Richard Adams has amassed an impressive list of accomplishments and life experiences. He’s taught at Harvard University, holds several degrees, and worked on a United Nations Tribunal. Now he returns to his hometown of Marshalltown to teach eighth grade English and language arts at Miller Middle School.

The son of educators (his mother is Patricia Adams), he first attended Fisher Elementary School before moving on to Lenihan Junior High School.

“I have a history with the Times-Republican: first, in elementary and junior high, I had a long, near the country club, Elmwood Drive, etc., paper route. Then, starting in junior high, I convinced Dave Norris, former publisher, to let me write weekly record review columns — it began as an extension of Gifted and Talented at Lenihan known as ‘TARGET.’ I wrote a column every week for something like six years,” he recalled.

Adams graduated from Marshalltown High School in 1984 and said he set his sights on attending an Ivy League school. He got his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied for a bit at the University of Chicago then finished up his PhD in English from the University of Iowa. He won the Best Dissertation Award in the English department for his work entitled: “Taking Stock: Cultural Capital and American Realism in the 1880s.”

He then moved from Iowa City to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was a professor of history and literature and English at Harvard University from 1995 to 2001.

He noted that a publication by the Modern Language Association (MLA) advertises which jobs are available.

“And of course, universities and colleges hire by focus areas, by areas of concentration,” he said. “I was, or still am, I guess, an Americanist that writes about the late 18th and early 19th century: writers like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and there are extraordinarily few academic jobs out there. I saw an opening in my area and I just let it fly, and was very fortunate to have worked with some good people and got the job.”

After teaching at Harvard, Adams taught English at the University of Arkansas.

“I came to education through an extreme, you might say, a preoccupation with literature and language,” he noted. “Not to say that the teaching isn’t important, but if you’re sort of devoted to a pursuit like literature and language, there’s really not much you can do. It takes you into teaching.”

After serving as a professor at Arkansas, Adams decided to leave teaching. He earned two law degrees: A JD (Juris Doctor) and an LLM (master’s in law in taxation, at Georgetown Law School).

“I worked for a while in tax law and in international law. I was fortunate enough to serve with the defense counsel over in the Netherlands in the United Nations Tribunal for Lebanon,” he said. “I only knew that there had been some political problems, and what had happened was that a group of assassins had killed the sitting president at the time, and the United Nations had managed to get custody of the plotters of the assassination. So I was part of the team that was doing research and writing memos and looking up applicable laws for matters like discovery and professional conduct. So it was really sort of fascinating. It was a fascinating case, and it was fascinating, of course, to be part of the international tribunal and to work with lawyers from around the world.”

After that he came back to Marshalltown for a few years, dealing with serious medical issues.

“My kidneys failed and I received treatment at the DaVita Center here in town,” he noted. “I was on dialysis for five years.”

He received a transplant at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in December 2018. He next lived in Portland, Oregon where he ran the business law program at Lewis & Clark Law School.

“I taught some state and local taxation,” he added.

Adams is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) who sent him on a paid one-year sabbatical to write. He spent time at the Huntington Library and Harvard’s Houghton Library to do some research and look at some manuscripts of Mark Twain and Henry Adams.

His move back to Marshalltown, he says, was motivated by his mom getting older and his son attending law school in Chicago.

“I wanted to be closer to them, to help out,” he said. “Frankly, I wanted to return to literature, to teaching literature, because I really think that’s vital. The teaching profession is an inherently virtuous endeavor.”

Adams applied to teach at other Iowa schools but said the team at Miller who interviewed him made the best impression. He looks forward to meeting his students and notes he’s an advocate of critical thinking in the classroom. His goal is to help youth cultivate a joy of language, develop the ability to be informed, and be “healthily skeptical.”

“I feel like I’m sort of a scout or a guide. I’ve pursued various interests, various work. I’ve seen different professional codes. I’ve used language in different areas: legal language, literary language, scholarly language, so I can help them to do everything, hopefully, from writing an eloquent email to being able to tell when a politician is using a mixed metaphor to get a point across,” Adams said. “It’s nice to have middle schoolers and have some give and take, some discussion, teaching them how to think. You’re getting them at a real crucial stage. By the time kids are in college, they’ve already sort of developed their habits of thinking, whereas you can really participate in forming the thinking and manner of thinking of middle school students.”