Frances McDavid has been through dozens of last classes in her 30 years at Mississippi State University. But this one was different.

The class, on April 25, was the last one before exams, and also happened to be McDavid’s last regular class before her retirement.

McDavid said some professors do last class lectures, but she hadn’t planned to do anything more than a quick review for her students’ take-home exam. She asked if anyone had any questions, and things evolved from there.

She took to Facebook to recount the occasion.

“That day you have your last class meeting before you retire and you ask your students if they have questions,” she wrote. “That’s when their attention turns to life — yours and theirs — and to what the future holds for us all. That’s the day I had. It was unplanned, but that’s a good way to end 30 years of teaching.”

McDavid is retiring Tuesday, following a 30-year career as a steadfast member of MSU’s Communication Department. Since 1988, she has mentored thousands of journalism students – including the last 20 years as the faculty adviser for The Reflector, MSU’s student newspaper.

She’s spent the last few weeks saying goodbye to students who will finish their time at Mississippi State and move on to the next phases of their life.

But it’s her first time as an instructor to be in that same position.

“It’s been very different,” McDavid said. “Because a lot of the things I’ve done, I’ve said, ‘Well this is the last time I’ll do this. This is my last faculty meeting. This is the last Reflector that’s being produced while I’m the adviser. This is the last committee meeting I have to go to, and then of course, the last class.'”

‘One year’ becomes 30

McDavid, an Oktoc native, has worked at MSU since August 1988. Before that, she worked as a reporter, including at The Daily Herald in Columbia, Tennessee from 1976-77; The Dispatch from 1977-81, where she established the Starkville bureau; and the Starkville Daily News as a reporter and then news editor from 1982-88.

When she started at MSU, McDavid didn’t expect the job to be anything but temporary. A position opened over the summer of that year, and she expected that it would be a year-long stint to offer some stable work hours while she and her husband, Sammy, raised their young daughter Mary Beth.

Teaching was initially daunting for McDavid, who describes herself as a relatively shy and quiet person. But as she taught that first semester, she gained favorable reactions and feedback from her students, which built her confidence.

With little direct oversight or direction on how to teach her classes, McDavid said she pulled from her newsroom experience to help students.

“Over the years, I relied heavily on my background as a journalist and told war stories from when I covered government and courts and police, and just features and generally everything that happened in the community,” she said.

During that first semester, McDavid also took her students to Starkville Board of Aldermen meetings — something she continued through this year.

She said she hopes it helps the students in two ways — to understand journalists’ significance in holding public officials accountable and keeping the general public informed, and in learning how local government operates.

“The thing I hope all of them take from it is the value of being conscious of what’s going on in government and knowing how the system works,” McDavid said. “If nothing else, they might be able to help the system work personally for them some day, if they’ve got an issue that needs to be resolved.

“Ideally, it would make them better citizens just to know how our country is governed down at the lower level, which you can often grasp better at the state and national level,” she added.

After that first semester, McDavid said she was excited to go back to the next one. That turned into another year, which grew to three decades.

In 1998, McDavid became the faculty adviser to The Reflector, which has held a deep personal importance for her, as she worked on its staff while she was a student at MSU, and met her husband at the newspaper.

The Reflector has performed admirably under McDavid’s leadership, often winning awards at the Southeast Journalism Conference. A particular point of pride for her is that three of her students have been selected as the Southeast Journalism Conference Journalist of the Year.

“That’s one from each decade that I’ve worked, essentially,” she said. “There are many schools that have never had anybody selected for that. I’m really proud of the success that our editors, especially, have had in working in the skill set and what they’ve been able to do there and in commercial and professional settings beyond.”

Former students look back

R.J. Morgan, an instructional assistant professor for the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss and director for the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association, had McDavid as an adviser and mentor in his year as a communication major at MSU before swapping to education. He also worked for The Reflector.

MSU, Morgan said, is losing a vast amount of institutional knowledge with McDavid’s retirement. He also said that she, despite what had to at times be a difficult job, has always put forth a great amount of care for her students.

“To have to read 30 years’ worth of freshman, sophomore, junior writing composition has to wear on a person, but you’d never know it talking to her,” Morgan said. “She’s always been very helpful and concerned, as if you were the only person in the world. It takes a servant’s heart, and that’s Frances McDavid.”

Ross Dellenger and his wife, Elizabeth Crisp, both work for The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Dellenger covers college sports and is soon to begin working for Sports Illustrated, while Crisp covers the Louisiana Legislature.

Both Dellenger and Crisp are former students of McDavid’s. They said most of their relationship with her came through The Reflector, where McDavid pushed them to consider big decisions for the newspaper, while allowing the students to make their own independent decisions.

“Her greatest strength as an adviser, and she was a damn good one, was to lay things out when it came to big decisions,” Dellenger said. “She laid out all of the facts for us students, and she would let us make the decision. She may question it, and she would kind of incite arguments, and things like that were great for a newsroom.”

Both Dellenger and Crisp said they found McDavid’s reporting experience to be invaluable.

“Her main emphasis, especially from her experience as a reporter, was a big focus on important watchdog reporting,” Crisp said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s city council meetings, or now, the Louisiana state legislature. It’s important to have healthy skepticism and be watching and now, especially in today’s business, not to overlook things that people might think isn’t going to be important.

“You should always maintain that curiosity in what’s going on and making sure that people know there’s somebody who’s keeping an eye on things,” she added.

Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.