Love’s not always part of the curriculum at Lafayette College, but with the season of romance now upon us, these two faculty couples offer an intriguing lesson in balancing work and love.
Mike and Kat Butler
Mike Butler, assistant head of the biology department, and Kat Butler ’98, director of IT planning, analysis and communications, for the most part, have their parents to thank for their relationship.
The couple met in a Connecticut townhouse at a dinner that their parents, who’d recently become neighbors, had collaboratively planned to get them together.
“They shared a wall,” Kat Butler explained. “And of course, they said, ‘I have a daughter.’ ‘I have a son.’ ‘Oh, let’s get them together!’”
Though these initial match-making efforts were not very successful, the introduction did spark an email relationship between Kat and Mike Butler that would eventually blossom into something more.
Years later, after months of long-distance and traveling, a summer together in Arizona and many, many emails, the Butlers finally moved in together for good. By July 2007, they were married.
In the summer of 2012, the couple started their next chapter, moving to College Hill. Mike Butler, newly hired at Lafayette, was preparing for his first semester as a biology professor while Kat Butler was in search of new work. Despite all the change, it was rather familiar to Kat Butler, who had graduated from Lafayette in 1998.
It didn’t take long for her to find her footing again at the college thanks to an unlikely coincidence during the Butlers’ first coffee run in the new neighborhood.
“We’d beaten out the moving truck here,” Mike Butler said. “So it was us and our pets, like two pots that we had thrown in the trunk and our luggage. That was it.”
The Butlers’ biggest problem? They’d beaten the coffee machine.
“So, to get coffee, which was a non-negotiable, we went to Cosmic [Cup],” Mike Butler said.
While at the coffee shop, the Butlers ran into a couple of Mike Butler’s new co-workers who introduced the pair to several more members of Lafayette faculty, including some people from the IT department. The conversation quickly revealed that the IT department had just put out a job search for the exact kind of work Kat Butler was looking for; it was a perfect match.
Now, over a decade later, the kind of community the Butlers encountered at Cosmic Cup that day is still their favorite thing about Lafayette.
“An underrated part of this position is living in College Hill,” Mike Butler explained. “It’s just a really neat community.”
Ken and Sue Newquist
Ken Newquist, director of application and integration development in the IT department, and Sue Newquist, associate director of admissions for campus visitation and events, found a lifelong connection through the Lock Haven University school newspaper, “The Eagle Eye.”
“I was a freshman, and he was a transfer,” Sue Newquist explained. “We both were journalism majors and so we both went to the student newspaper and worked on that … and then our second semester … his co-editor who was supposed to help him with his section didn’t come back and so he just recognized me as somebody who was at the newspaper and was like, ‘Will you be my co-editor on this section?’”
With so much time spent together trying to meet newspaper deadlines, the two had plenty of time to get to know each other and were dating by the end of their first years at Lock Haven.
For Sue Newquist, her 21st birthday will always be memorable. Ken Newquist proposed to her in the opinion section of the March 1994 edition of The Eagle Eye.
“The whole time he was not making a big deal of my birthday and I was getting really mad,” Sue Newquist explained. “I was like, ‘Where are we gonna go for my birthday?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t know, I think I’m gonna go out with my friend.’”
On the day that the paper came out, Sue Newquist was one of the last people to see it.
“I didn’t have class on Fridays, so I could sleep in,” she said. “Everyone had the newspaper and I didn’t have it yet because I was still in bed.”
As a copy editor, Sue Newquist believed she had already seen all of the paper, but pushing from her roommate encouraged her to take another peek.
“It was exciting,” Sue Newquist said. “It was very sweet, and very appropriate because we did spend so much time at the newspaper meeting deadlines and interviewing people.”
“I had a pretty good idea she was gonna say yes,” Ken Newquist said.
