ALEX BUCKNAM
Asst. News Editor
Warning: This article contains strong language.
If you don’t live under a rock, then you know by now that SUNY Fredonia is currently facing a financial problem.
Everything is a mess, the future is unclear, and staff, faculty and students are lost with no idea of what could happen next.
One professor in the Geology & Environmental Sciences Department knows that very well: before he came to Fredonia, Dr. Thomas Hegna was a professor at Western Illinois University, where he was laid off due to budget cuts.
Hegna started teaching at Fredonia in Fall 2019. He has taught multiple courses here, with the most notable ones being Earth history (his favorite), an honors course on evolution and creationism, and a class about dinosaurs.
Since being here, he has connected with a lot of students and other faculty. Kim Weborg-Benson, a geology professor who’s been at Fredonia for 20 years, agrees that the department would be incomplete without him: “We need someone that fills that little niche in the department,” she said.
During the job interview for his position, Weborg-Benson could truly tell that Hegna enjoys doing his job.
Hegna has done a lot of research with students, such as learning about the end of the Devonian extinction with Jasper Bateman at Dunkirk Beach.
Hegna has also worked with high school students, and has persuaded some to attend Fredonia.
Sam Post, who graduated from Springville High School in 2024, met Hegna during his senior year. Hegna let Post sit in on his classes and eventually convinced him to attend Fredonia.
“Hegna was one of the reasons I wanted to go to Fredonia. He was so clearly passionate about the geology program and he was excited to show me why Fredonia was a good choice for me,” Post stated.
He has yet to have a class with Hegna but has been welcomed by him into the department nonetheless.
Post’s favorite memory with Hegna is when he took him to the North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC) in June of 2024.
Bateman recalls when he received a letter from Hegna after he received his acceptance letter. The letter detailed that the small class sizes would make it perfect to get a very personalized education.
Four geology students who have had multiple run-ins with Hegna all stated that they enjoy his classes, and like him as a person.
“I have enjoyed his classes. He is a good professor,” stated Brooklyn Pry, a sophomore geology major.
“I love Hegna. We always get out of class early,” one person said after being let out 15 minutes early from his blue planet class.
Hegna has always been interested in paleontology and geology, and he recalls being captivated by extinct life in his childhood. “When I was little, I was fascinated with extinct life, in particular dinosaurs. But I always love[d] the creatures that you never heard as much about,” Hegna stated.
In his teenage years, he realized that the best way to pursue those passions was to get an undergraduate degree in geology.
Hegna started his academic career by attending University of Iowa in 2000, where he majored in geoscience with minors in English and philosophy. In 2004, he graduated with honors and distinction.
During his time at University of Iowa, he had multiple opportunities to work with professors. This is how he began picking microfossils for a professor, which ended up turning into a paid position.
Hegna then decided to stay at Iowa State to get his master’s degree in geoscience, where he was able to do fieldwork.
“You could go straight from undergrad to PhD, and I saw people who did that, but generally, they kind of spent their first year spinning their tires. By having a master’s, I had a head start,” Hegna stated.
After graduating from the University of Iowa with his Masters of Science in 2006, “I kinda wanted to get away from what my advisor did,” he said.
Hegna then went on to attend Yale University in 2006 to achieve his PhD immediately after graduating with his master’s.
He first started looking at branchiopods and realized that nobody really knew about them, so he wrote his dissertation titled “Fossils and Phylogeny: The Evolution of Branchiopod Crustaceans.” To this day, he is still working on studying branchiopods.
Hegna was teaching at Western Illinois University when he was working on his PhD, where his courses were roughly the same as those he teaches now. He taught history of the Earth, integrated science, mineralogy, and paleontology.
He recalled his experience of being laid off due to budget cuts: “The administration tried and failed to do some firings early on. So we had a pretty good idea it was coming,” Hegna stated. “[That was] a really dark place to be — knowing that your time there is limited.”
Since Hegna knew that his time was at an end, he started applying for jobs. “I was applying to all sorts of [academic] jobs. The academic job market is not one where you choose [where] you go,” Hegna stated. “Fredonia was one of [the jobs] that came up in that cycle, and I applied to it.”
Hegna then compared his experience with financial problems at Western Illinois University with what he is seeing at Fredonia right now. “I think Fredonia has not done things as well as they could have, but compared to the shit storm that was Western Illinois, they’re pros,” he said.
He mentioned that Western Illinois failed to do cuts the first time around, due to not paying attention to the contracts, and as a result, they telegraphed what they wanted to do.
The day he was laid off in 2019 happened to be the same day he got the job offer to teach at Fredonia. “I got this job offer 45 minutes before my layoff notice—on the same day,” Hegna stated.
He mentioned that this job offer turned what was going to be a very dark day into a much better day.
Hegna did not receive a retrenchment notice from Western Illinois University.
“The state funding situation is again a dark cloud looming over things,” he said. Hegna also stated that state funding is definitely on the minds of many staff, who are thinking about where their next paycheck is going to be.
Hegna started teaching here in the Fall of 2019, a semester before the COVID-19 pandemic happened. He has felt over the past year or two that he has finally truly gotten to know the people and the area.
During COVID, his son got diagnosed with diabetes. “Because that was during COVID, we could not bring my daughter [with us], so I had to go up there [to Buffalo] to get trained [on] how to give shots for insulin, and we desperately needed somebody to watch my daughter,” Hegna stated.
So far, he’s loved his experiences at Fredonia: “I feel like I have [things] going in my favor here. I’ve got my research program moving along, I like my classes that I’m teaching and I’m enjoying teaching them.”
Since being at Fredonia, Hegna has worked on papers including “The Devonian Fossil Record of Clam Shrimp,” “A Group of Crustaceans Called Thylakoids” and “Cephalons and Their Musculature,” as well as one on tadpole shrimp.
According to Hegna, his research is similar to what he did at Western Illinois University.If you are interested in learning more, visit his website called The Hegna Lab, which can be found linked on his Fredonia profile.