Senior College Stories

August 26, 2025

Sometimes there is info you do not need to know in Senior College. Do I need to know your full life’s story to be able to learn with you, or you with me?

“The family of Manley Eaton Rogers announced his peaceful passing from this life on August 9, 2025, in Portland, Maine, in the company of family at the age of 98."

I cannot fully remember how I knew Manley; I am fairly sure he was in a photo class I taught. I may have been in a class that he taught, or maybe we were both in classes together? Or some combination of these? It had to be after 2007 when I first joined SC, and it was probably before the COVID/Zoom era. I had not seen him around in several years.

What I do remember is that Manley was always a “good student” — asking the interesting questions, the why, the how. Sometimes I suspected he asked questions to fill in the gap where an instructor missed a reference, things that he knew other students would want to know. He never let his classmates feel ashamed at what they did not know, or that he was in any way better than they were. That he was humble could be seen in his eagerness to also learn from those 25 years (or more!) his junior.

We never talked about politics or music, but I am reminded of Ms. Franklin’s song R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Now being privy to the fuller life story of Colonel Rogers: “…served in the U.S. Army in post war Germany, military advisor in Iran, teaching faculty at West Point… trained, and then led, an Engineer Combat Battalion…in the Republic of Vietnam 1965-66.”

Meanwhile, I was busy in the streets of New York and Washington, trying in my small way to end that same war.

“…During the final 17 years of his career, he led the Admissions efforts of West Point…expanded its efforts to fully integrate by instituting a Minority Outreach Recruitment Program. Before then, only 68 Black cadets had graduated from the Academy in its 166-year history. The Academy enrolled 47 Black cadets in his first year as the Director of Admissions! He then oversaw the further expansion of minorities entering West Point and presided over the successful admission of women to USMA in 1976, making it a coeducational institution nearly 175 years after its founding.”

I was just downriver, practicing to be faculty in photography and learning more about Zen, and pacifism, and vegetarianism….

Would we have argued if we knew these facts about each other? I had respect for his deep intelligence about life, and he for me for what I knew about photography. I guess that is all that mattered for a successful time in Senior College.

You can read his full obituary, plus photo here.

- Paul Sheridan