Pioneers on the Page

Behind the student-professor partnership that published a children’s book.

From the Winter 2024 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

Professor Richard Pate has spent much of his professional life in the classroom or in the courtroom. Yet his latest venture, a collaborative effort between Pate and Julia Fernandez ’25, focuses less on litigation or grading and more on the journey of three little animal friends. Bored and Loving It is an unexpected new children’s book about three animal friends who have recently lost their cell phones. What follows is not a tale of stress or sadness, but a revelation of self-discovery and imagination.

Pate’s characters all learn that our minds are capable of much more creativity when we’re not distracted by a screen. The animals realize that boredom is a valuable tool for igniting new ideas—something that tends to be stifled by the stimulation of a phone screen.

As an educator and someone who plays a key role in shaping the next generation of thinkers, Pate harbors a very real fear for the future of his students. “What will they be like when they become doctors and nurses? How will they carry on relationships?”

Pate wanted to create a story celebrating the freedom of thought all of us enjoy when we turn off our screens. He was inspired to create a tale on the subject in recent years when, in both his personal life and in his classroom, he saw a dangerous uptick in phone usage.

“I’ve seen groups of young teenagers who ostensibly were friends but were not talking with each other at all,” Pate says. “I watched and watched and not a word. What I saw was humans with their necks parallel to the floor, robotically and in a sort of somnambulistic state staring into a tiny little object.

”The three characters in this book were conceived more than a decade ago when Pate created a bedtime story for his nieces and nephews, and he needed someone who could illustrate them. Fernandez and Pate had never met prior to this venture, but when Pate reached out to Nathan Lewis, the University’s art department chair, Lewis recommended Fernandez. The two connected instantly. Fernandez knew exactly what Pate had in mind, she says, describing the project as a “bucket list experience” for an artist. “Children need to be imaginative, adventurous, curious,” she says, “and the more we scroll, the more we lose these characteristics.”