Documenting the "Vacher Effect": Reflections on Dr. H. Leonard Vacher, University of South Florida

Dr. H. Leonard (Len) Vacher, 2004 Neil Miner awardee, past columnist for the Journal of Geoscience Education, founding Editor of Numeracy, and Professor Emeritus at the University of South Florida, passed away in May after a long illness.

Jeff Ryan: Professionally, Len wore many hats: karst/island hydrogeologist; teacher/advisor to many future Florida hydrogeologists; NSF-funded investigator on how best to teach quantitative skills to geologists; pioneer in the nascent scholarly field of Quantitative Literacy. But woven inextricably into all his roles was that of Mentor. His office door was always open to students. As a faculty colleague, I'd regularly hear, "Got a minute?...," Len's face in my doorway, or he'd call my name in the evening as I headed past his office to the elevator and home ("Len caught me on my way out..." was the one excuse my wife accepted for tardy returns from work). Whatever Len wanted, our conversations always started with him asking about my day, my work, my needs and concerns. And by the end of those chats, whatever he had needed, he always came back around to helping me, and guiding me to do better.And he did that with everyone, student or faculty, rank irrespective.

Len gave me courage to try and be good at teaching, though I was never his equal in lecture.  He broadened my scholarly horizons, put me on hydrogeology graduate committees (!!), and pushed me to think out-of-the-box in curricular matters.  Geoscience education is a graduate degree option at USF because Len worked the wires. I like to think I was his partner in this, but it would not have happened without his quiet drop-in visits with faculty across our unit.   Every day going home, walking by his door, I miss hearing him call my name, and the intense conversations that always left me better as a teacher and scholar.

KT Moran: Key aspects of my direction, view, and function as a geoscientist and educator came from many seemingly random conversations in Len's office as an undergraduate. I remember once telling Len that I didn't understand WHY I was taking Calculus.  He gave me an incredulous look and told me that I did calculus frequently as a geologist, because a derivative is just an expression of change over time. I had never made that basic connection before, and it changed everything about how I approached mathematics.  I know he helped bring about this change in perspective in so many of my fellow Vacherites.

I also told him I didn't have a good picture of how geologists spent their days. I wanted to shadow people at local firms and government offices, so I asked him for contacts.  I could see the spark in his eyes – he saw opportunity!  Many USF Geology alumni were local, and in less than a week we had a plan to bring them to us.  As president of the Geology Club, I requested activity funds to throw a 'networking party' for alumni and students.  It had a great turnout!  And Len got to speak with all the attendees. This fateful event started the USF Geology Alumni Society (GAS).  GAS has endowed fellowships and a field station, won awards, and become central to our local Geology culture.

I now know that our conversations were rarely as random as I thought.  Len had a knack for guiding people to do things in ways that made them feel like they'd wanted that all along.  I once made an offhand remark about my courses talking about drilling, geophysical surveys, groundwater sampling, etc., but having never seen any of these things.  Len called some people in GAS, and its GeoEXPO field demonstration event was born. It happens on the USF campus to this day.

I have rarely felt so honored as when Len 'came to get me' after I graduated. He showed up unannounced at my office and invited me to lunch.  He told me that the upcoming year might be his last teaching his graduate hydro courses, and he wanted to make sure that the 'ones who got away' had the opportunity to take them.  He saw this as unfinished business.  I can't describe how good it felt that I was still 'seen' by my beloved mentor.

Every day in my classes, I pass on concepts I learned from Len.  I can only hope to have half the positive impact on my students that he had on me.

Lee Florea: My first job in geology was with the Department of Surface Mining in Kentucky. While I enjoyed it, I wanted to do more academically but had no idea how to make that happen.  My job let me bank flextime from long days in the field. I used this time for independent projects, and traveled to conferences to keep myself engaged. My interest was in caves and karst, but there were few programs then in that field.

I presented my work on the influence of fault systems on the organization of caves in southern Kentucky at a conference on post-Paleozoic karst aquifers at the University of Florida.  At an evening social, a group of us gathered around a soft-spoken gentleman who had presented in our session on the hydraulic properties of the Floridan aquifer and differences in the conception of karst in "eogenetic" settings. The conversation was full of deep connections to the literature and to people through the decades. I would learn later that this was how Len Vacher spoke, even in casual settings.

I reached out to Len the following week about PhD programs. He first recommended other people I should contact. However, a few days later he followed up asking if I'd considered USF.  I had never heard of the University of South Florida until I met him. We struck up a conversation.  Soon, I sent in my application and was accepted into their Ph.D. program.

I'm not sure what Len saw in me aside from my background in math and physics. I was good at calculus, so I served as his TA for his Computational Geology and Physical Principles of Groundwater Flow courses. I was not a good writer then, which he let me know often. He had a Chicago Manual of Style in arm's reach of anywhere in his office. I had no idea of the many types and uses of dashes.

Len told me that he was there not to mentor my science, but to mentor how I communicated my science. He also said I was there to teach him caves and karst — and maybe I did.  But he did so much more to open my eyes to the breadth and depth of the hydrogeology of carbonate aquifer systems. Our work together rethought the Floridan aquifer from the "inside looking out" perspective of a caver—the inverse of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" (i.e., Florea and Vacher, 2006; 2007). I subsequently worked with Len on articles tracing the history of karst science associated with his work establishing the Karst Information Portal at USF, and with an award presentation he gave for the GSA History of Geology Section.

Len's amazing brain for both geoscience and its history gave him a synthesizing power I have yet to encounter since. He would create beautifully written first drafts, only to delete them and start fresh as he organized his thoughts in response to peer reviews. For a 2006 paper in Groundwater (Vacher et al., 2006), he rethought his model framework through the lens of a "bubble" metaphor to address reviewer comments about ASR injection in the Floridan aquifer.  I squirreled away first drafts of Len's papers to try to learn how he went from concept to product.

Of the group that gathered around Len that day in Gainesville, all obtained graduate degrees and positions in academia, government, or industry. With his help, our cohort founded the Karst Research Group at USF, now internationally recognized for karst studies.

Vic Ricchezza: In the summer of 2013, I resigned my position as a high school science teacher in hopes of entering a graduate program to eventually work in higher education. I sent out many emails in search of a program and got few responses. But I got the one that mattered. I went to interview with Len Vacher, little realizing how much my life was about to change. A year later I was starting graduate studies under his guidance.

Len had a reputation among the undergraduates. He spoke slowly and softly, and he always paused before he said something. To the undergraduates, this was usually interpreted (out of his earshot) as "he thinks I'm the stupidest person alive." It was my job as Len's teaching assistant to assure them that this was not so. Len considered one's undergraduate years to be when one is most allowed to make mistakes and not know things.  Rather, what they were seeing was Len thinking deeply.

Len was a disciple of sorts of the late R.N. Ginsburg at the University of Miami. Ginsburg wrote several articles in the 1980s with two-word themes, such as "So What" (Ginsburg 1982), "Who Cares", "Think Deeply", and "Words Matter". From these, Len took the following: a scientist (or anyone) communicating their ideas has a responsibility to be clear, concise, and to speak/write in ways that reach the audience. He told me a story of submitting articles early in his career that were reviewed by C.W. Fetter, whose repeated response to him was: "short, declarative sentences, Vacher!" Len took this seriously, even in conversation. And while he was constructing his responses to you, his gaze was penetrating. I quickly came to feel that our meetings were things I'd better prepare for, because that stare when you didn't have an answer was inescapable.

I discovered later that doing graduate research under Len was a rarer thing than I'd imagined. Between 1977 and 2019, he had ten Ph.D. students. He took on students for specific reasons: a research topic he was interested in, or the potential of a particular student. I've rarely felt so honored... or so unworthy.

Len had one superpower: he could get you to do what he wanted you to do. Showing interest in quantitative literacy or hydrogeology? You'd suddenly realize that you'd agreed to be an editor, or a co-author, or you were going to run some new study, and you couldn't quite understand how it had happened.  He'd calmly bring up an idea, and somehow, without debate or argument, he'd convince you to do it.

It's beyond obvious that I wouldn't be in my current position were it not for Len making me one of his last PhD students (concurrent with Ming Xie – call it a tie...). I miss my mentor, colleague, and friend. And, as I suspect others also said, I use what he taught me every day I go to work. And I cannot imagine it any other way.

Meghan Cook: The passing of Dr. Len Vacher is a profound loss to the academic community and to me personally. He was a mentor whose influence on my life is impossible to measure (quantitative pun fully intended).

I first met Dr. Vacher in his infamous Computational Geology course as an undergraduate. He was "that professor," who everyone feared because of his high standards. But after his class, I began to see the method behind the intensity—and by intensity, I mean how high his hair stood on any given day! Len didn't set high expectations to weed students out; he held us to them because he believed we could reach them. And he made it his mission to help us do just that.

Len brought me into his Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum project, and in our conversations steadily nudged me toward my love of studying how people learn. When I asked him to serve on my Ph.D. committee, I knew exactly what I was signing up for. He was notorious for asking the questions you feared and needed most. I needed him asking, "So what, and who cares?"

Although he retired before I defended, he gave me the highest compliment I've ever received in one of his annual progress reviews. He noted that I was a non-traditional student, and had taken a winding path, but said, "We [the Geosciences] are all going to be better for what Meghan is doing."  I aim to make Len proud every day. It is an honor to call myself a Vacherite.

Mark Rains (FL Chief Science Officer): When I first joined USF as an Assistant Professor in 2003, I was like many young Assistant Professors – well-prepared and deeply interested in my research and looking forward to building my research career and achieving tenure and promotion at a research-intensive university. Of course, I knew I would also be teaching, but I had been a research assistant throughout my graduate studies, and I lacked for teaching experience and any appreciation at all for the importance or challenges of teaching. Immediately on my arrival, Len volunteered to be my mentor. I don't recall precisely how it happened, or if it was even a formal role. I do recall Len being earnest, and that I either accepted or at least was swept along by his persistence (or, perhaps, his insistence). We scheduled monthly meetings, during which we would cross campus to have lunch in the cafeteria in the basement of Moffitt Cancer Center and talk about the importance of educating students and building our community of geologists. For Len, that was the central mission. Those experiences were transformative for me and continue to inform who I am today: deeply interested in my research but equally interested in growing the minds of our students and building our community of geologists. Many students were intimidated by him. A non-zero number of students may have cursed his name. But our students never had a greater ally than Len Vacher.

Todd Chavez (Dean, USF Libraries): I first met Len in 2006, when he came to my office to discuss the metadata describing his many impactful contributions in the NAGT portfolio. Len was always direct – but also always funny. In typical fashion, he began with, "What is this metadata stuff about, and why do I need to be concerned with it?" A fantastic, wide-ranging discussion followed, and we ended with a plan that suddenly brought me into the world of geosciences.

Because of Len, I had a chance to work with the geoscience community in ways that led to both career and personal growth. Len made me a better librarian through his generous sharing of his time and wisdom. Together, we designed and co-taught a course entitled Geologic Information for Graduate Students, that has evolved into "HOMG" – his History of Modern Geoscience course, now a required graduate offering. It was the most rewarding and transformative instructional experience a librarian could ever have!

He taught me to navigate the world of external funding: "...write ten grant proposals to have one favorably reviewed, then ten more to get one funded...." He helped me manage the disappointments that come with the process and to bounce back better.  And he mentored me through peer review for a series of articles he encouraged me to contribute to Numeracy. Len's editorial philosophy was to find ways to make a paper strong enough to be published. This is incredibly important in disciplines, like librarianship, that do not consistently emphasize publication.

It was an honor and privilege to work with Len on many projects: the Karst Information Portal, Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum, the National Numeracy Network, and the journal Numeracy. Thank you, Len, for your kindness, support, and impact on my life.

References:

Florea, L.J., Vacher, H.L., 2006, Springflow hydrographs: Eogenetic vs. telogenetic karst: Groundwater, 44(3), 352-361.

Florea, L.J., Vacher, H.L., 2007, Hydrology of eogenetic karst illustrated by the 2004 Hurricanes in Peninsular Florida, Groundwater 45(4), 439-446.

Ginsburg, RN. 1982. "Seeking answers; suggestions for students." Journal of Sedimentary Research 52 (2): 351-352.

Vacher, H. L., Hutchings, W. C., & Budd, D. A., 2006. Metaphors and models: The ASR bubble in the Floridan aquifer. Groundwater, 44(2), 144-154.