became the first in their families to earn a college degree. Both earned doctoral degrees and became accomplished leaders in the field of education.
Both say their educational and professional journeys would not have been possible without the encouragement they received from mentors and peers and, most of all, each other. Together, they’ve built a life centered on encouraging others, both through their chosen professions as educators and through their involvement in the community.
On Nov. 1, the Farmers will be recognized as Penn State’s 2023 Renaissance Fund honorees for their enduring contributions to Penn State and the State College community. An endowed scholarship fund has been created in the Farmers’ names, and gifts to the fund can be made at raise.psu.edu/renaissance2023.
“Barbara and Edgar Farmer’s passions for education, for equity and for service have propelled them to the highest levels of impact in both their local communities and at Penn State,” says Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi. “I congratulate the Farmers on this well-deserved honor and thank them for leading with integrity and by example.”
The Partnership Begins
Edgar was one of 10 children; Barbara was the youngest of six.
Barbara says her parents were old-fashioned and didn’t like her to socialize on weekends, so she played clarinet in her high school marching band as a way to get out of the house on Friday nights.
Like many of the men in both of their families, Edgar worked in the Newport News shipyard as a teenager, building aircraft carriers and submarines. He also became an Eagle Scout, played football and basketball and ran track.
The two met while attending rival high schools. Barbara had been selected to be a debutante, and Edgar was the escort to the debutante ball for one of her fellow debs.
While it’s hard to imagine the accomplished, confident Barbara of today ever doubting herself, she says she didn’t feel like she quite belonged with this group, whom she describes as having lighter skin, longer hair and more impressive activities. So she was surprised when Edgar showed her some attention at an event leading up to the cotillion.
“I thought he was a tall, handsome dude when he came in, but at the same time, I didn’t think I really had a chance to get to know him,” she says.
Edgar surprised her again a couple years later when the two were attending different historically black colleges or universities (HBCUs), she at Hampton University and Edgar at Norfolk State. During a football game between the two schools, he spotted her in the bleachers and sat with her.
“That opened the door,” Barbara says. “One Sunday evening while his school was on spring break, my buzzer rang. It was Edgar downstairs to visit me. I was shocked. After that, he kept coming.”
The two were married in 1968 at the age of 22.
Emphasis on Education
Barbara always knew she wanted to become an educator.
“I had wonderful teachers who made me feel smart and important, and I wanted to do that for other people,” she says. “My plan was to graduate from Hampton, teach business education in high school in the same building in the same room for 30 years, and retire.”
That plan was upended when Edgar came along, she says.
Edgar also was studying to become a teacher, but he had many other interests. He fancied himself an aspiring inventor, enjoyed carving beautiful sculptures out of wood and at one point entertained thoughts of going to law school.
“He’s actually a visionary. That is what has taken us around the world in 55 years,” Barbara says.
Edgar spent 10 and a half months serving in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam as an educational liaison in 1970. When he returned, he says he had hoped for a little down time, but he had been offered a teaching position in the Hampton City School District, where Barbara was working, and she strongly encouraged him to take it.
“There were only a few Black teachers in these schools, and we were trying to get jobs in places where we could represent and be there for the children,” Barbara explains, “so when the supervisor approached me and said, ‘We have a job for your husband if he wants it,’ I thought, ‘Okay, he’s supposed to get that.’”
He took the job, and he was quickly a hit, often drawing administrators and school board members into his classroom to observe his teaching style.
“I was a show-off, and I loved it,” Edgar smiles. “I got to show them that these kids could do things.”
The forward-thinking young man had aspirations of becoming a principal, so he earned a master’s degree in education supervision at Hampton University, and then a doctorate in technical education at Penn State. Jobs at Temple, North Carolina A&T State University and NC State soon followed.
During this time, Edgar says, “Barbara was willing to come and support me.”
That support included taking time off from teaching while raising their three children, Rebecca, Eric and Edgar Jr. It also included helping her husband with his studies, typing his papers and offering editorial feedback.
Throughout this time, Edgar started nudging Barbara to think about going back to school herself. It was not something she even considered until after she was teaching again in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area.
Her principal asked her to represent the school and speak at state meetings, where people started floating the idea of her becoming an assistant principal. To do so, she would need a master’s degree—something she was not anxious to pursue.
“I was just happy being a teacher. I loved working with teenagers,” she says.
“But all her friends kept pushing her,” Edgar says.
Edgar pushed, too. He convinced her to start a graduate program at North Carolina A&T State University, which involved a 90-minute commute. Using his own background in education supervision, Edgar helped map out her curriculum.
“And I was scared,” Barbara says. “It wasn’t anything I had wanted to do. But Edgar had always told me, ‘You’re smart; you can do it.’”
She was a straight-A student, and soon her supervisor and classmates started telling her she should continue on for her doctorate. Once again, Edgar pushed, going so far as to set up an interview for her at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
“I just didn’t think I was smart enough to do it, and I thought about all it would take, with three children. But Edgar convinced me that I could do it. He’s been a great encourager and supporter,” she says. “Once I settled down, I began to love it. I had good professors who saw something in me. And Edgar was always there.”
Home in Happy Valley
After 12 years at North Carolina State, Edgar was offered an opportunity to return to Penn State. Barbara, who at this point was working as an assistant principal, was reluctant to leave Raleigh behind.
“But it was a good move,” Edgar says. “Sometimes I think success might be connected to a destination.”
Once settled in Happy Valley, the Farmers flourished. Edgar served as the department head of Learning and Performance Systems and professor-in-charge of the Workforce Education & Development program in the College of Education.
Barbara was tapped to serve on a diversity committee at the State College Area School District, which led to her hiring at Lemont and Houserville elementary schools as the district’s first Black principal, a position she held from 1997-2008.
She also taught courses on principalship and diversity at Penn State and served as the director of multicultural affairs for the university’s College of Information Sciences and Technology from 2009-2014.
The couple worked as a team to advocate for diversity and inclusion in the community. They collaborated on a WPSU television program, “What Matters,” which Edgar helped to produce and Barbara hosted, and wrote a regular column for the Centre Daily Times. They also co-authored two books: “Diversity in America: Visions of the Future—Real Issues of Real People” (2002) and “Leading with Character” (2007).
Barbara is an ordained minister, and the couple is very active in their church, the Unity Church of Jesus Christ. They served on Penn State’s “Policing People of Color Task Force,” and they are members of Community and Campus in Unity, which addresses issues of diversity in the Borough of State College.
Barbara has also served on the board of directors for the Centre County United Way and the Centre County Women’s Resource Center (now Centre Safe). She still mentors women one-on-one today.
“I used to tell people I have a prayer booth in the Olive Garden,” she laughs.
After retiring from the university in 2013, Edgar continued to mentor students individually, sometimes bringing Barbara in as a tutor.
“We’ve sat at our kitchen table Sunday after Sunday, helping a person that is getting their doctorate,” she says. “We have people from our church who have gotten a doctorate because of Edgar. We just feel you’re supposed to love folks, support folks and take care of them if you can.”
The couple has also tried to support students through their philanthropic gifts to educational equity scholarships, and established the Edwin Herr and Edgar Farmer Research Enhancement Fund in the College of Education. The Farmers have also endowed scholarships at two of their other alma maters, Hampton University and Norfolk State University, saying they believe it is important to support HBCUs.
“Without those schools, college would not have been accessible to us,” Barbara says.
The Farmers are slowing down a bit in retirement. They enjoy spending time with their children and three grandchildren. Edgar is also focusing on his passion for wood carving—something else he says he developed through the encouragement of others.
“I learned wood carving as a Boy Scout. My work was horrible,” he laughs, “but they gave me a merit badge and that encouraged me, so over the years, I never gave it up, and just got better and better at it.”
He spends several hours a day working in the basement of their Boalsburg home or in the woodworking lab at the Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub in downtown State College. In the past year, he has begun showing his work at art shows.
The couple has received many honors over the years. Most recently, Barbara received the Legacy Award from the State College Borough in 2023 and the Mimi Barash Coppersmith Women in Leadership Award in 2020. Together, they received the Humanitarian Award from the Forum on Black Affairs in 2018. Still, they say, they were surprised when they received a call about the Renaissance Fund honor.
“At first, I thought they wanted us to be on a committee to help them pick somebody,” Barbara laughs. “It’s humbling. But we’ve just been doing what we’ve been called to do. And we’ve been blessed, because we’ve been holding each other up all these years. If one of us gets the call, we both go. That makes the doing of what we do work even better.” T&G
Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College.
