Hastings took winding path, through wine country and India, to get to Wingate

by Chuck Gordon

When Dr. Jim Hastings tells students that they don't have to have it all figured out in their early 20s, he speaks from experience.

Hastings took a varied and circuitous route to his two-decade Wingate University teaching career. A "participant observer" of many eastern religions and cultures, Hastings landed in the Wingate History Department at the age of 57, having sorted mail, waited tables, spied on wayward spouses and dished out sumptuous French cuisine before landing in academia.

Hastings, 78, is retiring this month after a late-in-life career at Wingate.

As he was moving into academia, Hastings' Ph.D., in South Asian studies, meant that he didn't fit neatly into an academic box. Was he a historian? An expert on religion? An anthropologist? All and none, he would say.

History seemed to be the closest fit, and after three years as a visiting professor at Wake Forest University, Hastings arrived at Wingate to teach world history, while also regularly teaching in his specialty area.

"I spent a lot of my time in the first 15 years or so schooling myself in global history," he says.

Hastings also spent a lot of time overseas, leading eight W'International study-abroad seminars. He took students to Singapore and Malaysia (five times), Taiwan, Cambodia, and Portugal (to examine its colonial ties to Asia). "Eight W'Internationals, averaging about 20 to 25 students," he says. "One hundred fifty to 200 students had their eyes opened."

Those trips were among his most impactful teaching moments, Hastings says. He recalls having his students spend the night in a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan, only to have them recoil at the sight of steamed rice and vegetables for breakfast and lunch the next day.

"They freaked out," he says. "But the next fall I would run into them and they would go, 'That was the most profound, meaningful experience I've ever had.'"

Hastings has had his fair share of profound, meaningful experiences over the years. All told, he's spent two and a half years in India, a country that has fascinated him from an early age. Hastings got his undergraduate degree from Reed College, a rigorous liberal arts institution in Portland, Ore., that employed a classical curriculum. "You wouldn't know that anything important happened in history east of Greece," Hastings says.

But several Reed graduates and students, including the Beat poet Gary Snyder and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, gravitated toward Buddhism, and Hastings himself became enamored of the Zoroastrian Avatar Meher Baba. He would eventually go on eight pilgrimages to Meher Baba's tomb-shrine in India, and he once spent 10 weeks in a Jain monastery. Hastings doesn't consider himself a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Jain, but he has a reverence for the religions and cultures of India.

After college, Hastings visited India off and on. He had an English degree from Reed, but he spent a couple of years sorting mail for the post office before getting a job as a private investigator. "It's not like it is in the movies," he says. "A lot of it was insurance work - somebody trying to scam the insurance company."

After tailing insurance fraudsters and cheating spouses for a couple of years, Hastings decided to go to culinary school at the age of 29, and he ultimately worked as a chef at French restaurants in California's wine country for more than a decade.

The singed arm hairs and long hours in the kitchen took their toll, however, and his longtime fascination with Indian culture led Hastings to take classes in South Asian studies and the Hindi language at Sonoma State University and Cal-Berkeley before heading to the University of Wisconsin for his advanced degrees - all while continuing to work as a chef.

Hastings says that his winding career path is an example for students, who should be learning transferable skills in college rather than aiming only for one particular job. Hastings used the critical-thinking skills that were sharpened at Reed and the other stops along his academic journey at every job he had during his career.

"If you're going into college saying, 'I want to be this.' Well, good luck," he says. "That might not exist 10 years from now.

"I tell students that there are certain principles you're supposed to learn in college. It doesn't matter if it's a math class, if it's an English class, if it's a history class - you're learning the same things. You're learning to process information - take information and do something with it. What do 90 percent of the jobs in the world today require? Take information and do something with it."

Hastings doesn't plan to stop taking in information and doing something with it, even in retirement. He and his wife, Dr. Susan Chen, a former visiting assistant professor of history at Wingate, are still mulling over where they want to spend their retirement years.

Wherever it is, Hastings will take a lot of fascinating memories with him.

"I think I did the best I could," he says. "I think probably in most of what I did I was more of a dilettante, rather than a master of the craft. I still have a lot to learn in terms of cooking. I still have a lot to learn in terms of everything else."

May 9, 2025