Within the organization, Francis worked to bring minority representation to the AAUP. She also helped form the association’s pro-affirmative action positions on events at the time, including the influential Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case in 1978 that set a precedent for using race as one factor in university admissions decisions.
While working full time for the AAUP in Washington during the academic year, Francis reserved her summers for La Granja, Spain, a town north of Madrid, where her mother had founded a summer school for American girls in 1962.
“We never made any money out of it but we had a nice summer vacation, a working vacation,” she says.
She ran the school until 1988 and over the years brought her whole family to Spain, where her daughter came as a student and eventually met her future husband.
“I could care less whether you study if you come back with a husband like that,” she says.
Avocation Adventures
After decades of scholarship on her grandfather, Francis completed her major work of family history and biography.
Her 1994 book The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry sought to provide a personal perspective on Frost and his family—and particularly on the women who published his poetry and helped advance his career.
At the moment, her research interest lies in Frost’s attempts to make his poetry accessible to young people and in his relationship with his own children.
In her current occupation as a substitute teacher, Francis says she has noticed the low-quality textbook compilations of poetry that students are assigned to read.
“I’m just horrified by the things I read there,” says Francis.
Students should not be forced to read poems that do not interest them, she says. Instead she tells children to find a poem “that catches your attention and sticks with you.”
In addition to substitute teaching, Francis lectures on her grandfather, still devoting most of her time to studying his life.
“I’m the only one in my family reckless enough to do this,” she says. “It’s something I view as a legacy to my children.”
And for her part, the pursuit of RF’s legacy has fulfilled personal passions and professional aspirations.
Robert Frost once wrote, “My object in living is to unite/ My avocation and my vocation.”
His granddaughter has adopted those lines, which appeared in his 1936 poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” to describe herself.
“The ideal is to have your vocation and your avocation,” she says. “In many ways, that’s what’s happened in my life.”
—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.