Editor’s Note: A former version of this article referred to Ed Baker as an associate professor. This has been updated to correctly refer to him as a professor.

After more than 20 years of service to the School of Performing Arts, Ed Baker has decided to retire at the end of the semester. Baker is an professor and the technical director for school productions.

“I don’t consider calling it quits,” Baker said. “It’s more a matter of finding new ways to share with students that aren’t our students here.”

The School of Performing Arts held a retirement celebration for Baker on May 6, open to friends, colleagues and students.

“Ed is generally an extremely supportive person,” senior Trevor Andreasen said. “I think that Ed Baker truly believes in storytelling as an important and enriching part of the human experience. He sees storytelling as a productive and important contribution to society, and he takes everyone’s stories seriously.”

One of Baker’s oldest colleagues in the School of Performing Arts, assistant educator Jason Flanders, remembers a time when Baker was there for him.

“I had a motorcycle wreck in 2004, and when I went down, my left leg stayed where it was and my right (leg) — so it tore my ACL completely in two (and) my MCL in half … so during that time I was recovering from the wreck and then going to physical therapy after surgery. A lot of times, he was the one that was helping me out.”

Flanders and Baker have known each other since at least 2001. 

When Flanders started working at the School of Performing Arts in 1998, he met Ed’s late wife, Danette, who worked as an adjunct at the university before meeting Ed.

“He was working at a millworks north of town,” Flanders said. “And he contracted me to help do some work with him. We just kind of went from there.”

Baker’s main push for his retirement was his age.

“At the risk of sounding ageist, there are plenty of old white guys in universities today,” Baker said. “If I stay here until I’m 80, I’m taking the place of somebody else, somebody younger, somebody with more energy, somebody who’s learned something new that they can give to students that I’m not able to give. And there’s just no reason for me to keep holding this … so I’ve got to make room for other people to get into academia and start serving students.”

The level of care shown by Baker is what some students have said is one of his most defining traits.

“(He’s) always really good about making sure that we are safe with whatever we’re doing,” senior Cassie McAllister said. “He always calls us rockstars, and he says that we’re all his favorite students. And he truly means that.”

Baker’s support for his students is driven by his commitment to seeing what he can do for his fellow students and colleagues.

“I’ve had more days that I went home at the end of the day trying to figure out if I did anything of any value,” Baker said. “If we don’t take care of ourselves, we can’t take care of each other. And if we don’t take care of each other, nobody’s going to take care of us. And that’s just sort of the way that I live.

“… the greatest part of being a professor is knowing that you’re supporting young people in ways that are going to serve them for the rest of their lives.”

Helping other people tell their stories is what Baker has done during his time at WSU.

“Every human has a story, and my whole career has been about helping people discover their story and then helping them to tell it,” Baker said.

It’s not the end for Baker helping others out with their stories; he plans to move to Chicago to help the Spanish-speaking community with theirs.

“I’m moving to Chicago to help some of the folks in our community who are not native English speakers with a casual chat,” Baker said. “Working here with non-native English speakers, one of the things that many of them have said is that they can go to class and they can get a tutor and it’s always formal and it’s always sort of formulaic teaching and learning. And what they want to learn is they would rather go bowling and learn slang and hang out and talk rather than go to a class.”

With his time coming to an end at Wichita State, Baker admitted he doesn’t know what he’ll miss until it’s truly over.

“I don’t know if I can answer that yet,” Baker said. “I won’t know until I’m in it, because I still have grades to do. I’m still busy just getting this year cleaned up. Maybe next year, in August, then I’ll be able to start talking about ‘here’s that thing I miss.’”