Listen Here
By Richard Mast
mastr@findlay.edu
For 40 years, Diana Montague has watched the same moment unfold.
Students arrive at the University of Findlay, stepping onto campus for the first time, uncertain and confused about who they are and what they will become. Faculty lead those students through the Griffith Memorial Arch as a sign that the students are walking into the next phase of life. As faculty marshal, Montague has been leading that journey for the last 13 years. Just a few years later she leads the faculty and those same students back out of the Arch, older, steadier, more confident, and ready to move on.
Montague has stood at both ends of that journey, year after year. Now she is nearing the end of her own.
Montague, a professor of media and communication at the University of Findlay, is retiring at the end of the semester after four decades of teaching. What began as a short stop after graduate school became a career defined by teaching, mentoring students, and shaping campus life. Now she is reflecting on that work as she prepares to step away from the classroom while finishing a book on the university’s history.
When Montague first arrived in 1986, she wasn’t much different from the students she would spend decades teaching. She was 25, new to teaching, and unsure of what came next.
“There were a few days when I cried myself,” she said. “Because it was all brand new.”
The work was demanding. Producing the student newspaper, originally called The Obilisk, required long hours and constant attention, often seven days a week. Without modern technology, every page had to be physically assembled by hand.
It was overwhelming. And like many of the students she would later guide, she didn’t know where she would end up.
Montague never intended to build a life in Findlay. Her plan was simple: gain experience and then move on.
“My first thoughts were, get your master’s degree, go teach someplace that will hire a master’s degree, spend a couple of years there, and then see what else there is out there,” Montague said.
But over time, the temporary became permanent. She pursued her doctorate. She built relationships. She met her future husband. She had become part of the culture she had originally planned to just pass through. She had built a life.
Did she ever imagine staying this long?
“God no,” she said.
For Montague, the work became about more than teaching classes; it became about the people moving through them.
Over the years she built connections with students through her work advising, what would become, The Pulse, leading the first-year seminar program, and helping launch the university’s orientation service project, which has become a tradition second only in length to the arch ceremony.
“If the first thing that our students are going to do is go serve others, score,” she said. “When you get out of here, you’re going to be part of the community.”
She also earned recognition for her work along the way, including the university’s Arch Award and several major faculty honors for teaching and service.
Now, as she prepares to step away from the classroom, Montague is working to preserve the history she helped live. She has spent the past several years writing a book documenting the university from 1983 to 2019, a project she felt uniquely positioned to take on.
“I lived that history,” she said. “And there was no one else who was going to write it.”
After 40 years in the classroom Montague is preparing for one final commencement ceremony.
As faculty marshal, she leads the academic procession, guiding faculty and students toward the arch that marks both the beginning and end of a student’s time at the University of Findlay. This year, it will be her last time in that role.
She has watched this same cycle play out. Each year brings a new group of students, different in background but similar in experience. Working through the same questions, the same moments of growth, and the same flashes of teenage angst that comes with being 19.
“I’ve been around 19-year-olds for 40 years,” she said. “New 19-year-olds come in, but they’re always going through what 19-year-olds go through.”
The work, she said, became a kind of “Groundhogs Day” of guiding students through those moments, year after year.
But what stayed with her was never the repetition itself. It was what came at the end of it.
“On the other side, the Groundhog Day of celebrating at graduation is fabulous.” ,” she said.
That moment is what stayed with her the most, the chance to watch students grow, to see them reach the other side of something they once weren’t sure if they could even do.
After decades in the classroom, Montague knows exactly what she is leaving behind and what she is taking with her. The routines, the long hours, and the day-to-day demands of the job will fade. What remains are the people. the students she taught, the relationships she built and the impact she was able to have along the way.
“I don’t miss the paperwork. I don’t miss the grading. I don’t miss the meetings. But I will miss the students and the relationships that you build,” she said. “I will miss having that impact on people.”
The legacy she leaves behind says the impact will linger on for years to come.
