Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Memorial Minutes

A tradition at the college for many years, the Memorial Minute is a tribute written by members of the faculty and other members of the Amherst College community upon the death of a colleague.  Each “minute” is read by one of its authors at a regular meeting of the faculty and is followed by a moment of silence in honor of the deceased.  Memorial Minutes have been posted online since 2005, beginning with those from the prior decade.

• David Lee Armacost
• Duane W. Bailey
• Theodore Baird
• Mary Catherine Bateson
• Ralph E. Beals
• Antonio Benitez-Rojo
• Robert Breusch
• Gerald Brophy
• Elizabeth Bruss
• George L. Cadigan
• Mavis Campbell
• Otis Cary
• Fredric Cheyette
• Richard Cody
• G. Armour Craig
• Asa J. Davis
• Benjamin DeMott
• Richard M. Foose
• Reginald F. French
• Prosser Gifford
• Miriam "Mitzi" Goheen
• Joel Ethan Gordon
• John Halsted
• Hugh Hawkins
• William H. Hexter
• Nasser Hussein
• Ernest A. Johnson, Jr.
• William E. Kennick
• Mirjana Lausevic
• Anne Lebeck
• James Maraniss
• Peter K. Marshall
• James Mauldon
• Ray A. Moore
• Rose Olver
• James E Ostendarp
• John Pemberton III
• John Petropulos
• Donald S. Pitkin
• Calvin H. Plimpton
• Peter Pouncey
• David Reck
• Martha Saxton
• Carl N. Schmalz, Jr
• Sigrit I.G. Schutz
• Lewis Spratlan
• Henry Steele Commager
• Dudley H. Towne
• Lucius Weathersby
• Donald White
• Richard Wilbur

DAVID LEE ARMACOST (1944-2021)

David Lee Armacost, Professor of Mathematics, died March 10, 2021 in the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. David was taken to the hospital because of a bad fall. While there, he tested positive for Covid-19 and did not recover.

David was a child of California, born in 1944 in Santa Monica. He attended Pomona College and then Stanford University for graduate work in Mathematics. His PhD was awarded in 1969, the same year he started at Amherst College. He and Gretchen Brunk married in 1977, eventually moving to Pelham. David retired in 2012 after 43 years of teaching.

David studied mathematical objects called locally compact abelian groups. Abelian groups are objects that are studied in abstract algebra, while local compactness is a property of topological spaces. Thus, the study of locally compact abelian groups lies at the intersection of two branches of mathematics, algebra and topology. David’s 1969 PhD dissertation studied these groups, often called “LCA groups.” He went on to write 12 papers on LCA groups, published between 1970 and 1986. His most satisfying collaboration was with his brother William, who earned his PhD a year before David. They wrote four papers between 1971 and 1978, a collaboration cut short by William’s untimely death due to cancer.

David’s other collaborator was Robert Bruner of the Amherst class of 1972. At that time, honors theses in mathematics were expository. Bob's thesis was the exception – he proved a theorem that resulted in a joint paper with David published in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. Bob recalls that David “showed me how to write in ideas rather than in calculations.” As far as we know, this was the first instance of an Amherst senior honors project in mathematics that led to published original research.

David’s study of LCA groups culminated in his 1981 monograph The Structure of Locally Compact Abelian Groups, which continues to be a standard reference in the field. To get a sense of David’s writing style, we quote from the preface:

“Indeed, from the point of view of algebra and topology alone, the theory of these groups displays a charm and elegance which some, myself included, have found irresistible.”

By “these groups”, he of course means “locally compact abelian groups”. He goes on to say:

“Before writing anything, I spent several years pondering what to present and how to mold the varied elements of the subject into a connected (or at least locally connected) narrative.”

Here we glimpse David’s sly sense of humor, much appreciated by his students. The book also illustrates the amazing breadth of his learning. Each chapter begins with a quote that introduces an idea relevant to the chapter. But the quotes are not from mathematics! Here are some examples:

• For the chapter on preliminaries, the quote is from Pascal’s Pensées: “The last thing one   
  discovers in composing a work is what to put first.” The quote is in the original French.
• There is a chapter on topological p-groups, where the letter “p” denotes a prime   
  number (divisible by only 1 and itself). The quote is from Shelley’s A Lament: “When will   
  return the glory of your prime?”
• For the chapter on sufficiency conditions, the quote is “Satis quod sufficit” (an old Latin   
  saying whose translation is, roughly, “enough is enough”).
• Finally, there is a chapter on homological algebra, with complex diagrams consisting of   
  objects connected by arrows. The quote is from Blake’s Milton: “Bring me my arrows.”

Other chapters include quotes from Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Saint Paul.

David’s facility with languages was legendary. For example, one time a student wrote the Latin phrase “We who are about to die salute you” on the board before a math exam. When David entered the room, he noticed what was on the board and corrected the Latin without saying a word. He then proceeded to hand out the exam. When David retired in 2012, Doug McVey of the class of 2000 told the following wonderful story about the languages David knew:

“When I was but a lowly freshman, I was treated to many impromptu conversations with Professor Armacost in his office on a great many subjects – from mathematics to the sciences to theology and back again. During these far-ranging discussions, he frequently retrieved one of these well-worn books from his shelf and turned to a passage and read aloud. Early on, I noticed that he often read just a bit haltingly – a few words per minute more slowly, and just fractionally less fluidly, than one might imagine a demonstrably brilliant professor might do when reading aloud. All at once, I discovered the reason for this – one day, when he was reading a passage from the Gospel of John, I noticed that he was reading from the Greek and translating on the fly. I realized that he had been translating Descartes from the French and Newton's Principia from the Latin just moments earlier. This epitomizes what I respect so much about Professor Armacost: he is a scholar in the classical sense, not limited by the confines of his primary field of study, well-read across many fields of study (in the original languages to boot!), and always generous of his time and expertise. His erudition, accessibility, and affability made it a true privilege to be counted among his students.”

Another language in David’s arsenal was Russian, which he learned as an undergraduate at Pomona. One semester a student told David that she was taking Russian, and the next time she came to his office hours, he greeted her in fluent Russian and gave her the Russian flash cards that he had used at Pomona. During the years of the cold war, he translated Russian mathematical papers into English for the American Mathematical Society. The Society had an active translation program to ensure that the excellent mathematics done in the USSR was available on our side of the Iron Curtain. David’s office was clearly a treasure trove. A fun example arose when a student from Poland was talking with David about the differences between Western European and Slavic languages. David did not speak Polish (finally, a language he didn’t know!), but he just happened to have an old Polish prayer book in his office that he gave to the student. On another occasion, David was interviewing a student who had applied for funding to study a tribe in South America. In the interview David asked if the applicant could manage in the relatively obscure language of the tribe. In reply, the student allowed that she or he could get by in the tongue. David then swung around in his chair, pulled from the shelf in his office a book in the language at issue, and asked for the translation of a passage. A few years later, David was chatting with David Cox about the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker. David reached into his shelves and gave the other David an original 1881 copy of Kronecker’s great paper on the foundations of arithmetic algebraic geometry. And yes, David knew German! David also helped several colleagues in the department with Latin translations for papers they were writing that delved into historical matters.

Anders Oberg, a visiting fellow from Sweden in our department, remembers David’s warm friendship and good advice about teaching. There were conversations about language, politics, and literature. David did not speak Swedish but mentioned that he knew enough Finnish (yet another language!) to have read the Kalevala in the original.

Anders also recalls conversations about teaching, in which David’s example encouraged him to be less afraid of talking to students, both in and out of the classroom. And this brings us to David’s greatest strength, which was his teaching. He was spectacular in the classroom, not in a flashy or self-important way but rather in the clarity and humor with which he presented mathematics. Many of his students have vivid memories of conversations during office hours, but they came to his office because of what happened in the classroom. He was somehow old- school, no-nonsense, gentle, and accessible all at the same time. It worked amazing well – even students who did poorly in his classes have fond memories of him.

We have mentioned David’s sense of humor, which he used to great effect in the classes he taught. Giving examples is not easy since you need to know some math to get the joke. In the field of analysis, Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy made many fundamental contributions. One time in class, David said “Cauchy sequences, the Cauchy integral theorem, Cauchy‘s root test,” adding “Cauchy fan tutte, as they say.” With his deadpan delivery, it was even funnier.

Given David’s extensive knowledge of languages, it should be no surprise that he had a profound knowledge of English grammar. This led to many spirited discussions in department meetings. When including student comments in a tenure letter, how should we handle the grammatical errors they made? To sic or not to sic, that was the question. David had particularly strong opinions about the use of commas. One time, when David was department secretary, he got so upset that he wrote the minutes of the meeting as a two-page heroic poem describing how

The One whose Name is humbly writ below   
Inquired about a Comma that did throw   
His Mind into Confusion dark as night

(He found out later that the Comma was all right)

However, even David could make a mistake. One time, at a lunch with Janet Tobin and Anders Oberg, he claimed that the first word of “praying mantis” should be spelled with an “e”, not an “a”. Later that day he discovered his error and wrote Janet “I must say, that with regard to the praying mantis, I repent in dust and ashes.”

David was a very private person – not a social animal. He was also a bit of an iconoclast, with unconventional views on fluoridation and other matters. When Amherst began fluoridating its water, he and Gretchen moved to Pelham. He was also deeply skeptical of modern medicine and preferred the homeopathic approach. Needless to say, he was very knowledgeable and happy to give advice on a wide range of homeopathic remedies.

There is a lot more that could be said about David. We have discussed neither his knowledge of ancient Hebrew (another language!) nor his harpsichord, not to mention his dislike of central air conditioning and restrictions on smoking his pipe. And, as noted by Karel DeLeeuw, his PhD advisor, David was a gifted amateur botanist. When David retired, Debbie Steinig of the class of 1994 wrote a sketch that captures much of what we loved about David:

“His pipe, his elbow patches, and his gentlemanly demeanor may have come across as old-fashioned, but his gentle kindness, his humor, his intellectual passion, and his lifelong learning across disciplines are timeless exemplars.”

I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence and entered into the records of the college and that a copy be sent to David’s wife Gretchen.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert L. Benedetto   
Gregory S. Call   
David A. Cox   
Norton Starr   
Daniel J. Velleman

Duane W. Bailey, the College's William J. Walker Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy, died unexpectedly in the early hours of the morning of October 27, 1998, in the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. He had entered the hospital because of a painful though not seemingly mortal medical emergency, but his long-damaged heart, which had sustained for sixty-two years a life of extraordinary vigor and achievement, could go on no longer.

He was born on September 22, 1936, in Moscow, Idaho. The eldest of four brothers, he seems early to have assumed the role, which persisted throughout his life, of leader and helper to those who came after him. After an active boyhood on his parents' thriving farm in southern Washington, he entered Washington State College (now University) in Pullman, from which institution he was graduated three years later with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics, the subject which was dearest to him among his many interests. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Oregon, from which he emerged four years later in 1961 with a doctorate in mathematics. His thesis dealt with the subject of Banach Algebras, in which he maintained a -keen interest throughout his life, notwithstanding the fact that he pursued a great many other mathematical subjects with remarkable energy and versatility. It was at the University of Oregon that he met his lifelong friend James Denton, who was later to join him on our faculty. It was also here that he met his future wife Leeta, whose constant loyalty and devotion gave him so much help and happiness. He leaves behind him, together with three fine sons, as well as our College community, grateful to him in so many ways for his tireless service and many acts of trustworthy counsel and friendly helpfulness.

After graduate school, Duane assumed a two-year instructorship at Yale. While at Yale he felt an increasing attraction to liberal arts institutions, and although tempted by an offer from Reed College in his native Northwest, he decided to come to Amherst, where he passed the remainder of his days. His energy and vision must have been early apparent since he was entrusted with the chairmanship of the Mathematics Department even before he had become a tenured member of the Faculty. It was during his early years at the College that he collaborated as an author of an ambitious and successful four-volume series of textbooks in calculus and linear algebra. He also participated in the development of a series of films on calculus for classroom instruction.

Duane's activities as a teacher were remarkably rich and varied. Despite the fact that his graduate training was in a branch of pure mathematics, he ventured as a teacher into an unusually broad variety of subjects, both pure and applied, ranging from real analysis and topology, which are central in the training of professional mathematicians, to numerical analysis and computer science, whose practical utility pervades so much of modern life.

In general, it may be said that he had two ways of teaching, each appropriate to the circumstances. In the more elementary courses, he adopted the time-honored lecture approach, laying a great emphasis on fundamental principles. He had a strong sense of tradition and the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next. Often, when asked by students how he knew such and such a thing, he would reply that when he was young he had been shown it by his teacher and that now he was passing it on to them. At the same time, he took pains to show how the thing might have been arrived at through reflection and ingenuity.

In his more advanced courses, however, in particular, those designed for honors students, he employed a very different approach. Mathematicians are familiar with the so-called Moore Method, which derives its name from the distinguished topologist R.L. Moore, who cultivated it with legendary success. In this method, students are provided at the outset of the course with a few pages containing definitions and theorems. The work of the course amounts to this: The students are to ponder the definitions and prove the theorems, relying only upon themselves and the careful guidance of the instructor. No outside help is to be sought. As may be imagined, the work can be agonizingly slow and, in its way, painful. The instructor becomes something like the Socratic obstetrician, presiding over the successful birth of ideas. Very few teachers seem able to conduct such a class with success, and Duane was among them. what is required, aside from mastery of the subject, is steadfast patience, the intuition determining the time to speak and the time to refrain from speaking, and finally, the certain faith that the students will find within themselves the resourcefulness which leads from darkness to light. Duane employed his own version of the Moore Method for many years; not a few of our finest graduates have reported that these courses transformed them from mere learners into mathematicians. Duane's passing leaves us a challenge and a luminous example.

Duane had a complex personality. His actions were not always easy to predict, though his good intentions were never to be doubted. He could and would change his mind, sometimes abruptly, more often in the deliberate manner of one who never stopped growing in intellect. One of his heroes was the celebrated English mathematician G.H. Hardy (after whom he named his last beloved bulldog, still young and missing his master). In G.H. Hardy's view, mathematics was a purely intellectual endeavor, in its highest form devoid, and rightfully so, of all practical utility. He scorned the very idea that any of his mathematical work might one day find utilitarian application. Duane admired this elevated and anti-pragmatic view of his subject, so much so that his increasing involvement in computer science and technology was a source of wonder to some who did not at first perceive the many forces and interests that drove him. For Duane could love the heights of Parnassus and still be a very practical man. He raised bees and made honey and mead, which he would share with friends; he worked in wood; he studied and invested in the stock market; he investigated the laws of probability, partly by means of protracted poker seminars with close College buddies -he was meticulous in keeping score and seemed, on balance, to prefer winning to losing.

Not even Hardy's ghost, then, could keep Duane's practical bent from bursting through into his professional life. Duane had become interested in computers in his earlier years while working during the summers for General Electric. It became apparent to him sooner than to many others that computers would eventually permeate many aspects of American life, including Academia. Whereupon he came to the conclusion that computer science should have a curricular presence at the College. In 1979 he introduced Mathematics 15, the first course in computer science ever offered at Amherst. He taught this and other such courses for many years, even after the time Amherst had computer scientists of its own. Entirely self-taught, he acquired so much knowledge and experience that the College, both institutionally and on an individual basis, turned to him for help and advice, which he unstintingly provided. just as in his beekeeping days, townspeople would often seek him out when menaced by swarms of bees, so in later days would distraught colleagues, made despondent by misbehaving electrons, apply to him urgently for rescue.) In 1984 he became the College's coordinator for computer planning and discharged his duties with energy and distinction. In truth, we may say, paraphrasing Emerson, that computer science at Amherst is the lengthened shadow of Duane Bailey.

Duane served the College in many ways besides those hitherto mentioned. He was never a member of the College Council, for which he more than once expressed his relief, but he did serve with distinction on a good many committees. He was twice elected to the Committee of Six and performed his duties so faithfully that the entire College came to see him as a man to be relied upon for honest and informed advice. He also served in ways less well known. Duane, as we know, was a beekeeper; but more than this, he developed an avid interest in the literature of apiculture and over the years acquired a fine collection of such books, which he dearly prized. Indeed, he was a collector of many things he thought fine, and perhaps it was for this reason that he regularly participated as a judge in the College's annual book collection prize competition. John Lancaster, curator of Special Collections and also a judge in the competition, reports that Duane took especial delight both in the seriousness and in the whimsy and play of the mind exhibited by students in their choice of books.

Duane had a very strong sense of history and took pleasure in instructing himself in the lore of earlier days at Amherst. This is perhaps partly why he took such delight in cultivating the society of faculty members with long institutional memories, with whom he frequently met on convivial occasions. He saw himself very much as part of an age-old tradition. By the same token, he took younger colleagues under his wing, pointing out to them the way they should go, at the same time conveying the grateful impression that it was he who was being instructed by them, as indeed, given Duane's personality, was doubtless the case.

No one could know Duane for long without perceiving that he was a man of strong likes and dislikes. Some could change, but some were constant as the northern star. He liked to raise plants and often did so in his office. He liked to keep bees, but out of doors. He liked bulldogs; cats were another matter unless they had white whiskers. He admired Benjamin Franklin and for years had a portrait of him displayed in his office. He was fond of normal numbers, a taste restricted mostly to the tribe of mathematicians. A lover of music, he was a skilled player of the trombone, an instrument that lends harmony and support but does not crave the limelight. In his later years, he especially admired the music of Shostakovich. His love of restaurants of the most varied kinds is the stuff of legend. He liked red things: red houses, red cars, red peppers. This chromatic predilection did not quite extend to politics, which he followed avidly, and in his last years, he contributed witty and incisive essays to a well-known national political journal. He admired the art of printing, including finely executed financial documents; his contempt, however, for personalized bank checks decorated, as he would say, with "clowns, posies and pussy cats," justifies to some extent, we will admit, his spirited self-description as a "curmudgeon."

Duane was a man of unusual vigor. Of his mental energy, we have already spoken. But he was also endowed with extraordinary physical stamina. Though anything but a sportsman, he loved to be active. He could stay up late into the night working at one of his many projects and still arise early the next morning ready for a full day. His strenuous activity was dealt a sudden blow when, in his early forties, he suffered a serious heart attack. Characteristically, he fought back, learning everything he could about cardiology and cardiologists. After undergoing successful bypass' surgery, he was able to recover what in darker moments he feared he had lost forever--the capacity to teach and learn with the vim and enthusiasm of earlier days.

But the blessing of health was to elude him. Some five years ago, after surgery to remove a malignant growth, it was found that he had suffered serious neurological damage in one leg. This left him with permanent pain and restricted mobility. He took comfort in reading the book of Job, but the hoped-for help granted at last to the patriarch never came to him. Indeed, he was beset by other physical difficulties as well, to which a lesser man would sooner have succumbed. Because it was hard for him to remain upon his feet for long, he entered reluctantly on phased retirement. He carried on with his teaching, and despite persistent ill-health, he was able to complete, in collaboration with his son Duane, a professor of computer science at Williams College, a new and timely book on network languages. Indeed, despite increasing sensitivity to pain, he carried on with all his duties to the very end. Though, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, stones might have wounded his feet, to us he was "still cheerful and helpful and firm."

A tree, it is said, is best measured when it is down. Now that Duane's life among us has come to an end and we bid our final farewell here in this room, which meant so much to him because it means so much to the College, we have been able to see and relate (perforce leaving much unsaid) many things about him that were perhaps not apparent to any one person who knew him. There is a poem of Whittier, better known a century ago than now, but known to Duane, named "Telling the Bees." The title refers to an old rural New England custom: whenever a death occurred in the family, the bees were duly informed and their hives decked in respectful mourning. And now we, in our institutional fashion, have honored the custom by telling of one of our own family who has, in Whittier's words, "gone on the journey we all must go. And though sad at his parting, we are consoled by the reflection that despite many troubles he could do so much that brought fulfillment to himself and gratitude to so many.

David L. Armacost, Ralph E. Beals, James Q. Denton, Richard D. Fink, Frank H. Westhoff

The late Theodore Baird of this faculty, Professor of English emeritus, who died after a brief illness on December 22 last at the age of 95, will not have been known personally to perhaps a majority of this assembly. He retired in 1969, during the presidency of Dr. Calvin Plimpton, with a final sabbatic leave and twenty-five more years of vigorous, productive, recreative freedom before him. These years he enjoyed with the zest that he brought to all occasions. "Outlive the bastards!" he had been heard to growl in private when finding himself at odds with one and another of the academic colleagues and administrators of his long day at Amherst from 1927 to 1969. He was an innovator, ahead of his time, always being told by someone that he was wrong. And outlive them he has, in one sense or another, literally or figuratively--and in that style of his, both ambitious and modest, which distinguishes him from any contemporary who may come to mind. Indeed, he promises to live on, justified in the writings of the newest generation of academic educators, who now refer, it appears, to the "era of Theodore Baird"; and who have less chance even than his contemporaries of appreciating just what he was about as a professor of English at this college--an irony not lost on him before his passing.

To undo the distance of twenty-five years of retired life, and more than as many again of the life of teaching, let us turn in the hope of immediacy to the language of a lyric poem. Here is Thomas Hardy in May 1909 remembering the late George Meredith:

Forty years back, when much had place   
That since has perished out of mind,    
I heard that voice and saw that face.

He spoke as one afoot will wind   
A morning horn ere men awake;   
His note was trenchant, turning kind.

He was of those whose wit can shake    
And riddle to the very core   
The counterfeits that Time will break....

Of late, when we two met once more,    
The luminous countenance and rare    
Shone just as forty years before.

So that, when now all tongues declare    
His shape unseen by his green hill,    
I scarce believe he sits not there.

No matter. Further and further still    
Through the world's vaporous vitiate air    
His words wing on--as live words will.

Theodore Baird loved words and the study of five words winging on. It was this love that made him for many years the teacher of a legendary course in Shakespeare's plays, as well as the discoverer of a highly original and fascinating way to teach English composition. "With Shakespeare," he said, anticipating the next thirty years of Shakespeare criticism, "you can bring in whatever you want to talk about, and I do. But what I love is the language." And what he taught, using the text edited by Kittredge, was the living language--not plots, or characters, or themes, or insights into the human heart, not cultural diversity, psychoanalysis, or even the art of theater--but the way words work, or sometimes seem not to work.

As well as the study of words, what Baird loved was the asking of questions. "What do you i1 o when you do History?" he asked the young James Merrill when he announced that he would not major in English. In the questions Baird asked, the answer itself remains somewhat in question and so does not deny the mystery that lies behind what words can say. The art of asking questions, the technique of framing what one has to say, not as instruction or information, but as a question to be considered or entertained--this art, this technique, was probably the most valuable of the several examples he set over three decades for his students and his junior colleagues and their students. Question and answer were certainly the life and soul of English 1-2, the now-famous required course in freshman composition which he invented and directed for more than twenty years. Summer after summer, it was he who spent his vacation "by his green hill" composing one of those elegant, fascinating, infuriating sequences of 31 questions plus final essay and final exam assignment. "The assignments" they were known as; and they constituted a very great effort of mental work for those who taught them, as well as for their author. They sit now in the college archives, a dazzling trove for the right archeologist. Even those laborers in the vineyard who resented the discipline and danger involved could hardly help learning something of great value concerning the experience of using words. About his founding part in English 1-2, Baird said, "I would take a general proposition of some kind, or to put it more exactly, I would take a question. The great thing I learned from Collingwood [Robin George Collingwood, the Oxford philosopher of history, nature, and esthetics] was that you had to learn how to ask a question. And the question I asked was, simply, something like this: `What is conflict?' And then I would go on from there and say, `Have you ever felt any conflict?' and `What was it like when you felt conflict?' We had a whole semester on conflict. The word didn't appear day after day, you understand. [What he means by this but does not say is that transposing the chosen word creatively was most important and most difficult, as in any composition.] But there were students in my class who said, `I have never known conflict.' I would like to have somebody tell me what a teacher does when a student says something like that." Listening to these words now, one imagines hearing at this point his great, brief, explosive laugh, "trenchant, turning kind."

It was rarely that he acknowledged a writer, as he acknowledges Collingwood here, as the source of his own thinking and practice as a teacher and scholar. Baird seemed to have sprung, as it were, fully armed, from his own head rather than from the head of Jove. He was well-schooled at Oberlin High School, at Hobart College, and at Harvard University; and before coming here, he taught at Western Reserve University and at Union College, as well as at Harvard. All his life he read voraciously; he quoted often and with acknowledgment, and discussed whatever he happened to be reading with critical gusto; generously he would recommend it to colleagues if he could. But he rarely acknowledged any writer as a mentor or any book as a source of his own ideas. Because his mind and conversation were so unusually interesting and original, and he seemed so often to be right or unanswerable in what he said, one wished very much to know who his mentors might be.

What he acknowledged in Collingwood was a chapter in the Autobiography on discovering the logic of question and answer which can certainly change any thinking reader's habit of mind. And autobiography tended to be the kind of writing that meant most to him. As a young teacher, he discovered The Education of Henry Adams and at Amherst did the surprising thing of making it the sole text for a semester of freshman composition. It was, as he acknowledged, another of the books that changed his mind. There is a famous passage from its first chapter that he would more than once have recourse to:

From cradle to grave this problem of running orders through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education.

It was Adams' use of "orders" in the plural that appealed to Baird, since the human orders we make are diverse and conflicting, and since, as he put it, "one man's order is another man's chaos." It was a principle that consistently informed the writing assignments he would construct for Amherst undergraduates in all his courses, in Shakespeare, in eighteenth-century literature, in modem fiction.

Soon after he arrived at Amherst, Baird put together an anthology of autobiographical selections titled The First Years, "an attempt to provide materials for a course in the writing of English by directing the student's attention to his own resources of experience." Although the composition course Baird would eventually invent made no use of this textbook, or indeed of any texts other than what students wrote, its principle was one he never retreated from that you could make students care about their writing, not by teaching them "good English"-- the elements of grammar and rhetoric--but by asking them to write about their own lives, a subject that presumably only a very few would claim to be devoid of interest. The First Years contained autobiographical selections from Adams, Gosse, Howells, and others, but the writer gave the most pages and with whom the anthology concludes is Marcel Proust, the last volume of whose great work had appeared in English the year Baird came to Amherst. In passages he chose from In Remembrance of Things Past Baird found what he called "the perfection of a kind of writing, occasionally hinted at, occasionally well done, in autobiography, but never [before] sustained for so long a time nor with such brilliant success." Such writing was a supreme effort at, in Adams' phrase, running various orders through the chaos of thoughts and feelings of a single mind. On a suitably small scale, the effort might be something the Amherst freshman could be invited to try his hand at.

The energies Baird would direct into his composition course were thus continuous with literary experiences he was having of modern masterwork by writers who had not yet become objects of academic study. The third modern writer whose example--right down to the most intimate matters of tone and temperament=made all the difference to Baird was the poet Robert Frost, who distinguished between what he called "the grammatical sentence" and "the vital sentence," the latter being what he was after and what any teacher of writing should also be after. Adams, Proust, Frost: are these the true progenitors of a course in freshman composition that was, so the word went round, really derived from William James's Pragmatism, Wittgenstein, Count Alfred Korzybski, or S. S. Hayakawa?

Baird said that one of his secrets in English 1-2 was to make new assignments every year so that neither he nor his colleagues could rest on what had been done the year before: "I ... never let the other teachers feel that they have done their work before the class begins. The work was always open, the questions were always there, and the answers were just as obscure and fleeting as they ever had been so that the student and the teacher were on the same footing. They were both perplexed and they were both putting what mind they could on the immediate problem: how do you tell, how do you put into words such an experience as this?" To this problem, he dedicated all his very considerable energy, imagination, and wit.

One way to put the exemplary achievement of Theodore Baird as a teacher and colleague on this faculty forty and more years ago is to say that he was an unusually interesting person who simply refused, under any academic circumstances, to allow himself to be bored, not in class, not when grading student papers, not in the library, not when meeting with students or with colleagues. To refuse to allow oneself to be bored is a very considerable achievement, and one not within just anyone's power or will or authority. This was a refusal, however admirable, made by an ambitious man. But there was also a modest and even mild man who asked for nothing more than to be a professor of English at Amherst College. If a junior colleague talked or otherwise behaved, as it were, professionally, with an eye to academic advancement elsewhere, he would say uncomprehendingly, "But I thought you wanted to be a college professor at Amherst." This was indeed what he himself wanted to be, and what with all his power of mind and personality he eminently was. This explains his very high standing in the regard of generation after generation of students, with many of whom he corresponded faithfully long after they went out into the world, students not only in English but mostly in the college at large, which was his true constituency. This explains his indulgent concern for the college library, which he visited almost daily to the end and of which he was a friend in both lower and upper cases, and for which he ordered in his lifetime a myriad of good books. In the days of dormitory libraries on campus, he built up over the years an invaluable, idiosyncratic collection in Pratt for the general student reader. And finally, this explains his relative indifference to seeing what he wrote put into print. He wrote almost as prolifically as he read, and in a very lively style. There are scholarly articles, essays in college and local Amherst history, book reviews, letters, as well as those very interesting course materials, and no doubt more. But he never saw fit to collect any of them or get them published. After all, they are to be found by anyone who seeks them in the collections of Amherst College, and it looks as if they may continue to be read.

The Amherst College that Theodore Baird wanted nothing more than to be a professor at, forty years back has now dwindled into the past, the past the imagination preys upon, as Dr. Johnson said in a sentence that Baird admired. Some of the best things done in Amherst English courses today may be things that Baird once did in his own inimitable way. When he died, he did not leave a wife or a child. His wife of 66 years, Frances Titchener, known to him and their friends as Bertie, a graduate of Wells College and a Doctor in French of Radcliffe who taught for some years at Smith and who made as intelligent, well-read, witty, generous-hearted a companion as one could ask for, died some months before he did. We shall not see his like, or hers, again.

Respectfully,   
Richard Cody   
G. Armour Craig    
William H. Pritchard    
Douglas C. Wilson

Catherine Bateson was the Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College from 1980 to 1983 and Professor of Anthropology from 1980 to 1987. Born in December 1939, she was the only child of two noted anthropologists, the British Gregory Bateson and the American Margaret Mead, a heritage that largely determined her own professional life as a cultural anthropologist and prolific writer and lecturer. Catherine died on January 2, 2021. Although her time at Amherst was not long she formed sustained and sustaining friendships with at least a dozen members of the Amherst faculty, friendships warmly noted in the prefaces and acknowledgements to all her books beginning in 1984. At age 20 Catherine married Barkev Kassarjian, who survives her, as does their daughter Sevanne.

In addition to her parents, her husband, and their daughter, educational institutions were, until her last fifteen years, central to her life. In Manhattan she attended progressive grammar schools, then the Brearley School, with her senior year, in Hebrew, in Jerusalem. She matriculated at Radcliffe-Harvard, graduating in two and a half years, followed by a doctorate, again from Harvard and completed, this time, in three years. Her dissertation, in Linguistics and Near Eastern Studies, was on classical Arabic poetry. After her degree she taught for another three years at Harvard, and published her Arabic Language Handbook in 1967; it has never gone out of print. In terms of lasting importance perhaps the most formative experience of her Harvard years was as a teaching assistant in Erik Erikson’s famous course on the stages of life, a schema to which she returned in the books of her maturity where, based on her own experience and that of others, she convincingly modified two of its late stages.

Like the cultural anthropologist that she was, from her first book in 1972 to her last in 2019 she identified patterns in speech and behavior. Her father, she wrote, found the essential patterns in the natural world, and her mother - whom she described as “funny and incisive and occasionally shocking” - identified them in folklore and poetry. She stated that the search for patterns is “a basic habit of thought of cultural anthropology.” If that sounds no more than obvious, she put it to rich use in her writing as she described, in unfailingly supple and lucid prose, her own life, the lives of her renowned parents, and the lives of many others, most of them women.

After Harvard Catherine and her husband, a professor of business management, worked in the Philippines for the next two years. She wrote that it was in that brief stay that she “retooled” herself as an anthropologist, there being no audience there for her work in linguistics and Near Eastern studies. On the other hand, from 1972 to 1979 she and her husband were in Tehran, first teaching, she in Persian, at the University of Tehran, then serving as the founding Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at a projected new university in northern Iran. The Iranian revolution in 1979 meant the end of that university and, for Catherine, her husband - who, when not developing new business management programs abroad, was on the Harvard Business School faculty - and their daughter, a return to a year in Cambridge. Her appointment to the Deanship at Amherst followed in 1980. She was the first woman to serve as Dean, opening the gates to the phalanx of exceptional women administrators who have followed.

Her term as Dean of the Faculty was painfully brief - she was deposed, if not defenestrated, in 1983. She wrote, and published in perhaps her most personal book, Composing a Life (1989), ten measured yet tendentious pages on that experience, noting accurately that the College, for all of its academic eminence, had been slower than every one of its peer institutions to adopt coeducation, and that a long legacy of male privilege survived. Twice acknowledging herself to have been shattered - her word - by her dismissal from the Deanship, she had been misled by the Chair of the Board of Trustees, who had pled with her to accept the Acting Presidency of the College upon the sudden death of Julian Gibbs. In a third consecutive sentence fragment she described not who we are now but who we were then: “A faculty of high intelligence and considerable integrity cocooned in complacent myths.” Thus she played her significant part, not unlike that of martyrdom, in transforming Amherst into the welcoming institution it is today. Yet “martyrdom” may overstate Catherine’s role in altering the College. She took pride in the fact that, as she put it, she “set up a minimum agenda to address the problem of sexism, which was eventually adopted in its entirety by the Board. The first step in the agenda was to create several faculty positions for senior women so that Amherst would not constantly be isolating and rejecting vulnerable young women of talent.” A look around this room testifies to her success.

Catherine was 46 when she taught her last course at the College. Not incidentally, among the courses she taught before she left was a Bruss Seminar with Deborah Gewertz and Rose Olver. And, presciently, she taught an ILS - the old term for a First-Year Seminar - called Race and Sex. Catherine was a formidable presence in a classroom, both deeply learned and adept at dialogue. As the Robinson Professor of Anthropology and, please note, English at George Mason University she continued to teach for many years, albeit halftime in order to make room for writing on a great variety of subjects. Indeed, she wrote in 1989 that henceforward she would be a writer first, an academic second. True to her word, under her full name, Mary Catherine Bateson, she published four books in the five years following her Amherst Deanship, after which her books came steadily, at roughly five-year intervals, until she died. Her last, Thinking Race, in collaboration with Richard Goldsby, appeared in 2019. In addition to Dick Goldsby, in book after book she continued to thank a significant number of her Amherst College friends, including the four of us signatory to this minute.

Thinking Race was Catherine’s second collaboration with Dick, the first, again in the timeliest way, was Thinking Aids, written and published well before medical science knew just how to keep the stricken alive and functioning. In all of her later books she speaks of the importance of being in long-term and wide-ranging dialogue with those with whom and of whom she writes. It is fair to say that the work of the second half of her career was fundamentally biographical. She narrated the life stories of many people she knew, largely women, both public figures like Jane Fonda and Erik Erikson’s wife Joan, a weaver, jeweler, art therapist and active collaborator with her husband. She was no less attentive to her neighbors in and near Hancock, New Hampshire, her resting place, convening gatherings to address such issues as climate change. In addition to her husband and daughter, and her collaborations with Dick Goldsby, her essential interlocutors included Johnetta Cole, the first Black woman president of Spelman College in Atlanta. Catherine co-taught a life-studies seminar there with Johnetta, writing about that experience with special warmth. But her fundamental collaborators - in her father’s case a literal collaboration titled Angels Fear - were her father and mother, about whom she indeed wrote an exemplary dual biography titled With a Daughter’s Eye.

A life, then, of formidable achievement, a life that testifies to the fact that Catherine was much at home in quite various cultures. Christian, unsurprisingly (despite her atheist father’s telegraphed instruction to her mother not to christen the newborn Catherine): raised in her mother’s high Anglican tradition, she attended Episcopal services until the mid-1990s, then converted to Roman Catholicism. She wrote in detail about the life and work of James Morton, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. And when she retired to the cottage in Hancock, New Hampshire she was active in her local Catholic church in neighboring Peterborough. For her the heart of religion was its function as community. Her other principal cultural home was of course the Near East: she lived in Iran where she taught and administered in Persian as well as English. She wrote about classical Arabic poetry and she knew Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, and Hebrew - as well as Tagalog, which she picked up in the Philippines. Israel in fact meant much to her, from her high school year in Jerusalem. She visited the country a handful of times in later years, forming strong friendships with a number of Israelis.

Finally, lest a reader think that she was, and that the undersigned committee (“senior citizens” all) are, without humor, we conclude by noting that Catherine remarked, only half in jest, that “ageing is an improvisational art form.” More, after many books with brief or no indices, she made up for it by the index to Willing to Learn (2004). It runs twenty-one double columned pages and includes entries extending from “bagels” and “bouillabaisse” to “yoghurt,” navigating the way forward through “hell,” “Midas (King),” “napping,” “Ping-Pong,” “Simpson (OJ),” “softball,” and “weeping.” Oh, and she kept on her Dean’s desk a roll of red tape and, facing her faculty guests, a small wind-up robot labeled “FTE.”

Rest in Peace, Catherine Bateson.

I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence, that it be entered into the permanent record of the faculty, and that a copy be sent to Mary Catherine Bateson’s family.

Respectfully submitted,

Deborah Gewertz   
Richard Goldsby   
Lisa Raskin   
David Sofield

Daniel Barbezat   
Richard Fink   
Walter Nicholson   
William Pritchard   
Frank Westhoff   
 

Antonio Benítez-Rojo liked to cite the French historian Fernand Braudel to the effect that literature and social science, along with other disciplines, ought to mix promiscuously. Certainly, Antonio’s professional control of historiography and the social sciences deepened his art and vice versa. If a person were to ask him about some cultural phenomenon, say the rumba, he would give an answer that was like an epic narrative in itself.

He would explain, warmly and dizzyingly, that in the rumba there is a polyrhythm of an African kind, a choreography similar to that of the yuka (a profane Bantu dance) and even fragments of ritual choreographies of Yoruba and Abakuá origin; there is a Spanish song with rhyme, message and other signifiers that come from Western culture; there is an African chorus and an instrument (the clave) that exists only in Cuba; there is a genealogy erased by the Plantation and some relations with Flamenco which, if they are easy to observe, nobody knows where and how they were established; the principal drum (called caja) was originally a wooden box for salt cod, of Norwegian origin; the drum called a quinto was originally a box for candles whose manufacture was local. For years the rumba was danced exclusively by black people in the cities of Matanzas and Havana. There is no one type of rumba but three. Nobody knows when the rumba started nor does anyone know who named it. Today the rumba is danced by both black and white Cubans. The rumba’s central rhythm, called the clave Cubana, was originally Bantu and later extended itself through almost all of Africa. The musicologists have determined that this and other similar rhythms exist within the drummers’ inner selves. The rhythm is a support for the memory (hence poetry’s popularity where people don’t know how to read). The memories of the African griots are sustained by inner rhythm. The fragments of African culture that are conserved in Cuba were able to be transported from Africa thanks to the inner rhythms of the griots and musicians. Salt cod was the common food of the slaves throughout the Caribbean, and then of all poor people. In Jamaica, it is prepared as salt-fish, in Cuba as aporreado y frituras, and in Puerto Rico as Serenata. The instrument known as the clave (two short wooden cylinders that are struck together) came from naval architecture (the plantation ports of Havana and Matanzas). The ñáñigos or abakuás worked in those ports (these sects do not exist in other parts of Cuba). The rumba sprang up from these cities. There were periods when the rumba was prohibited by the authorities...

On receiving this kind of an illumination, his friends and colleagues might say: “Oh, I get it,” while standing in awe of the man who knew so much about the Caribbean and could make it available clearly, sharply, rhythmically, like no one else in the world. Other scholars of the Caribbean, when they read him or heard him speak, would say: “That’s what I’ve been thinking; it’s a good thing that somebody has put it down.” As if such knowledge and argument exist in the spirit of the age, or in the language. As if anyone else could have come up with it. That’s the price Antonio may have paid for calling himself a post-modernist. He was a lot more than that.

While still in Cuba, before his long exile in Amherst, Massachusetts, he headed the Center for Caribbean Studies at the Casa de Las Américas in Havana, where he read everything, studied everything, and wrote articles about Caribbean history and society. He then went on, after he had begun to write the short stories that made him famous, to become head of the Las Américas publishing house. Before this, he had held other posts, as an economist in the Cuban revolutionary government. (He was very informative and funny on the impossibility of running a full-employment socialist economy. He said that he had on occasion been called to explain himself before the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, and that the Central Committee had been less cocksure of its own opinions than had the Amherst College Committee of Six when he’s been asked to speak with them)

A long period of quiet labor in these government institutions, plus his international fame as a writer, moved the Cuban government to trust him enough to send him to a writers’ congress in the socialist bloc, where he defected, after some cloak and dagger maneuvers, to eventually join his wife Hilda Otaño in Boston. She had been given permission to emigrate earlier, in search of medical treatment for their chronically ill daughter, María. This clement intervention, which prolonged their daughter’s life considerably, was not the only thing to motivate their emigration. They were political liberals and admired that strain of North American history and politics. They couldn’t abide the lack of freedom under the Castro regime in Cuba. Many other Cuban exiles, knowing of Antonio’s defection, expected him to endorse counter-revolutionary, right-wing causes, which he would never do. He was against Castro, but politically outside the Cuban exile community. His works were being read all over Cuba in smuggled editions. He became an American citizen.

When Antonio left Cuba for good, in 1980, his novel, El mar de las lentejas (translated into English as Sea of Lentils) was about to be published, but his leaving stopped the publication, and no Cuban would ever read it in anything but a pirated edition. (It was soon published in Barcelona.) All his knowledge of the Caribbean, all the narrative genius that had made him famous everywhere as a writer of short stories, all his reading of the chronicles of Oviedo, Las Casas and others, all that was known of the era, the Spanish empire, the Armada, Philip the Second, John Hawkins and the English Sea Dogs, the epic movement of the Arawaks, the Caribs (Montaigne’s cannibals)–everything that was known and felt by the Europeans of the 16th Century in their endless blind curiosity and avarice, was reinvented by Antonio in this book. The more formal sources combine with his own new and syntactically plastic energy to lend a dreamlike visual clarity to what people thought they knew of the Spanish conquest: the greed, the killing of infidels, the destruction of indigenous culture, the introduction of slavery.

On January 8, 1991, his translator received this typewritten postcard from the man who would be the book’s most famous and influential reviewer in North America:

Dear Mr. Maraniss:   
Many thanks for your helpful response. I guess I could have been smarter about the Babtista pun, but everybody else is real and this guy certainly becomes real. I hadn’t realized it was his son (son, or the baptized infant?–not the same) that does him in, so vividly, pinning his lungs to the earth. The book overflows with images that another author would have set a little more space around. Your translation seemed etc. I hope you like the review, if and when they run it. I’m sorry the book didn’t win a prize – it deserves one. My best to Bill Pritchard.   
Yours, John Updike

Antonio wrote more books in exile, in Amherst; he wrote the most recent and best multidisciplinary study of the Caribbean (The Repeating Island), a new book of stories (A View from the Mangrove), and another novel. He was an expatriate like Hemingway, Nabokov, Conrad, Cortázar. The latter, an Argentine living in Paris, was one of Antonio’s closest friends and one of his half-dozen peers among 20th Century Latin American writers.

One of Antonio’s favorite things to say, when someone started to lament life’s reversals, was that really we’re not so important: “No somos nada.” It’s easy to imagine him, sitting at El Floridita in Havana with a visiting Julio Cortázar, and one of them saying to the other: “No somos nada, ché”.

Robert Hermann Breusch, Walker Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, and one of the finest teachers in the history of the College, died on March 29, 1995. Born on April 2, 1907, in the German city of Freiburg, he grew up in a time of great intellectual ferment, darkened by the shadows of war and disruption. We reckon his years at nearly eighty-eight; his friends and admirers we cannot number. Those who knew him will have much to add to what we say here; while, if we have done our work aright, those who did not will wish that they had. His friends called him Bob, and we, who were his friends, shall continue to do so here.

Freiburg is a fine old city in the Black Forest region of Southern Germany, and here Bob spent his youth and came of age. His father was a teacher of science, and Bob and his elder brother (who was to become a distinguished chemist) proved to be apt and eager scholars. Bob went on to pursue Physics and Mathematics at the University of Freiburg, with considerable time spent studying in Berlin, eventually earning his doctorate in Mathematics in 1932. It is of interest to remark that Bob, whom we knew so well, was himself acquainted with such legendary mathematicians and physicists as Hausdorff, Schrodinger, Schur and von Mises.

The thirties were not easy years in Germany, and Bob's excellent work in Mathematics could not secure him a university position. He became a teacher in a boarding school near Freiburg, and at this time he met Kate Dreyfuss, who was to share his life. It was their delight to roam the woods and hills together, and their design to marry. Bob had been raised a Protestant, Kate was Jewish, and Hitler had come to power. Bob's loathing of National Socialism was intense, and Kate's people were clearly in danger. There was nothing for them but to flee.

At this time, the government had no objection to Kate's departure, but Bob's case was altogether different: he could become a useful if unwilling servant of the Reich. Bob had a valid passport, but he was under suspicion; if the authorities supposed that his intent was to forsake the Fatherland, they would confiscate his passport. Bob felt the need of a fallback passport, in case this all too probable event should occur. He liked to tell the story of how one day he went for a walk in the Black Forest with Ernst Zermelo (whose name is familiar to every mathematician). During this walk, Bob feigned the loss of his passport, whereupon Zermelo swore in good faith that the passport had indeed been lost. The ruse succeeded: Bob was issued a new passport, and now he had two. He taught himself the craft of bookbinding and artfully concealed one of the passports in a volume of Mathematics, an item, he rightly guessed, not likely to be examined with close attention. In the event, the second passport was never required.

After much careful planning, involving short forays into Switzerland, where Bob established a small cache of his belongings, the time for departure was at hand. This was in the spring of 1936. Bob and Kate bade farewell to parents (whom they would never see again) and made their way by separate paths into Switzerland, and thence to Paris.  In France, they parted. Kate sailed to America, where she stayed with relatives; Bob took ship for Chile, where there were faint prospects of employment. (Immigration to the United States on a permanent basis was not possible at this time, the quotas having already been filled.) Bob was well versed in Latin and Greek, but Spanish was a tongue practically unknown to him. But Bob persisted and finally found a university teaching position in Valparaiso. Kate then arrived from America; and they were married in July of 1936. They spent three happy years in Chile, mastering the language and roaming the countryside together.

When the chance to emigrate to America finally came, they took it. Kate knew English, but Bob did not, so one more language had to be added to his repertoire. Their early times in this country were difficult, and Kate undertook various jobs to see them through. In. the passage of time, Bob became an instructor at Shady Hill School in Cambridge, where the schoolboy Robert Romer first encountered the finest Mathematics teacher he was to know.

In 1943 Amherst College was a busy instructional center for Armed Services personnel, and skilled teachers of Mathematics and Physics were in urgent request. To Amherst then he came. The College was not slow to recognize the quality of the man. He was to spend three decades here until his retirement as Walker Professor of Mathematics in 1973.

Bob was a brilliant and highly respected mathematician. His work in Number Theory (especially his insightful new proof of the Prime Number Theorem) is well known, and his name is frequently cited in the literature. Well into his old age he remained an avid problem-solver, and many of his elegant solutions are to be found, year after year, in the volumes of the American Mathematical Monthly.

Bob's many students remember him for his masterful command of his art, but they revere him for something else. He was the finest teacher many of them had known or would ever know. In manner gentle and self-effacing, in matter luminous and thorough, he affected his students in a way not easy to describe. Was it his clarity, his whimsical asides, his deep interest in their progress, his willingness to consider their lapses as his own, his power to lead them through dark places? What was it that left such an imprint on the minds of so many? The enthusiastic project, undertaken by a group of alumni at the time of Bob's retirement, to endow a fund to establish the Breusch prize for the best Senior thesis in Mathematics, is but one of the palpable signs of his influence for good. We cannot know Bob's secret if secret there was. We can but praise, and so we do.

There is an important thing about Bob that everyone wishing to know the man should know. He loved to climb. His eyes were ever lifted up unto the hills, even unto the highest snow-clad peaks. And given the opportunity, his feet were sure to follow. He would climb any mountain that came to hand; he would seek out mountains and climb them too, for the sheer love of it, frequently exciting amazement at his speed and agility. Even an accomplished mountain goat might be excused a twinge of envy upon observing his perilous ascents. Peaks all over the world, from the Alps to the Andes, became feathers in his cap. He set many a mountaineering record. The more forbidding climbs he undertook alone, but on the easier ascents, such as his annual Spring hike to the top of Mount Washington, engulfed in snow and ice and battered by tremendous winds, he delighted in the company of Kate and other companions. Many a decades-younger friend, with giddy brain and heaving chest, wondered how such things could be. But Bob never pushed (or rather pulled) them beyond their endurance, and cheerfully sacrificed speed to good fellowship. Yes, Bob loved to climb and to share his climbs with others. In the same way, he loved to solve hard problems and to lead his students up the slopes.

Bob and Kate spent many happy years at the College. On a typical evening at home, Bob would pursue his Mathematics or read his favorite authors. (He was fond of Homer, Sophocles, Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, and Russell Baker.) Kate would forge ahead with her readings in Russian and Greek, or else she would dream about their garden, wondering what to plant next. Music was always on the phonograph (Beethoven's string quartets moved Bob deeply). In the summer they would travel to Switzerland or the Rockies, where the mountains beckoned them. New Zealand became their home for several years after his so-called retirement. He taught at the University of Waikato, and they climbed the nearby peaks.

Bob and Kate were inseparable, till death with slow but relentless steps finally parted them in 1979. Bob lived alone for some sixteen years, as cheerful as his lingering bereavement would allow. For many of these years, he heeded the college's call for help and taught various courses in the Mathematics Department. This was a joy to him and good fortune for a younger generation of students. He still climbed, he still enjoyed the company of friends, he still solved problems with gusto. He even took up the cello, an instrument he loved above all others but had never learned to play.

He was not to be spared the bodily ills old age so often brings in train. His ninth decade witnessed the slow undermining of his robust constitution. He walked the hills, the mountains he climbed no more. Many faculty friends had gone before him; several remained. And other friends he had, among whom closest was Janice Denton, who for years faithfully looked after him and helped him to the very end.

Bob loved the College and gave it his best, nor will he be forgotten by the many whose lives he bettered. As a young man, he lost his home but found another. As an old man he lost his Kate, and there was no other. But in death, they are not divided.   

David Armacost   
James Denton    
Robert Romer    
Dudley Towne

GERALD BROPHY

Gerry Brophy taught geology at Amherst for forty-three years.  He passed away at the age of eighty-seven on April 2, 2014.   Born in Kansas City, he was raised in New Rochelle, New York.  Upon graduation from Iona Preparatory School in 1944, Gerry served in the U.S. Maritime Service in the North Atlantic until the end of the war.  He then attended Columbia University, completing his B.A. and then a Ph.D. in 1954.

 The Samuel A. Hitchcock Professor of Mineralogy and Geology, Gerry taught at Amherst College from 1954 to 1998, with Introduction to Geology, Mineralogy, and Economic Geology as his signature courses.  He was instrumental in the hiring of Emeritus Professor Ed Belt in 1966, myself in 1975, and Peter Crowley, and Tekla Harms—both in 1986. So, of the current five tenure-line faculty members in our department, Gerry hired and trained three.  In this way, Gerry’s legacy as an educator has been felt for decades after his retirement and continues after his passing.

We three faculty came to Amherst from research universities—Wisconsin, MIT, and Arizona—and only Tekla had actually attended a liberal arts college.  So, it fell largely to Gerry to help us learn how to teach, and how to teach at a liberal arts college, and specifically how to teach at Amherst. 

Gerry taught us how to teach an introductory science class—Geology 11—to all students at the college, while at the same time providing an education that would serve as a foundation for those who wanted to major in geology. Few students come to Amherst as geology majors.   Majors are typically born in Geo 11—students are drawn in by the allure of new and exciting concepts offered by friendly and enthusiastic faculty—and ultimately become hooked on the subject through the now-famous Final Project.

As conceptualized by Pete Foose, but perfected by Gerry, the Geology 11 Final Project is a virtual-mapping exercise based on more than one hundred rock samples laid out in a grid on the lab floor. This is one exam that is seemingly remembered and revered by all who have survived it.  More about the Final Project a bit later.

Gerry understood the power of field trips both to educate and to provide a lifetime of enjoyment and appreciation, as graduates of Geology 11 traveled around the earth throughout their lives. Field trips are still woven into the course’s weekly labs, and there is also an all-day Saturday or Sunday trip, all with the purpose of educating students about the geologic evolution that has occurred over the past one billion years in the area now occupied by the Connecticut River Valley.

Gerry decided that teaching should be fun.  He believed that if faculty are having fun and are enjoying what they are doing, then students will enjoy what they are learning.  Personalizing interactions with students was a hallmark of Gerry’s teaching style.  Called by his first name by many students, even at a time when many faculty called students by their last names, Gerry generously shared stories about his geologic travels around the globe, not to mention his Friday-morning report of the previous evening’s poker results.

Gerry’s impact on the discipline of geology and his contributions to Earth science education reach well beyond Amherst College.

While a graduate student at Columbia, Gerry studied uranium ore deposits in central Utah with the support of the Atomic Energy Commission.  During his long career, he worked as a consultant to several mining companies in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa.  Gerry also worked in Pakistan, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mexico.  From 1978 to 1980, while on leave from Amherst, Gerry managed the Department of Energy programs for potential geothermal resources in the lower forty-eight contiguous United States.

 For many summers, Gerry was an instructor in and served as counselor and president of, the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association, a field station in Red Lodge, Montana, where students from around the U.S. come for summer field courses in geology.

Gerry was also instrumental in Amherst’s participation in WAMSIP, an acronym for Williams-Amherst-Mount Holyoke-Smith Interinstitutional Project in Geology, a program created in the late-1960s to promote and support undergraduate research in geology.  This program served as a model for the KECK Geology consortium for undergraduate research, which began in 1987 and continues to the present day.

Gerry worked with the Geological Society of America, our most prestigious professional organization, to establish both an undergraduate membership program and a regional section of the society to serve the unique geology of the northeastern U.S. and Canada.  To this day, Amherst geology majors present their honors research results at the annual Spring Northeast Section meeting as student society members.

 The new Beneski Earth Sciences Building and Museum of Natural History opened in 2006.  This wonderful new facility was built around the concept of a teaching lab that integrates lab and lecture components of a course, a concept modeled on Gerry’s mineralogy lab in the old Pratt Building.  In fact, the current mineralogy lab still uses many of the same mineral and rock storage trays designed by Gerry; some still have their original color scheme.  Moreover, the new intro-teaching lab bears a striking resemblance to the old Geo 11 lab in Pratt, with one significant improvement.  Gerry used to set up the final project by first laying out a 26-by-26 block grid on the lab floor with masking tape, requiring him—and later us—to spend several quality hours on our hands and knees at the end of every semester.  We are so convinced of the ongoing positive value of Gerry’s conception of the final project that we had the grid permanently built into the tiles of the Beneski intro lab. 

Gerry served as the director of the Pratt Museum for twenty years, from 1968 to 1987. As director of the museum, in so far as possible, Gerry implemented a philosophy of letting visitors encounter the wonder of the museum’s collections at close range.   This vision continues to this day in the new Beneski Museum, with the location of the mineral collections along the main corridors and the prominent beltway of drawers within the galleries that visitors can open to engage with representative material from the collections—the stuff behind the closed doors.

To take a walk around Beneski is indeed to take a walk with Gerry.  The department’s program, its people, and the facilities all bear his indelible mark.  Each year, a stellar Amherst geology student is awarded the Belt-Brophy Prize, which consists of a Brunton Compass with field case, the most versatile field tool of the geologist.  And two of Gerry’s three children graduated from Amherst, James, Class of ’77 in geology, and Tom, Class of ’84 in political science.

I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence and entered into the records of the college and that a copy be sent to Professor Brophy’s family.

Respectfully submitted,

Edward S. Belt   
Jack Cheney   
Peter Crowley   
Tekla Harms

ELIZABETH BRUSS (May 8, 1981)

Professor Elizabeth Bruss died suddenly on May 8, 1981. Liz came to Amherst in 1972 as an assistant professor of English. She had received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1967, earning her master’s and doctoral degree there in 1968 and 1972. At Amherst, she taught English literature, men’s and women’s lives, literary theory, and linguistics; she taught as well in the Kenan colloquium and in the ILS course on Race and Sex. She was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor in 1978; from 1979 until her death she served as chairperson of her department. She served on numerous College committees, including the Fellowship Committee, the Committee of Six, and the Select Committee on the Curriculum. She participated actively in the Five—College Committees on Linguistics and on Women’s Studies, and at the time of her death was setting up a Five—College study group on literary theory. She served on the editorial boards of “The Massachusetts Review,” “Poetics,” and “Enclitic.” She had held a grant from the Ford Foundation, was a fellow at the National Science Foundation, Summer Institute of Linguistics and at the Aspen—Cornell Colloquium on Choice and Decision, and she had deferred a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 1979, the Johns Hopkins University Press published her first book, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. During 1978—79, she held a Guggenheim Fellowship, working on a second book, Beautiful Theories, an analysis of five major contemporary literary theorists, which was accepted this spring by the Johns Hopkins Press.

These, one might say, are the facts of Liz’s professional life. But Liz herself was always most deeply suspicious when presented with the purported facts. Her academic laurels must be seen not as the essence but as the concrete evidence of a vital presence who, with her integrity, her intellectual, political, and personal commitments, her brilliance, and her generosity, has affected us more, and more lastingly, than her roles as teacher, colleague, or author could ever suggest.   

She did so by challenging us to see the world differently. Liz once admiringly referred to Jane Austen as a subversive. Liz, too, was a very special kind of subversive, one who, rather than turning the world upside down, helped us to see where “right side up,” wasn’t. Where others ordinarily see the way things are, Liz saw the way things are constructed, as systems of meaning, as relations of power, privilege, or partiality cloaked in the language of universals, as temporary and historically bounded arrangements masquerading as eternal and inevitable. In her teaching, in her writing, in her interactions with colleagues and friends, she beckoned to others to think with her in this way, to cooperate in penetrating to the deeper meanings below the surface. She challenged us to an effort of deconstruction as the necessary first step towards constructive endeavors.   

This quality in Liz was apparent in the formal settings in which she operated: teaching linguistics, working on the proposal for the ILS curriculum, planning the study group on literary theory, writing her books. Yet it was so much a part of her view of the world that it could be detected in everything she did: in her work helping to organize the Copeland Colloquium on race, sex, and class in American culture; in the advice and expertise she provided others for their courses and their writing; in her participation in planning and performing in the first (and thus far the only) guerrilla theater to have been presented to a meeting of this faculty; in the twinkle in her eye as, in conversation with her, one lapsed into yet another unwarranted assumption.   

It was part of Liz’s magic that this fine critical awareness was inextricably tied to deep and strongly felt commitments. She was perhaps too keenly aware of how they are constructed to feel an allegiance to any institution, but her allegiance to the people within this institution and to the goal of making the most of its possibilities, and theirs, made her give unstintingly of her time and energies.   

She was committed to the cooperative pursuit of understanding; although she excelled in all the tasks she undertook alone, she seemed to feel most fully engaged when she could interact with others. Many on this faculty have benefited from her insights and criticisms. When working with others, she shared their enthusiasm for their own ideas while conveying the sense that their sharing with her was essential to her own intellectual life. She lent excitement and insight to the courses she taught with others, and gave sympathetic and helpful hearings to probably more unformed ideas than any of the rest of us would tolerate.   

She was committed to creating a society in which men and women, in which people of all races could participate fully and equally, and in which boundaries of class and privilege would no longer stand in the way of the full development of anyone. In the academic setting, these commitments led her to work towards making this a college for both women and men, a task that she saw beginning and not ending with the admission of women students. Thus she participated actively in designing courses examining men’s and women’s roles in society and in literature; served on the Five—College Committee on Women’s Studies, and spoke out publicly and privately on issues concerning sexual equality. As both a student of cultural assumptions and an individual committed to racial equality, she spoke out on issues affecting minority students in the College, helped to design the ILS course on race and sex, and protested College policy on investment in South Africa.   

Her encouragement to others engaged in like endeavors was unfailing. Both her intellectual convictions and her generosity of spirit led her to see this striving for equality as a striving for inclusiveness, not just of individuals but of the cultural and group contexts which gave substance and meaning to their lives. She drew on her personal experience as well as on her wider knowledge in reminding her colleagues and students of the economic inequalities which hampered human development. And here, close to home, her actions revealed that she never forgot that the College included not only faculty and students but staff as well.   

There was much more to Liz. Even her faults stemmed from her virtues; she could never say no to any request, and if she did not suffer fools gladly, they rarely knew it. She was, as all who encountered her soon realized, possessed of both a brilliant mind and a warm heart. She did nothing by halves. She spoke extemporaneously not in sentences but in paragraphs. Her wit and her seriousness could emerge simultaneously, sometimes disconcertingly but always effectively. She disdained puffery while preserving her sympathy for the puffer. She always prized a certain zaniness in herself and in others. She was more modest than she had any right to be, but it was all genuine——while few things delighted her more than being able to brag of the achievements of others. She was a model perhaps most in her steadfast refusal to be or be made into a model of anything but integrity, of being true to oneself and one’s principles.   

Respectfully submitted   

C. Armour Craig   
Kathleen J. Hartford   
Robert C. Townsend

George L. Cadigan was born in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., April 12, 1910, the son of Edward and Christine (Lindblom) Cadigan. He died at his home in Topsham, Maine on December 16, 2005.

His mother, a beautiful woman, born in Argentina, was of Swedish and English descent. His father was of Irish descent. His grandfather fled Ireland after a brawl with English soldiers in a local tavern. Somehow he managed to make it to South Africa and then New York City. George’s father recalled that from hostility and need his father’s underpants were fashioned from a bedraggled Union Jack. Edward and Christine Cadigan had four sons and a daughter. George was the third son.

George Cadigan was raised in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., where he attended high school for three years before transferring to the Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia to be with his older brother, Charles, following their mother’s death. Charles Cadigan was a student at the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria. George excelled as a student and as a leader of numerous student organizations. At the urging of his brother, who had attended Amherst College, George applied for admission to Amherst.. He met the entrance requirements of four years of Latin or Greek and three years of a modern language and was accepted into the Class of 1933.

George later wrote: “These were beautiful years for me. The faculty was excellent and the undergraduates knew their teachers and each other.” However, these were the years of the great depression. Many students had to leave for lack of funds. George’s father’s business suffered; but with the assistance of scholarships and various sorts of employment, George managed; indeed, he thrived. He was class president in his freshman, sophomore, and senior years. He was a star player on the football team all four years and was captain in his senior year when Amherst College won the Little Three Championship for the first time in five years. George graduated cum laude. He admired the excellence of the faculty and the range of courses that he was required to take in a highly prescribed curriculum. He never departed from this vision of the College. In a 1966 Baccalaureate Sermon in Johnson Chapel, using the opening paragraph of the College Catalog as his “text,” he stated: “For 145 years this College has been a bulwark against the overspecialization and departmentalization of education and of life. It has maintained a belief that the student counts. His (her) relationships to faculty and other students have priority. It has endeavored to equip her sons (and daughters) individually and corporately, not for personal salvation, but rather for the redemption of a confused world. It has never permitted them to miss the forest because of a flaming bush or a sunny meadow, lovely and seductive though such may be. It is one world, and your college is deeply committed that her undergraduates and alumni be equipped to admit and work with this fact.”

In the Olio from 1933, one of his classmates wrote: “Now George is not one of those things called reformers, but the legion of those who know him are forced to admit, however unwillingly, that because of him there is a change in them for better or worse. So his decision to assume the clerical collar sounds a welcome note. He will succeed there as here. So quake ye halls of fame: an Irishman is on the way.”

George attended the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where “from the beginning,” he writes, “ I felt very much at home. My classes in Church History, New Testament, Old Testament, Theology and Philosophy of Religion seemed to bring a beautiful integration to my liberal arts studies at Amherst. In the medieval sense, theology became the ‘Queen of the Sciences.’” In 1935 he received a Simpson Fellowship from Amherst College enabling him to attend Jesus College in Cambridge, England for a year of graduate studies. Upon returning to the United States, George was ordained to the priesthood and served at Grace Church, Amherst, and as Assistant Chaplain at Amherst College in1936 and 1937, before becoming Rector of St. Paul’s Church, Brunswick, Maine (1937- 42).

While in Brunswick, George and Charlotte Wales Young were married. They had the joy of two children before Charlotte was stricken with flu and died in March 1943. Bereaved, now an only parent, and pastor to families whose children were being “killed in action,” George wrestled with anger, loneliness, and the desire for a shared life of love. Later that year he met Janey Jones—an artist with words and brush. Within months they were married; and in the years that followed, they gave birth to two children and shared a long and wonderful marriage. Jane died in 1993.

George’s ministry at St. Paul’s Church in Brunswick (1937 to 1942), at Grace Church, Salem, Massachusetts (1942 to 1948), and St. Paul’s Church in Rochester, New York (1948 to 1959), were marked by significant renewal in the spiritual life of all three parishes. George’s ministry as a pastor, his ability to listen and to lead with a gentleness and understanding became widely known. He was also increasingly aware of the Church’s need for community outreach to address the social and economic problems of an urban society and their political underpinnings. In 1959 he was invited to become the seventh Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, elected on the first ballot to succeed the distinguished Right Reverend Arthur Lichtenberger, who had been elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Such an honor; and yet it would mean leaving New England and being far more distant from the lovely cottage they had built on Kezar Lake in Lovell, Maine. George loved the ponds, lakes and streams of Maine. They were a source of spiritual renewal. He was an ardent and superb fly fisherman. He delighted in quoting John Buchan’s observation: “The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive, but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” Their dismay at the thought of moving west was expressed in Jane’s saying, “My God, George! Missouri is beyond the Mississippi River.”

Arriving in St. Louis, the new Bishop found himself in a city that was discovering how thin the veneer was that masked its southern bearings. The Civil Rights Movement was underway, and resentment on the part of St. Louis citizens was manifest. In October 1963 Bishop Cadigan wrote a Pastoral Letter to the Churches in Missouri.

“My dear people:

Not since the Civil War has the United States been so convulsed by civil disorder and conflict. Up to this time, too many of us have been spectators, witnessing in the abstract one of the greatest social revolutions. We have felt comfortingly secure in that such was taking place in Montgomery or Oxford, Mississippi, or Orangeburg, South Carolina. But now it is increasingly in our very midst and we cannot remain uninvolved.. The disobedience to the law at a banking institution tells us, whether we like it or not, that the race issue is not apart from us and compels me at this time to address you in this way.

We are all wrapped up in the bundle of guilt that separates us in cruel and untoward ways from our fellows. Demonstrations have their place in our society and such can be very therapeutic so long as they are consistent with the philosophy of non-violence. Demonstrations will occur repeatedly, before some labor union headquarters, at an industrial plant, or on the steps of the church where we worship. [They will occur] until the sick body of our society is cleaned and made whole.

At this point in time, the cleavage between Negroes and whites is very marked indeed. The understandable hostility of the Negroes is matched only by the increasing bitterness of the whites. It is not inconceivable that disorder and even violence are on our threshold. What can we do, what must we do, to save our community and make meaningful those now almost forgotten phrases of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘children of God.’

Employment opportunity is perhaps the most necessary measure in the whole gamut of civil rights. There are some of us, and many persons and businesses have been working toward this end, who are in a position to employ qualified Negroes in positions of responsibility. The area of open housing, so delicately regarded by some, and so pointedly rejected by others, must serve to free the Negroes from those ghettos in which they are now encased. More strongly than ever do I feel that a Public Accommodations Measure must be passed now, in this state where we live. It is blasphemy to speak of loving one’s neighbor and to refuse him/her a resting place or a cup of coffee in most parts of Missouri. Each of us must urge our respective legislators to stand firmly for a law that will ensure, for all, the essentials of citizenship—of being part of the community. Such are but a minimal Christian response. We face no question of either/or. Justice and charity require that social rights be protected by social structures and justice requires also that those who are prejudiced must be shown a better way of living. Both must be done and they must be done in the present situation with equal seriousness and dedication.

There are many sincere persons who will say that this statement is alien to the meaning of the Church. But food, shelter and self-respect, and the meaning of persons are of the stuff of life. Prayer and worship and statements of faith are shibboleths unless they prompt us to act with God, Who came into this world to bring wholeness to all men. I believe you believe this, too. Please pray for me, even as I will pray for you. Do pray also that God’s Holy Spirit will lead us to create with Him a community where Justice and Charity prevail.

George L. Cadigan   
The Bishop’s Office.

In the years that followed, Bishop Cadigan would participate in marches on the State Capital on behalf of fair housing and Open Accommodations; send Pastoral Letters in support of Planned Parenthood; call for an alliance with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers by boycotting the purchase of grapes and lettuce and making owners of local markets aware of their reasons; urging the liberalization of an abortion statute; condemning the bombing of North Vietnam. Initially, the response of persons in St. Louis was outrage. George received calls from local political leaders, businessmen, and even members of parishes in his Diocese protesting the Bishop’s public actions and statements. Some members of the Cathedral left in righteous indignation. Hate calls, even threats were received. George sorrowed, prayed, and stood resolute. He kept in touch with Martin Luther King, Jr. and brought him to the Cathedral in St. Louis. He supported reforms in the city’s educational system. His affect was such that one member of the Board of Education openly wished that “that Bishop” would not attend meetings, for he could not tolerate the quiet manner in which George addressed issues. Finally, in many quarters, dismay and anger turned to respect. He traveled on peace missions to Israel and South Africa. At the House of Bishops, he argued for the right of women to be ordained to the priesthood and for full inclusion in the Church’s sacramental life to gays and lesbians. In the1970s he was named St. Louis Citizen of the Year by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Urban League of St. Louis. He was named to the Board of Trustees of Amherst College in 1965, serving for six years, and received the Medal for Eminent Service from Amherst College in 1988.

Upon his retirement as Bishop in 1975, George and Jane returned to Amherst. President John William Ward invited George to be Minister at the College. When George asked what this entailed, President Ward said, “I want you to be a presence.” George did not find this very informative, but since it did not obligate him to a particular schedule and provided him with the opportunity to be in touch with students, George accepted. Indeed, George Cadigan became “a presence.” In the eight years as Minister at the College, he became the friend of many in the community, and through his capacity for friendship was respected and loved. As a fitting tribute to one who loved and served the College so well, The Cadigan Center For Religious Life was dedicated in October 2000.

Mr. President, we ask that the faculty rise for a moment of silence and that this letter be sent to the members of George L. Cadigan’s family.

Respectfully submitted by:   
Deene Clark   
Peter Gooding   
David Hixon   
Betsy Cannon Smith   
John Pemberton III, Chair

Otis Cary, class of 1943, passed away on April 14, 2006. He was Professor Emeritus of History and served from 1947 to 1992 as Representative of Amherst College at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He had a remarkable career spanning prewar and postwar years in Japan. His death signals the passing of a generation and the end of an era. Cary was born in Japan, the son and grandson of Amherst graduates who went to Japan as Christian missionaries. His grandfather was a student with Niijima Jo (Joseph Hardy Neesima), who graduated from Amherst in 1870 and founded Doshisha in 1874.

After attending elementary school in Japan, Cary entered Deerfield Academy and Amherst College. A junior at Amherst when the war started, he joined the U. S. Navy, served at Pearl Harbor’s Joint Intelligence Center, and participated in the Aleutians and Saipan campaigns. Later, he was executive officer in charge of more than 4,000 Japanese prisoners of war in Hawaii. A fellow officer said of Cary, “he was determined to treat prisoners not as enemies but as human beings.” He talked to the POWs about war, democracy, militarism, and the Japanese emperor. He supplied them with books and allowed them to set up a school where they taught history, politics and English to each other. When the war ended, Cary went to Japan as a member of the American Occupation Forces. Armed with letters from some of his former prisoners, he found their families and assured them their sons were alive and would soon return home. In the fall of 1945, Cary met privately several times with Prince Takamatsu, one of Emperor Hirohito’s younger brothers. He suggested to the prince that the emperor should shed his military attire, issue his messages in everyday Japanese and mix with the people. Cary’s relationship with the prince continued until the latter’s death in 1987.

Cary returned to Amherst in 1946, completed his undergraduate degree and enrolled at Yale, where he earned his M.A. in American Studies. President Charles Cole in 1947 appointed Cary Amherst’s Representative at Doshisha University and an instructor on the Amherst faculty. Cary revived the prewar relationship between his alma mater and Doshisha University that had led to the building of the Amherst House on the Doshisha campus in 1932. Otis and his wife, Alice, a graduate of Yale’s School of Medicine, lived in the Amherst House with Doshisha students until 1960, when an annex was built which included a residence for the Cary family. They had three daughters and one son. Cary served as the director of the Amherst House until 1980. Assisting him as caretaker of the Amherst House for 27 years was Nakano Isamu, one of the prisoners Cary had befriended during the war. In his 45 years as Amherst’s representative and a faculty member at Doshisha University, Cary taught courses in American Studies, co-founded the Center for American Studies, and served as a trustee of several prominent organizations and centers of learning. During sabbatical leaves in 1950 and 1956, Cary returned to Amherst and taught courses on Japanese cultural history.

As director of the Amherst House, Cary invited many celebrities and scholars to speak at Doshisha University, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Marian Anderson, John D. Rockefeller III, Arnold Toynbee, Emil Brunner and others. He also helped organize summer seminars in American Studies for Japanese professors of many universities. At weekly events for students, he spoke not only of America’s strengths but also its shortcomings and inspired his students to question what they had been taught. “This was the awakening of my intellectual curiosity,” recalled one former student. Many remembered his great sense of humor, his passion for jazz, especially Louis Armstrong, his extracurricular discussion sessions, and his practice of giving nicknames to students to short-circuit the social stratification imposed by standard Japanese forms of addressing others according to age and rank. “His wit and love of Japan,” recalled another former student, “were always evident in everything he said and did.”

President Cole visited Japan for six weeks in early 1953 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Cary and Count Kabayama Aisuke (Amherst class of 1889) arranged Cole’s lectures at major universities and Cary served as his interpreter. When Kabayama and John D. Rockefeller III, supported by the U.S. government, established the International House of Japan as part of an effort to encourage intellectual exchange with Americans, Cary was appointed to the Board of Directors of that organization. Cary recommended to President Cole that Amherst College establish two fellowships for Japanese students to study at the College. The Trustees accepted the recommendation and funded the Niijima (Neesima) and Uchimura (Uchimura Kanzo was class of 1887) fellowships for Japanese students to spend two years at Amherst and earn degrees. Cary also recommended that the prewar practice of sending recent Amherst graduates to serve for two years at Doshisha (in effect from 1922 to 1941) be replaced by one-year Amherst-Doshisha fellowships, which took effect in 1958.

In 1968, Dean Prosser Gifford urged Otis Cary to encourage Doshisha not only to support American Studies but also to help with the development of Asian Studies at Amherst. In September of that year, Cary hosted an Amherst-Doshisha conference on expanding relations between the two schools. Dean Gifford and three Amherst faculty members met in Kyoto with Cary and Doshisha representatives and proposed faculty exchange, joint research projects, library cooperation and a junior-year program for Amherst and other American students at Doshisha. The anti-war movement at Japanese universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s delayed the adoption of these proposals. But, with Cary’s urging, Doshisha did provide office space and other logistic support for the Associated Kyoto Program (AKP), the junior-year abroad program which was founded in 1971 by Amherst and Carleton College. Today the AKP has fifteen sponsoring institutions and has sent more than twelve hundred American students to study Japanese language, history and culture at Doshisha University. An agreement in 1976 made it possible for Doshisha faculty to spend a year’s leave at Amherst and for many Doshisha students to study English here during the summers. Otis Cary’s support was essential for the success of these programs.

Cary’s scholarship includes books and articles he authored and edited on missionaries in Japan, American civilization, and events during and immediately after the war. Cary is the author, in Japanese, of several volumes of wartime and cross-cultural experiences including Nihon Kaigen, Jeepu Oku no Hosomichi, Nihon to no Taiwa and translations into Japanese of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History and The Self and the Drama of History. Especially interesting is his book Atomic Bomb Targeting: Myths and Realities, in which he showed that Secretary of War Henry Stimson personally removed Kyoto from the list of potential targets for the atomic bombs; and War-Wasted Asia, 1945-46, a collection of letters he exchanged with Donald Keene, Theodore deBary (both later Columbia University professors) and others immediately after the war. He also wrote on Kyoto for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Among his honors was Japan’s Order of Sacred Treasure, awarded by the Japanese government in 1987.

Otis Cary retired from Doshisha in 1992 and left his beloved Kyoto in 1996 for Oakland, California, where he spent the remaining years of his life with his family.

Trent E. Maxey   
Ray A. Moore   
Samuel C. Morse   
Wako Tawa

George Armour Craig taught English at Amherst College for forty-five years, from his appointment in 1940 to his retirement in 1985. His only interruptions of that teaching career, aside from the usual sabbatical leaves, were his serving as Dean of Freshmen for two years, and as Acting President of the college after the sudden death of Julian Gibbs in 1983. He was born in 1914, a first-generation American, son of parents from Glasgow, Scotland. He grew up in Cleveland Heights, graduated from the Hawken School, and came to Amherst as an undergraduate in September of 1933. Fifty years later, when called upon to act as president, he addressed undergraduates in Johnson Chapel and began with a recollection of how things were, back then:

I entered Amherst as a very green freshman from the Middle West, and the Amherst I came into was very different from that which some of you entered last fall. Amherst was a small town with a single policeman and a constable. There was so little traffic that on hot spring days a huge St. Bernard, owned by someone but apparently chiefly at home in the middle of the town, would lie panting in the middle of the crossroads where we now so impatiently wait for traffic lights to tell us to walk.

His experience at Amherst he later generalized into what he saw as perhaps the college's major impact as an institution--that of "taking some of the Cleveland out of the boy." His belief was that exposure to classes, lectures, talk, and above all reading could open one's imagination up to history and a dedicated life of the mind, as it had this boy's from Cleveland.

For if Amherst the town in 1933 had its somnolent dog and constable, Amherst College had two men on its faculty who made all the difference to Armour's future life. The first was Theodore Baird, whose extraordinary originality as a teacher of English made itself especially felt in the composition course he was already experimenting with, a course that would, in the postwar new curriculum, become English 1 and in which Armour would be instrumental: teaching it, making up writing assignments for it. English 1 and the weekly, department-wide staff meeting on the next assignment, under Baird's leadership, no doubt informed Armour's thinking very deeply--as it did most participants'. The second teacher was Robert Frost, a very unacademic one whose presence had already impressed itself on Baird. Frost taught no classes, and as Armour later recalled a student hardly "conferred" with him but listened rather to one of the greatest conversationalists since Samuel Johnson. After a long and late evening with Frost (Armour wrote, with himself in mind as a young man) "the student goes home to his room dazzled by the range of the talk, his head full of an excitement he would never forget If the student went again, and he certainly went as often as he could, he would sometimes hear repetitions of parts of other conversations, but the repetition would be fresh in its context and would always be new as evidence of energy, the energy of a mind thinking close to its subjects." It was one form of what Frost himself called Education by Poetry, an activity in which the mind's energies were stimulated and released into expression through metaphor, the saying of one thing in terms of another, which Frost believed to be the essence not only of literature but of science and religion as well.

Armour was a member of Alpha Delta Phi (known to his fraternity brothers as "Crack") and of Phi Beta Kappa. In the fall of 1937 he began graduate work in English at Harvard, did some teaching in the writing program there, but quickly was called back to Amherst. With the advent of World War II and most of the undergraduates called into service, the college consisted mainly of servicemen taking Army and Air Force programs in pre-meteorology and pre-engineering. But also in English Composition, and it fell to Baird, Craig, and Reuben Brower- the third key member of the department--to provide instruction. Something like 1200 soldiers and flyers took these newly improvised courses in composition, and it was as difficult a task as any of the teachers had faced: "We were not going to short-change them," said Baird, "and we didn't."

Finishing a dissertation in the midst of all this teaching and paper reading must have been even more of a chore than usual, but Armour received his Ph.D. in 1947, his dissertation a learned one on a seventeenth-century writer, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More; his advisor the well-known Galileo scholar, Giorgio de Santillana. The dissertation was, among other things, about More's prose style and in it, Armour combined his literary, philosophical, and scientific interests and knowledge. For many years afterward, he would teach a course in 17th-century poets, Milton and the Metaphysicals, but he began it with a comparison of prose styles: Bacon with Burton; Hobbes with Browne. His approach to literature was very much the reverse of a narrowly aesthetic or "appreciative" one. He loved the poems of George Herbert in particular, and read all poetry closely, in the manner of the New Criticism, but he tended to organize his literature courses as questions in the history of ideas. He taught students about the importance of syntax in poetry and prose; about the dramatic turns and tones of meaning Frost saw as essential to good writing; and about the poet or prose writer as someone addressing an audience by employing a rhetoric. He used to think and talk, in class and out, about the problems of speaking of such concepts as Eternity, and he liked to quote Sir Thomas Browne's question "Who can speak about Eternity without a solecism." His students had to look up the word in their dictionaries.

He had met his wife-to-be, Margaret Ball, in Cleveland days, and they were married soon after her graduation in 1938 from Connecticut College for Woman. The marriage was a source of great pride to Armour. Peggy Craig, who became mother of two children, Jamie and Sara, was a cook, a talented gardener, a good watercolorist, a costume-maker for the Masquers' dramatic productions at Kirby Theater, and a fiercely loyal supporter of her husband. She also possessed one of the loveliest smiles, and heartiest laughs on record. They were the handsomest couple in Amherst, no doubt about it, and in 1953 built the house on South East St. where they generously entertained members of the college, students and faculty, and where they lived until 1996 when Peggy died. Armour thereafter moved to Hanover near his daughter in New Hampshire.

Armour's teaching style was, like his appearance, striking, original, more than on one occasion surely impenetrable to the neophyte sitting in his class. This was to be expected in the Freshman Composition course, which asked students puzzling questions that had no easy answers, perhaps no answers. But his dealings with literature were comparably difficult of access. One of his students from the 1960s noted that he figured in undergraduate mythology as "a teacher of hidden truths and strange languages." He had a principled and inveterate habit of not finishing sentences he had begun but instead staring heuristically out the window of his classroom in the ground floor of Appleton Hall. Students were there, he once declared, to finish the sentences their teachers can't quite see the end of. One of his finest students, the critic and editor Richard Poirier, said that if Armour had a fault it was "that he never lets on that the things he asks of his students are so daring and unique, so beyond anything being done at other places, that then, when you get outside of Amherst, it's years before you discover how original it's made you." When Armour was invited to spend a term at Harvard in 1956, substituting for his old colleague Brower on sabbatical, his course in the 19th-century English novel was elected by large numbers of students who were introduced to questions and ways of talking about literature they could never have imagined existed, having been brought up on the safe, historical pieties of Harvard's English faculty.

Probably the most popular course he taught at Amherst was that one in the novel, and from it issued a number of marvelous critical essays--on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Jane Eyre, George Eliot, and Dickens--though never the book he hoped to publish that would have included them. Aside from a handful of these extraordinary essays--some of which he first gave as lectures at The English Institute at Columbia in its heyday of the late 1950's--and an imaginative textbook about literary history, his writing is to be found in scores of speeches, addresses to the college and related bodies, but above all in the beautifully legible comments he wrote in the margin and at the ends of thousands of student papers. He spoke of this paper-reading activity as mind-destroying but in fact it kept his mind fresh, new, always acute.

Among his many services to the college prior to acting as its president for two years, the most important was his presence on the curriculum committee of 1966 that replaced the then twenty-year-old new curriculum of required courses with a freer elective system, though with introductory required courses in Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences called Problems of Inquiry. Armour's major investment in the report was a proposed course for all seniors titled The Composition of Knowledge, in which students would review and try to come to terms with what they had been doing in the preceding three years. The faculty voted down this part of the report, probably its most challenging and rigorous--if admittedly difficult to administer --aspect. But the post-new curricular program in which he really participated was ILS, Introduction to Liberal Studies instituted in 1978. That fall Armour and William Heath from the English department combined with Joel Gordon from Physics and Allen Kropf from Chemistry to offer a course titled "Light." It met in laboratory sections, each jointly led by a scientist and a humanist, and its materials included the phenomenon of light considered first as "traveling in straight lines," then as a system of particles. In addition to scientific discourses on the subject, beginning with Newton's on the spectrum of colors, light was studied as a metaphor found everywhere in literature from the Bible to Milton, Goethe, Henry Adams, and Robert Frost. In "Light," important questions were asked about the relation of observation to understanding, of modem science to the science of Newton, and of the literature of fact to poetry. This ambitious course was repeated and serves as an admirable example of the possibilities for interdisciplinary teaching at Amherst.

Armour's openness and breadth of mind, as well as his moral seriousness, was shown as the college began coeducation. Office space being short in Johnson Chapel, he offered to share his with the first women appointed in English, Elizabeth Brass, and following her untimely death, with other younger colleagues. Wholly without the dig-in-your-heels-the-best-days-are-behind-us mentality that has been known to afflict professors, especially male ones, as they age, he kept vigorously in touch with the new faculty as well as the students during the changes of the 1970s and '80s. As Dean of Freshmen, he showed a humorous sympathy with the trials of new students, never losing his memory of being a very green freshman from the Middle West.

He was a member and longtime faculty advisor of Alpha Delta Phi but was without sentimentality about the fraternity system. Once long ago he gave a talk titled "Have Fraternities Lasting Values?" and began it by saying "It is perfectly obvious to anyone that fraternities do have lasting values. But the trouble is that precisely those values in them which are lasting, are the wrong ones." With the admission of women to the college, it became necessary to level the playing field one way or another. And he satisfied himself with his usual scruples, that the fraternity ethos had become bankrupt. So when he assumed the presidency in 1983, and with the backing of the Board of Trustees, he determined it was time to abolish fraternities at Amherst. It was an unpopular decision for some students and many alumni who revealed their annoyance that certain "lasting values" were no longer to be honored by the college. As an Amherst graduate and a fraternity man, Armour was in a stronger position to act on this matter than would have been his presidential successor. But it was not an easy ending over which to preside. The courage of his decision was met with an explicit rancor from some students and alumni that spoilt somewhat the finishing achievement of his acting presidency. But Peggy and he enjoyed their brief tenure in what they called "the big house" even as her slow, fatal ordeal of cancer became the measure of their lives.

When Armour retired from teaching, a book of tributes from former students and colleagues was presented to him. By all odds, the shortest and most memorable of these was a four-line poem submitted by a true poet, James Merrill of the class of 1947. There is no better tribute a student or a college could have paid to this teacher:

Taught to read close and to forswear the vague    
And that no truth endures except in fiction,    
A sophomore delivered by Conviction    
In Shining Armour thanks Professor Craig.

Howell Chickering   
Richard Cody   
Joel E. Gordon   
Helen von Schmidt   
William H. Pritchard

On September 28, 1999 historian and teacher, Asa J. Davis died and left this community. Asa was one of the founders of the Black Studies department at Amherst College. He taught here from 1970 until his retirement in 1992. In the fullest sense of the word, Professor Davis was a unique presence on this campus and in the Five Colleges generally.

Asa was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1922 and one could still detect just a tinge of a Tennessee accent in his voice if listening carefully. He was raised primarily in New York City and educated in its public schools. He was particularly proud that he had attended Frederick Douglass junior high school in Harlem. From those experiences, in the 1930s he remembered visits to his school by the scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the poet, Langston Hughes. As a student in the thirties Asa first encountered Douglass's Narrative of his slave experience, a book only taught in black schools in those years because it was out of print.

Asa was the product of both America's historically black schools and colleges and of Harvard. As an undergraduate, he attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, the oldest black college in America. While he was at Wilberforce, the flagship school of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of that denomination's bishops was Asa's uncle, Monroe Davis. During part of the time Asa was enrolled at Wilberforce, its president was Charles H. Wesley, a Harvard-trained historian and a major contributor to the growing field of African American history. Asa was a well-connected participant in the religious and intellectual life of Wilberforce, but he learned much in these years about the old adage, "there's no fight like a church fight." Asa's undergraduate years were interrupted in 1943 when he entered the United States Army in World War II. By the time he completed his service and resumed his studies in 1947, both Wesley and his uncle Monroe had come out on the losing side of church battles and had lost their jobs. After graduating from Wilberforce in 1948 Asa went to Harvard Divinity School where he first pursued a three-year course of studies that provided both a broad background in religious history and an S.T.B. degree, the educational credential required for ordination in many Protestant denominations. Receiving this degree in 1951, Asa stayed on at Harvard to complete a one year Master's program and then worked on a Ph. D., which he received in 1960. Much influenced by the emphasis on classical church history and meticulous philological scholarship then very strong in the study of religion at Harvard, Asa prepared as his dissertation a critical edition of an Ethiopian Monophysite text. As part of this work, Asa also examined the spread of Islam in Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. The preparation necessary to pursue that project included not only the usual European scholarly languages of French and German, but also a working knowledge of Ethiopic, Amharic, and Arabic.

Moreover, Asa also mastered Portuguese, which became increasingly central to his post-dissertation work. Ford and Rockefeller grants took him to archives in Portugal, Italy, and Egypt, where he pursued the complex early modem history of the Portuguese in Africa, in Ethiopia, and especially in the kingdom of Kongo. Eventually, this interest broadened out to include the whole history of blacks in Lusophone Africa and Brazil. Though he remained primarily an Africanist, his historical interests were very widespread, crossing many borders and ethnicities. He especially sought to understand the broad impact of European colonialism and of human migration on the history of the modem world. His writings ranged from numerous articles on medieval Ethiopia to essays and translations concerning sixteenth century Kongo, to studies in nineteenth-century West African Islam and African-Brazilian abolitionism. At Amherst, Asa taught courses on African history, African nationalism, African cultural survivals in Brazil, Latin America and the Caribbean, and African American history.

Asa taught from 1962-1969 at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where he first met a young art historian, Professor Rowland Abiodun. Asa loved Africa, her people, and the promise he saw in her intellectuals. During his seven-year sojourn at the University of Ibadan, Africa's premier institution of higher learning, Asa developed intimate and life-long professional relationships with the foremost African scholars of history, religion and African Studies. They include E. A. Ayandele, the leading authority on church missionary history in Nigeria; the late Kenneth Dike, Professor of History at Harvard (one of Asa's mentors), who became the first African Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan; and Adeagbo Akinjogbin, one of the preeminent historians of Dahomey, its neighbors, and the slave trade, as well as the founding editor of ODU, The Journal of West African Studies, based at the University of Ife. Asa also contributed to the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, serving as its assistant editor for three years. Until the time of his death, Asa spoke passionately of his experiences in Africa in the 1960s, the period of transition from colonialism to independence. Being present at the birth of the independence of many African states forever shaped Professor Davis's interests in the story of African nationalism. Asa collaborated with many African colleagues on research projects of mutual interest to Africans and African descendants in the United States and Brazil. Upon his return to America in 1969, Asa taught briefly at San Francisco State University before coming to Amherst.

It is no accident that Asa's early teaching career was in Africa and not the United States. At the time Asa received his Ph. D. from Harvard, there was no special sense of urgency among American colleges and universities to add blacks to their faculties or student bodies. Asa's coming to Amherst was made possible only by the transforming influence on American higher education of the civil rights and black power movements, and this circumstance put a permanent mark on his career here. Arriving at the College in the fall of 1970 as a professor of history and the new chair of a fledgling Black Studies department, Asa's position at Amherst was from the outset challenging and problematical. What one learned from coming up in black schools, from being well-connected in the AME Church, or from having taught in Africa for seven years, was neither quickly recognized nor easily apprehended by most of Amherst. And, if it was Asa the Harvard-trained scholar who seemed more suited to win the respect of his colleagues, it was a match that was never fully made.

Appointed in somewhat irregular fashion, in the midst of an intense political climate, and with significant Five-College participation, Asa was not everywhere received by much of Amherst College with the usual enthusiasm typically accorded a new senior colleague. Nor, it must be said, did Asa's sometimes oblique manner help in overcoming the initial suspicion with which he had to contend. It was difficult for Asa to establish a sustained scholarly conversation with many of his Amherst colleagues. His love for his subjects was an obvious one, as was his zeal as a dogged researcher. Professor Blight also remembers occasions in archives around the country where he looked up to find Asa across the table from him (at the Schomburg Library in New York and the Houghton Library at Harvard), plowing through collections of documents. To most of his Amherst colleagues, however, Asa remained a scholarly enigma.

If at Amherst Asa remained an elusive personality, he quickly built a world of his own in the Black Studies department - and in the larger Five College black community. Here, in ways often not fully seen or appreciated by his colleagues, he was a critically important voice. At the end of his first year at Amherst, in June 1971, Asa wrote a letter of protest in the Hampshire Gazette, chastizing the Northampton Police Chiefs effort to ban as an "obscene" book the 1960s classic, Manchild in the Promised Land, a work about racism and poverty by Claude Brown. In the letter, Asa wrote with a sure voice: "The obscenity which is alleged to characterize the book," he said, "strikes us as inhering, instead, in the fact that too many people must live the life there depicted, and that ever since the 18th century, the testimony offered by black people concerning their experience in America has been systematically suppressed."

Asa is remembered as an enthusiastic and gracious conversationalist among his former students and colleagues; his kindness won him the devotion of many people. At Asa's funeral in October 1999, he was remembered lovingly and profoundly by his family, his children, and grandchildren, by a friend from his Wilberforce years who traveled across the country to pay tribute, and especially by former students. For many black students who attended Amherst in the 1970s and 80s, they came of age as black history entered the curriculum, and became what C. Vann Woodward once called the "moral storm center of American history." Asa Davis was their pilot in that storm. Such personal testimonials were repeated at a special memorial service in his honor last Sunday, April 2, during Black Alumni weekend here at Amherst College. Clearly, to many black graduates of Amherst, Asa Davis was a special - both real and symbolic - presence in their lives and their learning. After his retirement; Asa often held court among University of Massachusetts students at that campus's Student Center, talking about current affairs, race relations, or any historical problem with all comers. Some former U-Mass students testified at Asa's funeral that were it not for his guidance and listening, they would never have finished college. Asa's influence on young blacks trying to make their way in this world of higher education in the Pioneer Valley went well beyond the corner of Routes 9 and 116. Upon his retirement, friends and former students endowed the Asa Davis Prize, which goes to the student each year who writes the best senior thesis in history on Africa or the African diaspora.

Asa is survived by a closely-knit family: his wife Jane, a son, Asa, who lives in Northampton, three daughters, Beryl of Boston, Stephanie of Washington, DC, and Bridget of Amherst, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Asa Davis's life was a personal odyssey of discovery and teaching, from Tennessee to Harlem, from Wilberforce to Harvard and Ibadan, in African, Portuguese, and American archives, and from the AME Church to Amherst College.

This memorial minute is submitted by Rowland Abiodun, David Blight, Rhonda CobhamSander, and David Wills.

Benjamin DeMott taught English at Amherst College for just under forty years, from his appointment in 1951 to his retirement in 1990. It's fair to say that no other English teacher at the college offered such a variety of courses and subjects: from Shakespeare to Contemporary Cultural Studies; from 17th and 18th-century English writers to continental fiction of the 20th century; from Ben Jonson to Bruce Springsteen. In each of these courses, he kept true to his belief, as declared in one of his essays, that "English" was "the place wherein the chief matters of concern are particulars of humanness--individual feeling, individual human response, and human time, as these can be known through the written expression."

Although a voluble anecdotalist who delighted in laying out comic scenarios in which he more than occasionally figured, Ben DeMott was relatively reticent about his life before Amherst. Born in Rockville Center, Long Island, the son of Gerard and Janet DeMott, his father was a builder and contractor, his mother a practitioner of faith healing ("the bitter child of Christian Science" DeMott once privately referred to himself). After graduating from high school he spent an undergraduate year at Johns Hopkins, then served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945. After the war he married Margaret (Peggy) Craig; they would have four children. He took his undergraduate degree at George Washington University then went on to Harvard where he completed his PH.D. in remarkably quick time. At Amherst in the early 1950's, he taught three courses each semester, serving as a bulwark in the freshman and sophomore staff courses in Composition and in Interpretation of Literature, where he joined such luminaries as Theodore Baird, Reuben Brower, G. Armour Craig, C.L. Barber, and others. What distinguished DeMott from numerous other young instructors who, in those days, were hired to teach the staff courses, and who then, after serving for a few years, were invited to move on, was that DeMott established himself as--in one of his own phrases--a Keeper. The extraordinary effect that he had on students from the beginning showed itself when, having completed his first four years of teaching, he was elected by the senior class to be their speaker at Senior Chapel. In a memorable talk, recently reprinted by the college and titled "Amherst and Other Institutions," DeMott made the case for why, without sentimentalizing the experience of college days, they--the about to be graduates--should feel some sense of loss, since as he put it "you have been for a while in a place of feelings and of felt connections, and that is how the college should go on reverberating in your imagination." There was no way after such a performance, added to his other achievements, that the man was going to be anything but tenured by the college.

His Harvard dissertation was about some English 17th-century speculative language projects, and his first published article, "Comenius and the Real Character in England," appeared in PMLA with thirty-two substantial footnotes to guarantee its scholarly authenticity. But although early in his career he published a few other "professional" articles, his main inclinations in writing were elsewhere. They could be seen in various short stories he published in little magazines like Partisan Review, and in the quite extraordinary number of essays and review-articles, he began in 1957 to publish in Partisan, Hudson, Kenyon, and other journals. Not only were these pieces (as he called them) not about English l7th-century writing, they were not, strictly speaking, about "English" as traditionally practiced in the academy. Instead, their subjects were, to name a few; Washington politics, New York literary culture, the phenomenon of "sick" humor, the New Math, the Peace Corps, and others. These "pieces" were densely written, exhibiting the twists and turns of a complex mind concerned to explore an underexplored subject as well as committed to entertaining an intelligent reader. This is exactly what they did.

DeMott the novelist made his debut in 1959 with The Body's Cage. This tautly imagined story about a young boy's conflict with a "healer" whom his father brings into the house to care for the boy's ill mother and younger sister, is voiced with subtlety and technical resourcefulness. It rightly received sympathetic reviews and also inaugurated a fertile creative period--1960 to 1971--in which he produced four volumes of essays and a further novel, won two Guggenheim fellowships as well as the E. Harris Harbison Award for distinguished teaching, and, to speak of humbler matters, chaired the Amherst English department for three years. The range of subjects in these four volumes of essays--Hells and Benefits, You Don't Say, Supergrow, and Surviving the Seventies, has been noted; their attempt was, as stated in the preface to Supergrow, to imagine "what was going on in the mind, say, of an adversary teacher in Mississippi, or in the mind of a homosexual's neighbors at an eastern watering-place." The "arena" in which the worth of such imagining was to be judged, he insisted, was not literary (as in this writer is superior to that writer) but rather, in a word he would use more than once, "dailiness"--"ordinary human encounter, family life experience, the supper table." Although DeMott's name would be mentioned in the 1960s in the company of writers like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, apostles of "the new Journalism," his interests were quite divergent from theirs, whether the subject was literature or the "life" DeMott felt was too often ignored by academic critics and teachers of literature.

This concern to imagine "innerness" can be seen in his second novel, A Married Man; in the countless columns, he wrote during the sixties and seventies for journals such as The American Scholar, Harpers, The Atlantic; but most notably, at least for purposes of this faculty minute--in his Amherst classrooms. For some twenty years beginning in the late 1960s, Ben DeMott may well have been the leading critic in the United States of how literature is taught, and how it might be taught. These years coincide with both the heyday of New Critical pedagogy and of what, in the minds of many, was in the process of replacing it, the American domestication of continental literary theory. The sources of DeMott's practice, however, lay elsewhere: indeed, his thinking about the English classroom was largely homegrown, the result of his own evolving experience with Amherst students and faculty. In English 1-2, English 21-22, in the later English 11 and the English Junior Seminar, his sustained weekly participation in staff meetings challenged a generation of younger members. Instead of what he was a master of, the kind of close reading that had notably thrived at Amherst and Harvard, Ben formulated his practice of what--in the title of a 1500-page textbook he published in 1988--he called Close Imagining. The substance of this activity he described in his essay in Teaching What We Do, the volume of faculty essays edited by Peter Pouncey: "In a good class," he wrote, "the efforts of student and teacher bring an imagined human innerness alive." If that formulation makes it sound like what all literature teachers think they are always doing, you may be confident that in DeMott's hands the result was frequently revelatory. To hear him in a staff meeting evoke what lies in a single line of King Lear's very last speech, "Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir," was to be instructed as one had never been instructed. The point was not to link, as the New Critics did, the words to similar words uttered by Lear as he tries to clothe Poor Tom on the stormy heath. The point was to arrive, through the give and take of student and teacher, at what precisely are the nuances of feeling in play at such a moment.

He had written in Supergrow that a teacher "should remind himself that most [people] don't know what they feel, hence sometimes feel nothing; and the literature teacher and the writing teacher are [those] whose gifts and sensibilities are means by which others can be awakened to contrarieties and puzzles of ordinary response." Much easier said than done, surely, but doing it well may send readers where they have most need to go. For many, at Amherst and elsewhere, Ben was the most valuable teacher of teachers, whose lesson was always to think for oneself, always to be alert for classroom opportunities to come freshly to representations of human interaction. This is at the heart of his legacy to the College, and it received succinct testimony in a letter from one of his students after his death, recalling classroom moments in which literature was brought to life--moments such as the loneliness of Eben Flood's party of one, Keats's fears that he would die before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain, the fly buzzing in Emily Dickinson's scene of the end. Imagine, that freshmen would be given the credit to gather an inkling for inhabiting such moments of literature conversant in the deeps of life! We saw the deer outside the house about to spring away in Hardy, we felt the heightened erotic tension in Updike of a young husband seeing a young woman up to her angular flat. From simple, confined moments accurately drawn, to ones of more telling and grand theme, we took from life and learned what learning might entail.

It would be pedantic and solemn in a way Ben DeMott would have scoffed at to enumerate the countless organizations, committees, panels, and symposia at colleges and universities on which he served. Once asked to speak to new faculty members at the college, he was encouraged to say something about what, besides grading papers, there was to do on weekends in this small Massachusetts town. To which he replied: New York is that way; Boston that way. Ben was an unconventional academic who never quite fitted in with standard definitions of the professor. This attribute made him a controversial figure but also one of the most invigorating presences at Amherst. As someone said about the philosopher William James, "It was the unacademic" qualities that made him our leading academician." Ben was life-giving.

A former student, Richard Todd, with reference to his professor's spiffy sartorial getup said "He always looked as though he'd just gotten off the train from New York--which he had!" DeMott's schedule of out-of-town appearances wedged in around full-time teaching was astonishing; when he was on sabbatical he worked even harder, in and out of town: Guggenheim selection committees, National Book Awards, ACLS and Arts Counsel grants, gigs at various community colleges, teaching black students in West Point, Mississippi, or at Bethune-Cookman College in Florida. It was work, but for him, as for the man in Frost's poem, the work was play for mortal stakes. Sometimes the stakes weren't quite so high, and some of us have vivid memories of the late-sixties Poker Club, a monthly organization that flourished on its eight or so members figuring out new ways to humiliate and insult one another around the table. DeMott's technique was to show up at this nickel-dime-quarter game, with a fat money clip, placed on the table in plain, intimidating sight. That he then proceeded to bet conservatively and cannily added to the chagrin we felt. There is also the pleasing image of DeMott at the piano, initiating barrelhouse extended solos in the manner of his idol, the great swing pianist Jess Stacy, or--unexpected from him--versions of another idol, the angular modernist Thelonious Monk. Just a few years ago, at the urgings of family members, he produced a CD titled Worthington Breakdown (titled after his residence in the Massachusetts hills) on which he played and sang various classic tunes, most vigorously "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas" and, most wistfully, his version of "Don't Blame Me." (The latter may in fact have been a suggestion for this very Minute.)

His retirement in 1990 served as incentive for a sequence of books on, in the language of their subtitles, why Americans can't think straight about matters of class, race or gender. The Imperial Middle, The Trouble with Friendship, Killer Woman Blues, and most recently Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind, are polemics filled with examples from popular culture, the newspapers, TV and the movies. He courageously persisted in the writing of these books through a series of operations, and the fact that they are currently in print (always a matter of importance) is testimony to their reach and the influence they exerted on other minds. In October of 2004 in Harper's Magazine, he published a withering criticism of how in his view the 9/11 commission report defrauded the nation. "Whitewash as Public Service," should be admired as the exemplary act of a public intellectual who, in his reading of the tone and style of said report, was also very much a critic and teacher of its English.

Saying farewell is hard to do without being mawkish or pompous or bureaucratic, so a way to conclude may be to recall some graceful and heartfelt words spoken by Ben DeMott at the conclusion to his speech to the Amherst College senior class in May 1955. They may serve to celebrate the poise of his close imagining, even on such a public occasion. He had been speaking about his belief in the possibilities of personal connections at the institution of Amherst College: And since I claim the belief I am reluctant to conclude with an impersonal salute. I must first face those among you I know--those whose taste and intelligence I have admired, and whose passing grins and waves seemed to me always to express the appropriate measure of comic astonishment that freshmen became juniors then seniors had not yet outlived their first-year instructor. To these, I only say that even the poet allows that

There is a time for the evening under lamplight    
(The evening with the photograph album)

--the moment of idle remembering when names and faces and perhaps someone's joke wells mysteriously up from the past--and that is a moment I shall enjoy.

Respectfully submitted:

John Cameron   
David Sofield   
Ronald Tiersky   
Kim Townsend

ANNE LEBECK

Please click on link to view the Faculty Memorial Minute for Anne Lebeck.   
 

Anne Lebeck

Richard M. Foose, Samuel A. Hitchcock Professor of Mineralogy and. Geology, emeritus, died November 26, 1994. He was 79.

"Pete," as he was known, came to Amherst in 1963 as a full Professor with tenure, replacing George Bain. He came here with a well-earned reputation for starting up Geology Departments. Pete retired in 1986.

During the decade after he arrived, our Geology Department was indeed revitalized. The department was awarded several National Science Foundation matching-funds grants that resulted in refurbishing old and creating a new classroom, laboratory and office space. Grants were awarded for undergraduate research, and it became mandatory for all seniors to do a thesis. In 1965, the department received a fourth tenure track position.

Pete Foose organized spring field trips for Amherst students, including many who were not geology majors. These encompassed such varied topics as the geologic history exposed along the canyon of the Colorado River in 1966, and on the coral reefs, the beach erosion, and the bedrock geology of Bermuda in 1968, of Tobago in 1970 and again in 1971, and of Tortola in 1984. Advanced students working under Pete were encouraged to publish their thesis research in professional journals. The most important topics included the buried Connecticut River channel east of Mt. Warner (today an important aquifer), and a Jurassic-age volcanic neck near Mt. Tom.

Pete taught for more than 35 years at the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association (often called YBRA), the geology field camp in Montana, and encouraged all our majors to attend. Pete was elected Councilor of the YBRA in 1951 and retired two years ago. He was President of YBRA 1985-87, and was the inspiration behind the gift by Dr. Porteus Johnson (Class of '28) to build the "Amherst Cabin". In town matters, Pete was 10 years on the advisory board of the Lawrence Swamp Technical Advisory Committee for discovering, developing and protecting our drinking water supply.

In his 23 years of teaching here, he was committed to Structural Geology and Geology 11. In addition, though, in the late 1970s, he developed a course entitled "Geology of the Ocean Basins" which caused him belatedly, and perhaps reluctantly, to become convinced of the efficacy of plate tectonics, and in the early 1980's he developed another new course, "Geology and Public Issues" that integrated his 40 years of practical experience in engineering geology with student interest in environmental problems. The latter course was nearly always oversubscribed.

Pete developed his personal relationships with students through frequent invitations to his and Dottie's home; they never forgot a name. She made the best Baked Alaska ever. On the matter of his dealings with students and their problems, he could be quite rigorous, though always optimistic about improvement, a quality some only came to appreciate after they had acquired greater maturity.

Pete's scholarly focus at Amherst was structural geology, but his 50+ publications include a wide variety of topics. He was an expert on landslides, tunnels and dams, landfills and water resources, surface collapse in limestone terrane, and mineral resources such as iron, aluminum, and manganese. He wrote an article (with John Lancaster) on Amherst's Edward Hitchcock. He became enthusiastically involved with a fascinating undersea treasure hunt with Warren C. Stearns (Class of '62), and in order for the team to find the 1641 wreck of the Concepcion, he was instrumental in designing the first hand-held undersea magnetometer.

After graduating in Chemistry from Franklin and Marshall College in 1937, Pete taught Chemistry at Northwestern University for two years, and then joined the Pennsylvania Geological Survey. While at the Survey from 1939 to 1946, he mapped geologic quadrangles, he developed information on the State's mineral resources, he completed a Ph. D. in two years at Johns Hopkins University under the direction of the world-class structural geologist, Ernst Cloos, he served as the Pennsylvania Survey's chief of strategic mineral investigations during World War II, he was Geologist for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (7 railroad tunnels were converted to vehicular traffic under his watchful eye), and he was consultant to mineral exploration companies in South Africa and the Ryuku Islands. During this time he also became an authority on predicting landslides. Any one of these assignments would have been a full-time job.

In 1946 he left the Pennsylvania Geological Survey to found the Department of Geology at Franklin and Marshall College. There he assembled a strong group of faculty and over the next 11 years, they developed a rigorous program, unusual for its day, of requiring not only a great deal of fieldwork but also chemistry as background for geological studies. Quoting from Donald U. Wise (one of Foose's students at F & M, who later became a Professor at F & M, and for 21 years has been a Professor of Geology at UMass): "Pete had a very practical approach to everything and instilled a confidence in all of his students that they could do almost anything they set their mind to. He made it almost a religion to look out for his students in terms of jobs and graduate school." While at F & M, Pete spent four years as Geologist for the Military Geology Branch of the U. S. Geological Survey. He won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Rangoon, Burma in 1950 and a Ford Foundation Fellowship to Stanford University in 1955-56. And it was in the late 1940s that Pete began a life-long consulting relationship with the Hershey Foundation of Pennsylvania. For more than 42 years he was involved with their problems related to building foundations, sanitary landfill sites, water pollution, and surface collapse. In 1955, he got an NSF grant for the study of structural geology of the Beartooth Mountains, Montana; this resulted in his most quoted publication on the origin of those mountains.

Though Pete left F & M in 1957, his influence lingered, and in the 1980s that school and Amherst were two of the top three colleges in the United States in numbers of graduates in Geology moving ahead to complete a Ph. D. program. The third was Williams.

In 1957 Pete Foose joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI). There he created the department of Earth Sciences and was its first chair. Most of his assignments with SRI led to study in western Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South Africa, Morocco, central and southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and the Hawaiian Islands. The exhilaration of travel was a fringe benefit he greatly enjoyed, especially with his wife Dottie. During his time at SRI, he was Consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and in 1959 he served as a member of the technical working group at the discussions with the Soviets in Geneva on nuclear testing. In 1960 he testified before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the U.S. Congress. He developed friendships with Soviet geologists that carried through into the 1980s. He left SRI in 1962 and accepted an NSF senior post-doctoral fellowship to study the role of vertical tectonics in crustal deformation at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Technical Institute) at the University of Zurich. From there he came to Amherst College.

Pete was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geographical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a distinguished lecturer for the American Geological Institute five times. He prepared more than 50 unpublished _ consulting reports for some 20 corporations in the U.S. and abroad. He was associate editor with the American Institute of Mining Engineers and with the American Geological Institute. He gave the keynote address at a NATO symposium on the "Geology of the Mediterranean Basin" in 1982. In 1984 he was invited to participate in formal meetings of the 27th International Geologic Congress in Moscow, USSR.

Pete Foose brought to Amherst College a wide and varied professional background, as well as a keen interest in the development of undergraduate students. This combination enabled him to attempt to reestablish geology at Amherst on a level commensurate with the College's long and distinguished history of the subject. We salute his distinguished career and his many achievements.

Respectfully submitted:

Duane W. Bailey    
Edward S. Belt, Chair    
Gerald P. Brophy    
John Lancaster    
James G. Mauldon

REGINALD F. FRENCH (1906 - 1996)

Reginald F. French was born in West Lebanon, New Hampshire exactly 90 years ago today on May 23, 1906. One central theme in his life became the desire to explore, to understand, and to preserve his New England heritage. It led him to Dartmouth College as an undergraduate and on to Harvard for his graduate degrees. It also induced him, while a teacher at Amherst College, to pursue a secondary career as an antiquarian, collector, and dealer in antiques. Together with his wife Rachel he bought an old house built in 1780 as the home for the miller who ran the Old Grist Mill located down on South Pleasant Street by the Mill Valley bridge over the Freshman River. They turned this colonial building into a showplace and opened a business there, R. and R. French Antiques.

After a number of serious automobile accidents with fatalities occurred around the bridge, the state decided to straighten out the intersection with East Hadley Road at that point and in the process seized the French's house by eminent domain. Reg and Rachel managed with considerable difficulty to buy back their house from the state, to divide it into two sections, to move them both 100 feet to the west and to reassemble the structure again as their home and their place of business.

As an antiques collector, Reg French became an expert in early candlesticks, hearth furniture, delftware and pewter. He wrote many articles on early pewter for the Pewter Collectors Club of America. A close friend once observed that when Reg presents himself for the great feast on judgment Day, if he sees any pewter, he will turn it over to examine the trademark. Reg also compiled a checklist of the paintings by Erastus Salisbury Field which was published in the Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin.

Reg served as President of the Amherst Historical Society for seventeen years. He was Chairman of the Amherst College Committee which helped to arrange for the celebration of Amherst's Bicentennial in 1959. He was also a member of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield and the Connecticut Historical Society. He served at one time on the curatorial staff at Sturbridge Village. He also was a Trustee of the Amherst Academy - a Board which meets once a year to supervise the assets of an Academy which closed in 1868.

Despite all these intensive pursuits into his New England heritage, Reg French's major concern in his teaching and his scholarship lay in the wider and much more ancient field of Italian literature. He earned his M.A. in Romance Languages at Harvard in 1928, spent the year of 1929-30 studying Italian Literature at the University of Rome, and earned his Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Harvard by 1935.

His first teaching post was as an Instructor at the University of Missouri in 193031. He always took pride in having taught in this first year Charles Singleton who would become the leading Dante Scholar in the United States. Reg followed that by four years at Williams College and two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska. He came back to New England and to Amherst in 1937 where, along with Geoff Atkinson, George Funnell, Ralph Williams, King Turgeon and Al Johnson he filled out a remarkably harmonious Romance Language Department.

Al Johnson was an early Amherst student of his and recalls:

"As a student of Italian, I remember with great clarity and pleasure   
the many sessions reading, discussing and enjoying the language, the   
thoughts, and the feelings of Boccaccio, Dante, Castiglione, Machiavelli,   
Petrarca - even I Promessi Sposi - et al. in Reg's upstairs northeast comer   
office in Grosvenor House.

"Reg was casual, but very demanding, always ready to laugh or to ask for a look at the opposite side of the coin under discussion. The classes were always small, even tiny. In fact, I think on occasion I may have been the only student, fortunately."

After World War II when Amherst adopted its so-called "New Curriculum" with its many required core courses in Freshman and Sophomore years Reg French became a pillar of the Humanities course. Jack Pemberton remembers:

"George Funnell and then John Moore chaired the course. We met every Monday afternoon for an hour or two and occasionally at John's home for further conversations in the evening. Reg was always a lively participant in the discussions and took the lead when we read the Divine Comedy. He delighted in Dante's poetic imagination and the levels of interpretation the poet invited, the sweep and grandeur of the poem, and the subtle, obscure, teasing references, the interlocking rhyme pattern of the terza rima. No translation satisfied him. Hence he read to us the Italian to give us a feel for the language, the interplay of sounds with which the poem was composed. His delight became ours.

"Reg understood the history and rhythms of the Catholic liturgy which he believes provided the ground bass of the Comedy and enabled him to combine meaning and feeling in his analysis of the poem.

"One matter did distress him. The Humanities staff rarely agreed to read beyond the Inferno. 'To permit our students to remain in Hell is to miss the point!' he would declare."

Reg was, of course, a member of the Modern Language Association and served as chairman of its Italian section in 1949. At Amherst, he served as Chair of the Committee on Educational Policy in the early 1960s.

In 1930 Reg French married Rachel Clapp who had been trained as an artist. In 1934 they had a daughter, Rebecca, and in 1941 they had twins, Richard and Polly. Rachel French started one of Amherst's most useful institutions, the Grace Church Clothing Exchange in 1948, and she continued to manage it for the next eighteen years. Both of them, in fact, maintained long, close, and active relations with Grace Church.

One colleague has summed up the feelings of all those who knew Reg French:

"He was a gentleman in every sense of the term - poised, easily met, possessing a graceful wit, patient, rarely showing irritation in faculty meetings even when having to report and answer questions as chair of the Committee on Educational Policy."

Respectfully submitted,

Joel Gordon   
Ted Greene, Chair    
John Halsted    
Al Johnson    
Peter Marshall   
Jack Pemberton

Prosser Gifford

Prosser Gifford was born on May sixteenth, 1929 in New York City and died in his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts on July fifth of this year. He was 91.  Prosser was, in the true sense of the phrase, a gentleman (quite literally, a gentle man) and a scholar.  He compiled an exceptionally distinguished and broad-gauged academic record.  At Yale, he wrote a summa cum laude thesis on the poetry of Wallace Stevens; he remained a lover of poetry all his life.  In 1953 he earned a B.A. from Merton College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1956 and a Ph.D. in History, again at Yale, in 1964. 

Prosser became an assistant professor of History at Yale, teaching African history and preparing his thesis on the Rhodesias for possible publication.  One rainy day in the fall of 1966, a tall man came into his office, his poncho dripping wet, and announced, “I am Cal Plimpton.  [He was president of Amherst at the time.] I believe in education and I think you believe in education.”  They chatted for a short while, after which Cal invited Prosser to come up to Amherst for lunch.  So Prosser and his wife Shirley (universally known as Dee Dee) drove up one Sunday, expecting to have lunch with Cal and his wife Ruth.  When they walked in, they discovered that six men were joining them – yes, the Committee of Six.   Soon after, Prosser was offered the job of Dean of the Amherst College Faculty. He would be the first in Amherst’s history.

Life was simpler then.  There were only two deans: a dean of admissions, Bill Wilson, and the Dean, Scott Porter, who was, in effect, the dean of the faculty and students. When Porter died early in 1966, Cal decided to split his responsibilities. Prosser was happily situated at Yale; he imagined he would be staying indefinitely.  But he accepted the job he had been offered and served, with great distinction, from 1967 to 1979.  During those twelve plus years, in the words of a former colleague, he “was able to represent and defend the best traditions of Amherst – i.e., academic freedom and excellence, while simultaneously being open to the ferment of the sixties in areas of feminism, anti-war protest, and race.… He sensitively bridged the traditional college and the new world of the sixties and helped us to navigate successfully through those passionate years.”  A longtime friend described his “capacity to listen with deep attentiveness, to think with nuance, and to speak with insight and thoughtful generosity.”

In the fall of 1969, Cal Plimpton put together a Long Range Planning Committee and under it, task forces that explored many aspects of the college’s life, including one on Size and Coeducation.  The Committee recommended co-education unequivocally. But it was not until November 1974 – five years after Cal had officially introduced the subject – that the Trustees agreed to move forward.  Prosser was definitely in favor of coeducation: the fact he was the proud father of three daughters may have had something to do with it.  As he later said in an Amherst Oral History interview, “It’s a singular disadvantage to men to bring them up as undergraduates when they never encounter brighter women.”  Pross was equally proud of his role in co-educating Amherst’s faculty: there was one woman (Rose Olver) teaching here when he was appointed, and 26 when he left.  Distinguished additions to the faculty during that time include Buffy Aries, Deborah Gewertz, Susan Niditch, Lisa Raskin, and others who are now emeritus, teaching elsewhere, or deceased. 

There remained two other pressing issues of the day: the Vietnam War and race. 

Bill Ward’s arrest at Westover Air Force Base for civil disobedience in the spring of 1972 (the first spring of his presidency) in response to Nixon’s ordering the mining of Haiphong Harbor received national attention---and among a fair number of faculty members and a large number of alumni and trustees, deep dismay.   Prosser “sat in” with Ward, as did about 400 students and a sizeable portion of the faculty.  At the faculty meeting immediately after Ward’s announcement that he was going to get arrested, Prosser read his own letter of protest to Nixon and added that anyone who wanted should sign, which many did.  His opposition to the Vietnam War was clearly evident, though he didn’t play the leading role.

But he did play it in making sure -- as we now might say -- that Black Lives Mattered.  In the spring of 1969, the faculty voted unanimously to establish a Black Studies Department.  After Ward became president the following fall, he entrusted Prosser with the responsibilities and authority to accomplish that seemingly all but impossible task.  How would you define the department’s mission?  What courses would be taught?  Who would teach them?  How could we compete with all the colleges and universities that were looking for Black faculty members?

In the fall Jan Dizard and Gordie Levin offered an Introduction to Black Studies; Prosser participated in some classes.  In 1970 a chairman, a Ph.D. from Harvard who had taught in Nigeria for nine years, was hired, as were two other faculty members.  Obviously, that was not enough, nor were there enough black students being admitted, nor enough black faculty members in other fields, nor enough funding of a Five College tutoring program in Springfield.  Black students and their white allies applied pressure.  During his twelve years as Dean, there were sit-ins, occupations, confrontations, too numerous to cite.  All involved meetings, some of them mass meetings in the Chapel or the gym; Prosser presided over several of them.

The last that took place during Ward’s presidency, in April 1979, the most dramatic, the climactic one, was called because he had announced that Black Freshman Orientation was going to be replaced by an “Ethnic Day,” tacked on to what had been just Freshman Orientation for as long as anyone could remember.  Students had occupied his and Prosser’s offices in Converse and a six-foot cross had been burned (by two black students, as it turned out) on the lawn outside the Charles Drew House just before the meeting.  Accusations flew back and forth. Was the decision “vicious retribution” for “actions of past days”?  Ward stormed out.  Prosser took over, calmly assured everyone that there had been no decision until that afternoon about Orientation and that it had been arrived at with the agreement of representatives of the black community. The crowd dispersed during the speeches that followed. 

Later that spring Ward resigned.  Prosser was ready to go too, but he agreed to stay on in the fall to help with the transition to the administration of Ward’s successor, Julian Gibbs -- an Amherst alumnus.  It had become clear that was what the Trustees wanted.

In 1979 Pross and Dee Dee moved to Washington, D.C where he became deputy director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  He worked with scholars from all over the world to facilitate their research and ran seminars and colloquia.  Eight years later, he moved to the Library of Congress, where he was Director of Scholarly Programs for 15 years “bringing together hundreds of scholars from around the world to collaborate on research, writing, and discussion of national and world issues,” and editing, or co-editing the proceedings of their meetings and many volumes of their essays. 

Prosser was a passionate sailor.  He first met Dee Dee at a sailing race when he was 11 and she was 9.  He crewed for the Bermuda Race a half-dozen times and raced trans-Atlantic twice, once in a hurricane-filled trial from New York to Spain.   In 2005 the Giffords moved to Woods Hole.  Prosser continued to do what he was so good at:  uniting people – “rising above politics,” as he said of his work in Washington and could have said about his work at Amherst – uniting people who were working for a common good.  He was chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Marine Biological Laboratory, an honorary member of the corporation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and president of the Woods Hole Public Library’s board of directors.  He also served for ten years on the board of Hotchkiss, was founding president of the Merton College Charitable Corporation, and a member of the Board of Governors of the Association of Yale Alumni. 

Prosser was wise, humane, and a model of equanimity.   Those of us who knew him personally will never forget his distinctive laugh, a generous, unself-conscious expression of delight.  At Cal Plimpton’s last faculty meeting, Prosser stood up and praised Cal, ending with these words: “He had one great strength – he never took the furor of opposition, lock-outs, sit-ins etc. personally.”  There is no doubt but that one can say the same about Prosser – and be very grateful for his service to Amherst. 

Jack Cameron   
Gordie Levin   
Jane Taubman   
Kim Townsend

Mitzi Goheen

Mitzi Goheen was born on August 15^th 1942 in Bellingham, Washington at her grandparents’ farm, Arborcourt. She grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, where her mother was a librarian and her father worked as a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University after his Marxist political views ended his Harvard career at the height of the McCarthy era.

Mitzi’s academic career began inauspiciously when, at the end of her senior year in high school, where she was a cheerleader, she eloped with the captain of the football team. Over the next twenty years, with the unwavering support of her parents, Mitzi raised her son, Patrick Mahaffey, worked multiple jobs to help support her husband through college, completed her own undergraduate education at Oregon State University, and eventually earned a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1986. These personal details situate the paradoxical cornerstones of Mitzi’s life and career:  a white woman raised before the feminist revolution, whose non-traditional route into a male-dominated profession in academia made her a role model for marginalized female students and students of color at Amherst College; a Harvard-trained economic anthropologist with a soft spot for student athletes, especially football players; an unapologetically Marxist intellectual with a sartorial preference for glamour and glitz; and a loyal friend, for whom the adage “it takes a village to raise a child,” so central to her experience of early motherhood, defined her involvement with the Cameroonian grassfields kingdom of Nso; the unstinting generosity with which she made space in her home for friends in need of shelter; as well as the nurture and love with which she surrounded other people’s children.

Mitzi’s Harvard mentor, the Sri Lankan economic anthropologist, Stanley Tambiah, encouraged his students to take a historically grounded, materialist approach to their fieldwork. Mitzi highlighted this approach in her introduction to  Radical Egalitarianism: Local Realities, Global Relations, an essay collection she co-edited in 2013 in his honor. It also informed her fieldwork in Nso, where she undertook her life’s work and found a true home. Mitzi lived in the Nso kingdom periodically over sixteen years, in the course of which she was accorded the title ​Yaa Nso​ (​Nso Queen​). She proudly wore the ceremonial headgear she received to mark that occasion at many Amherst graduations. She also wore daily the ceremonial antique ivory bracelets she was given, until a misguided customs officer decided that they were smuggled contraband and confiscated them.

As a respected elder in the Nso community, Mitzi saw it as her responsibility to nurture and support all its members. Each time she returned, she took with her mountains of clothing, ranging from serviceable sweaters and jackets that were much needed by residents of Nso’s chilly, mountainous grassfields, to stylish and completely impractical high heels and cocktail dresses that also were much sought after. One year, she had T-shirts bearing images of Nso’s royal family printed for all the children in the community, and she always made sure that the other female elders distributed her contributions equitably. Mitzi also paid the school fees for several children in Nso, organized donations of scarce pharmaceutical supplies for Nso’s Baptist mission-run hospital, and made sure that the young men and women who helped her collect data for her research projects received ongoing professional training when their work with her ended. Further afield, she worked indefatigably to support the careers of African scholars engaged in cultural and economic research. These included Amherst Copeland fellows Nantang “Ben” Jua, now a professor of political economy at South Carolina State University; Jacob Olupona, now professor of African religious traditions at Harvard University; and Cyprian Fisy, who went on to become Director of the Social Development Department of the Sustainable Development Network at the World Bank.

The major fruit of Mitzi’s academic labor in Cameroon was her monograph Men Own The Fields, Woman Own The Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroonian Grassfields, published in 1996 by the University of Wisconsin Press and considered today a classic in anthropology and gender studies. The study examines how in precolonial and colonial Nso culture the division of labor and property broke along gender and community lines. Men owned the fields and women owned the crops, but this arrangement, far from being settled and uncontested, was the subject of constant negotiation within households and communities. Women worked the land that their husbands owned, that ownership coming either by inheritance or delegation from the chief. Women farmed the land and sold the harvest, but the husband could assert the right to the profits from those sales. While men benefited from the sale of crops, many women had sufficient power--derived from their economic productivity--to retain a portion of their profits and to allocate some of the produce for household consumption. In the post-colonial years, the trend that had begun in the later colonial period of growing increasing quantities of cash crops led to a shift in the gendered balance of power, with men taking the profits from all cash crops for their personal use. These stark social and economic changes were mediated through a discourse of culture and "tradition," with women and men deploying different notions of what "tradition" required. Mitzi's study demonstrates how this gendered dynamic informed the complex historical process that determined systems of land tenure, external and internal politics, and marriage in the communities around Nso. It also speculates that such shifts may have contributed to the emergence of a new class of elites, as it is mostly better-educated women from wealthy families who have managed to maintain their former gendered power in the household.

Mitzi’s classes at Amherst were always heavily enrolled. Consequently, she had numerous opportunities to challenge the ideological assumptions of a wide variety of students over the three decades of her teaching career. Her introductory anthropology course was the first sustained encounter with the theory of evolution for most of the first year students who took it, and Mitzi spent hours each fall semester vigorously dismantling the skepticism a not insignificant number of them harbored about the theory's validity. Similarly, Mitzi’s popular course on African cultures and societies disabused generations of students of the notion that the continent of Africa had no culture, introducing them to a wide range of African states, each with its distinctive cultural forms and complex social histories. In her course on economic anthropology, a favorite with athletes heading to careers on Wall Street, students encountered alternative economic systems that operated successfully alongside the mainstream economic models they knew best. For many American students at Amherst, Mitzi’s courses marked a turning point in their intellectual development, the moment they were first challenged to revise their assumptions about how cultures and societies operated beyond their small corner of the world. For international students, especially students from Africa, Mitzi’s courses validated social structures and socio-economic realities they had experienced but had never had the opportunity to examine from an academic perspective.

By the end of her time at Amherst College, Mitzi had become increasingly disillusioned with academia. Although her mathematician father had been at the forefront of the computational developments that launched the digital age, she never made peace with the computerization of the workplace. To the very end of her career she wrote out her copious comments on students’ weekly papers by hand, even when arthritis made that an exceedingly painful exercise, and she could never remember her email password. A social theorist who traced her intellectual pedigree through the works of Gramsci, Habermas, De Certeau, and Baudrillard, she deplored what she saw as the increasingly transactional nature of relationships between students and faculty and between the faculty and the administration, abandoning attendance at faculty meetings well before she entered phased retirement. She especially distrusted the rationalization of college bureaucracy and our growing reliance on virtual networks over face to face communication to get faculty business done. From her obdurately Marxian perspective, she divined in our willingness to go along with these changes a capitulation to the demands of late capitalism that she feared would destroy what was most valuable about communities, within and beyond academia. The irony that these memorial remarks will enter the faculty record remotely would not have been lost on her.

Mitzi not only valued the face to face interactions, the rituals and the story-telling that were the foundations of her anthropological praxis; she also understood the centrality of food to such rituals. Many of her colleagues dined at her table, drank wine, sometimes palm wine, and saved roasted chickens from being scorched, as they swapped stories long into the night. Mitzi brought this love of food and nurturing to the classroom as well.  Long after gluten free snacks and zero calorie drinks had become the rage, she insisted on sharing junk food with her students on a weekly basis. The last course Mitzi taught in Fall 2015 was a first year seminar for a group of students who have now completed their senior year at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. I remember that they pooled their resources to buy the junk food for their last class with Mitzi - a cake covered with chocolate frosting - and to give her a card thanking her for spoiling them rotten. I remember, too, that Mitzi asked me repeatedly to keep an eye on Chimaway Lopez, a Native American student in that group, who would ferry all Mitzi’s books and bags back to her office at the end of class and then stay on for hours talking about ideas—in the way Mitzi felt students who were genuinely interested in intellectual growth should want to do at a college like Amherst. This fall, Chimaway will become the first student in the inaugural cohort of Mellon-Mays minority fellows at Amherst to enter a PhD program. We think Mitzi would have been proud to know that he is planning to follow in her footsteps, making the ideas about social justice and alternative models of community that he discussed with her the centerpiece of his future academic research.

Those of us who knew Mitzi well were conflicted about preparing this memorial. Mitzi adamantly refused to have a retirement party and she often talked about how remote she felt from Amherst College by the end of her career. However, on reflection, we realized that it was important to place into the record of our community the accomplishments of a colleague who understood her life’s work to have been about sustaining community.  Mitzi’s example reminds us that we should not have to choose between investing in valuable academic work and investing in the lives of others; that it is possible to be deeply theoretical and deeply nurturing at the same time; and that there need not be a conflict between the adornment of the body and the improvement of the mind. In addition to her son Pat, daughter-in-law Debbie, and grandchildren Harry, Siobahn, and Alfred, she leaves behind Steve Fjellman, who remained her partner, her caregiver, and hero until the end, as well as two brothers and their families, multiple official and unofficial godchildren, and very many dear friends and colleagues scattered over several continents.

Madame President, these remarks were prepared by Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Rowland Abiodun, Lisa Raskin and Sean Redding. On behalf of my colleagues,  I move that they be entered into the minutes of the faculty by a vote of silence and ask for a copy of the minutes to be sent to Mitzi’s family.

Joel Ethan Gordon, 1930-2021

Joel Ethan Gordon, Stone Professor of Natural Science, joined the physics department at Amherst College in 1957. He retired from the college in 2000.  Joel died on August 10, 2021, at the age of 91.  With his passing the college has lost a great teacher, scholar, and citizen. 

Joel was born on May 9, 1930, in Denver, Colorado.  His family moved to Berkeley, California, in his high school years.  Joel received his undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard University in 1952. After graduation he continued his studies as a Rotary Scholar at Magdalene College of Cambridge University. There he met Pamela (Pomma) Wonfor. He returned to Berkeley for graduate school in physics. He and Pomma were married in Berkeley in 1956. At Berkeley, Joel worked under the supervision of Professor H.B. Silsbee and received a Ph.D. in 1958 for a thesis titled “A Two-stage Magnetic Refrigerator”

Specializing in experimental condensed matter physics, Joel supervised more than 30 honors thesis students and published approximately a hundred papers during his career.  Over the decades, his sustained contributions have included measurements of heat capacities of rare-earth metals and compounds, ferroelectricity, magnetic properties of materials, and how the electrical resistance of high temperature superconductors is affected by applied magnetic fields.  In his post-retirement years, Joel collaborated with Professor Larry Hunter in a completely different field of experimental physics. As part of this work, Joel contributed to the elucidation of how electron spins align in the mantle of the earth.  Joel’s active research in retirement was an inspiration to his colleagues.  

When a former physics major received an honorary degree from the College many years after his graduation, he referred to Joel, only partly in jest, as “the king of heat capacities”! Joel attained this status not only through the work in his lab at the college, but also through national and international collaborations during the summers and sabbaticals.  In the summer of 1963, he along with Amherst colleagues, Professors Colby (Skip) Dempsey and Robert (Bob) Romer, carried out experimental work at Brookhaven National Lab to observe a possible nuclear contribution to the heat capacity of Uranium 235. Their results were the first measurements of hyperfine contribution to the heat capacities of actinide metals.

Not all their efforts were focused on physics research. As Professor Romer recalls,  “On August 27, we spent all day on our experiment, finally put it to bed, and the three of us grabbed a bite to eat, piled into a car and headed for Washington, where the famous March on Washington was to be held the next day. We arrived at the Sheraton about 2 A.M., where my mom had made us a late arrival reservation.  Getting up the next morning, with difficulty, we took a cab down to the mall, hung around for several hours near the Washington Monument, greeted a few fellow travelers from Amherst, and finally began to march. We made it about halfway to the Lincoln Memorial when progress was blocked by the press of people, so we sat at the edge of the Wading Pool with our feet in the water, listening attentively to Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and then, as an unexpected treat, we were introduced to a rising star in the Civil Rights movement, a very young John Lewis. There was a wonderful feeling in the air that day, a sense that the nation’s civil rights problems were on their way to a prompt resolution.”  It was, of course, a naive optimism; only three weeks later came the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Joel was a visiting scientist at Imperial College and Harwell in England, CENG in France, and for many years a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab at the University of California, Berkeley.  

Of all the places that Joel visited for research, the closest to the heart of the entire Gordon family was their visit to Cali, Colombia. In 1968, Joel arrived as a Visiting Professor at the Universidad del Valle (along with Pomma, and their two young sons, Peter and Stephen) under a Rockefeller Foundation grant.  In preparation they had started learning Spanish during the previous months. Joel was bold enough to give his physics lectures in Spanish, which by all accounts were well received. He helped to establish a strong physics program there.  Physics Professor Enrique Castellanos, his wife Tulinga Velasco de Castellanos, their daughter Tulia and the Gordons formed a familial bond that endures through the generations.  

In his long career, Joel served on numerous college committees. He noted with special pride his service on the Committee on Coeducation in 1973.  As a member of the faculty, he thought in terms of the college as a whole, rather than in departmental or divisional terms. Collaborative teaching across divisions was more common in decades past and Joel was an avid participant. He taught in every college-wide requirement. In the Introduction to Liberal Studies program, he taught a course called ‘Light’ in collaboration with other physicists and English professors; he was a co-developer of a course called Nuclear Weapons with professors in Chemistry, History and American Studies. Joel had an extraordinary degree of cultural breadth and depth in literature, the arts, history, and politics, indeed, in all that the liberal arts comprise.  Back in the early fifties, when he was a student in England, he took a job an usher at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden so that he could afford to see the performances. A great conversationalist who was equally able to engage a four-year-old as a physics Nobelist, Joel’s breadth of interests, curiosity, and benevolence were on full display in social settings. In more formal settings, he was a talented interviewer. He established a warm rapport with those he interviewed and then asked probing questions that went to the heart of the matter at hand.  He and Pomma were gracious hosts to many college visitors, and dinner parties in their home were lively events.   

Joel served as chair of the Physics Department many times, and as Director of the Physics Laboratory for a very long time.  He chaired the Resource Letter Committee of the American Association of Physics Teachers for five years and served as the Book Review Editor of the American Journal of Physics for eight. He was a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research and the Union of Concerned Scientists. His commitment to community service beyond the college and the profession took many forms.   

Here's an example. About ten years ago, while he was serving as a member of the Town’s Council on Aging, his daughter-in-law Elaine Leung, gave him an iPad, his first touch-screen device. When he learned that the recommended styluses were rather expensive, Joel decided he could manufacture these at much lower cost.  After experimenting with several ideas, he settled on a design, used hand tools to make about 50 styluses and designed and constructed a holder for each of them. The package was accompanied by a short ‘instruction’ sheet that includes the advertisement that the use of the stylus can improve the user’s score when playing their favorite games. He sold these at $5 apiece, all proceeds going to the Senior Center at Amherst.  It is conjectured that the Center received a bounty in the low three figures through these efforts! Joel joked that he could represent himself as a member of the new generation of entrepreneurs! 

Joel was an excellent teacher. His classroom lectures were designed with care so that students could follow the development of ideas and understand the topics in deep and sophisticated ways.  The collaborations with senior students stood out for him as the best part of the job.  As he put it, “One remembers the good students, but one also remembers the ones who were not so good but were excited by the light of learning.  I guess those students are the most rewarding.”   

He was much admired for his care and support of junior faculty, whether visitors or tenure-line, whether members of the department or not.  Joel took the initiative to promote the careers of colleagues through nominations for local honors and national awards.  Those of us who were initiated into the Amherst classroom through co-teaching our early courses with Joel remember fondly his gentle guidance before, and admonition after, each class meeting.   

In 1987, on the fortieth anniversary of low temperature physics research at Amherst, Joel wrote an essay on its history. Systematic fostering of cutting-edge scientific research was not a common feature of small liberal arts colleges in the late 40s.  But new faculty and those who returned from wartime work had the vision that a cooperative research program in a single subfield by several faculty members would enhance the research profile of the college.  Indeed, this vision was vindicated in the following decades and continues to be true to this day. Joel traces the scientific achievements of lasting impact that arose from the work at Amherst and notes the important contributions of staff in the department’s machine and electronics shops through those decades. Characteristically, he reserves the greatest praise for the many students who worked in the labs over the years. Joel writes, “Yet the most important of all to the success of low temperature physics at Amherst have been the students…[T]hose students have contributed much. Without their intelligence, their eagerness, their insights, and their capacity for hard work, Amherst’s research program would have accomplished very little.”  He notes that these students went on to a variety of distinguished careers: some are physics professors at leading institutions, one became an inventor, and another a professor of comparative literature at the University of Amsterdam.  Whatever their careers, Joel notes that all of them regard their undergraduate research experience as an intrinsic and important part of their liberal arts education.   

Professor Gordon is survived by his sons, Peter and Stephen, daughters-in-law, Elaine Leung and Stacy Gordon, and grandsons, Nicholas, Trevor, Christopher, Rider, and Ethan. 

Respectfully submitted,

David S. Hall

Larry R. Hunter

Kannan (Jagu) Jagannathan (Chair)

Robert H. Romer

John Burt Halsted, the Winkley Professor of History emeritus, died on Wednesday, February 25^th, 2015, almost two decades after retiring from active service at the College.

He was born on September 17, 1926, the son of Henry M. Halsted, an American businessman who was posted in Antwerp, Belgium.  Determined to ensure that John would be a “natural born citizen of the U.S.” and uncertain about exactly what that entailed, John’s mother, Katherine Holmes Halsted, had the birthing bed draped with an American flag and its legs firmly planted in containers of soil brought from New Jersey.  The preparations were unnecessary but tell us about the high ambitions that greeted John’s arrival. 

The Halsteds stayed in Antwerp until John was five when his father took the family back to the United States and a series of new homes—in Washington, D.C., Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Englewood, New Jersey.  John attended the Deerfield Academy and the Dwight-Englewood School, followed by Wesleyan University, where his studies were interrupted by service as a communications officer in the Navy.  John returned to Wesleyan following his discharge from the Navy and graduated in 1948 with the highest honors in history and membership in Phi Beta Kappa.  After completing a master’s degree at Wesleyan the following year, John entered the graduate program in history at Columbia University. 

John had acquired a taste for nineteenth-century literature and political philosophy while at Wesleyan, and Columbia was a logical place to extend his studies.  The University lived and breathed ideas, had an undergraduate curriculum organized around their history, and was home to such wide-ranging thinkers as Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, and Richard Hofstadter.  There was probably no better place to study intellectual history.  John concentrated on nineteenth-century Britain and France, completing a Ph.D. dissertation on the social and political views of the English essayist, Walter Bagehot, in 1954.

John began teaching well before completing his thesis, spurred on, perhaps, by his marriage in 1949 to Betty Nilsen, the lovely woman who would be his life-long companion.  In 1950, only a year after entering the graduate program at Columbia, John took a full-time instructorship at the Stevens Institute of Technology, just across the Hudson from New York City.  There, John taught young engineers history and literature as well as English composition.  After two years in this position, John accepted an instructorship at Amherst. 

The record of John’s teaching during the next forty-five years traces the history of Amherst’s curriculum.  Although John was posted to the History Department, his primary duty was to assist in the large general education courses in the humanities and history that were required of all students under the “new” or Kennedy curriculum.  He did well enough under this system to gain tenure in 1960 but did not look back on the era with enthusiasm.  He was skeptical about the educative value of compulsion and unsympathetic to the design of the general education courses in history.  Unlike their counterparts in English and Science, History 1 and 2 were didactic rather than exploratory.  John wanted to join his students in defining and asking good questions and not simply convey fixed bodies of information.  The short-lived “Problems of Inquiry” curriculum of the late 1960s and early 70s was more to John’s taste, as were the various first-year seminars that in turn succeeded it.  To each of these programs, John contributed good and sturdy courses.

Perhaps the most striking feature of John’s teaching was how much of it was collaborative, even after the large general education courses passed away.  Nearly all of the members of the History Department active between the 1950s and 1980s taught with John on one or more occasions, often in various versions of the Department’s “Introduction to History” class.  But he also taught with at least a dozen faculty members from other disciplines, both in freshman seminars and in upper-level colloquia.  John enjoyed working with others, liked to learn new things, and took joy in discussing books and ideas with colleagues, old and young. 

Collaborating with John was a pleasure.  He drew out the best in his coworkers—holding back when he might easily have dominated, gently steering conversation along productive lines, and showing enthusiasm for ideas that may have been new to his colleagues but which were surely old hat to him.  He loved literature and wove novels and poems into most of his history classes.  He was well-read in the philosophical and political writings of the nineteenth century but also ventured into works on economics and biology.  John enjoyed crossing borders and appreciated thinkers who did so.   Perhaps his favorite class was a seminar built around the writings of Alexander de Tocqueville.  Tocqueville’s liberal politics and lucid prose appealed to John, as did his deep insights into the interrelatedness of events, but perhaps even more to his liking was Tocqueville’s discerning distinctions among the interests and values of his subjects.  John himself was much more the splitter than the lumper.  He was drawn to the work of teasing out differences and took delight in helping others appreciate the varieties and valences of concepts such as tolerance, liberalism, and evolution. 

John’s scholarship reflected his teaching.  He was principally concerned with placing better resources into the hands of historians.  To this end, he edited three valuable collections: Romanticism: Problems in Definition, Explanation and Evaluation, a volume in the well-respected D.C. Heath series on “Problems in European Civilization: ” Romanticism: A Collection of Documents, which appeared in the Harper & Row series, “A Documentary History of Western Civilization;” and December 2, 1851: Contemporary Writings on the Coup d’État of Louis Napoleon, published by Doubleday/Anchor. 

The Amherst that greeted John when he arrived in the fall of 1952 was in many respects still of the nineteenth century.  In an interview with the late Doug Wilson, John recounted how surprised he and Betty were to find visiting cards awaiting them upon their arrival in town.  He and other faculty were still expected to deliver eight-minute talks at the College’s mandatory chapel services and to gather for monthly dinners at the Faculty Club.  Much of this was quaint; some of it helped build a sense of community.  The College, however, was also paternalistic and occasionally vicious.  President King had expected faculty members to seek his advice before embarking on a lengthy trip or a new marriage.  Powerful barons on the faculty expected deference from junior colleagues.  Tenure was an utterly mysterious process.  Antisemitism blighted hiring decisions, and a full range of other prejudices could be found not far beneath the College’s idyllic surface.

John, who both studied the idea of toleration and applied it in his life, was a member of that post-war generation that gradually brought Amherst into the twentieth century--in part through the formal process of faculty legislation, but more often by setting examples of civility and good citizenship.  His influence was felt most strongly within the History Department, where he did much to heal what had been a badly fractured faculty.  John exemplified reasonableness in meetings and was a generous mentor to untenured colleagues long before the College acknowledged the need for such a role.  In recognition of John’s commitment to our students and the comity that he helped bring to the History Department, a student reading room was named in his honor upon John’s retirement. 

John’s influence on the College may also be seen in the durability of the courses that he helped develop for our first-year seminar program.  In 1978, following the adoption of the Introduction to Liberal Studies proposal for freshman year, John sat down with two biologists to work out the syllabus for a course on the history of evolutionary thought.  The particulars of that course, “Evolution and Intellectual Revolution,” have themselves evolved over the decades, but the basic design remains very close to that which John and his collaborators worked out.  Since the class was first taught, it has enrolled thirty present and former members of our faculty as instructors and served as an introduction to Amherst for many hundreds of first-year students.  After helping to launch “Ev and Rev,” John turned his attention to another first-year seminar that has remained a perennial in our offerings, “Romanticism and the Enlightenment.”  As in all of his teaching, John’s goal was to encourage exploration unfettered by disciplinary boundaries and to stimulate doubt.  These inclinations made him a master of the seminar and a favorite thesis advisor among history majors, scores of whom he helped guide to honors degrees.

John’s nickname among his fraternity brothers at Wesleyan was “the Duke,” and it is easy to see why.  A bit formal and reserved among strangers, John exemplified generosity and good humor among friends and co-workers.  He gave freely of his time and attention, was courtly in his manners, and was quick to appreciate irony, not least when the joke was on him.  “Cheers” is how he often signed his letters.  Coming from John, the word sounded entirely authentic.   Cheers to you, John.

Respectfully submitted,   

Frank Couvares    
John Servos (chair)    
Patrick Williamson

NASSER HUSSEIN

Nasser was born in Karachi, Pakistan, on June 21, 1965: he died in November of 2015, four months after his fiftieth birthday.

Nasser came from distinguished stock. His father served as a captain in the Pakistani Navy and later as a government official. His mother hailed from a prominent family driven from northern India in the Partition, an experience that later informed Nasser’s scholarship.  During Nasser’s childhood, the family spent three years in London, where his father served as an attaché and his parents attended glittering diplomatic gatherings—his mother vividly recalls meeting the queen on more than one occasion.  Resettled in Karachi, Nasser attended the Karachi Grammar School, the oldest and most elite private school in Pakistan.  He crushed his A-levels; a photo taken of Nasser when he was perhaps eighteen, shows a thinly-mustached youth with a vaguely supercilious expression and five or six academic trophies gathered in his arms. 

He left Karachi for Yale, where he majored in history, writing a thesis on Indian Muslim identity and the end of colonialism in the early twentieth century.  After Yale came his graduate training in history at Berkeley, where he wrote his dissertation under Tom Metcalfe on what ultimately became his book, The Jurisprudence of Emergency.   He received his Ph.D. in 1996 and promptly was hired here at Amherst on soft money from the Luce Foundation, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought (LJST) and History.  At his job interview, sitting across from Martha at the old Classe Café, Nasser raised his eyebrows and muttered doubtfully,  “Cows…everywhere!”  For a time he was lured away from Amherst to Cambridge and Harvard’s Society of Fellows, but two years of hobnobbing with Stanley Cavell and Leon Wieseltier proved enough, and he returned to the valley and LJST, where he successfully stood for tenure and ultimately became a full professor.  He remained, though, a consummate cosmopolitan, traveling often to Karachi and London; still, he called the U.S. his home.  He became a citizen in the U.S. District Court in Boston on August 18, 2011.

During his two decades at Amherst, Nasser made a number of pivotal scholarly contributions. Chief among these was his book The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law, published in 2003 by The University of Michigan Press. The book takes as its subject the extension of English law to English colonies. With India, Jamaica, and Ireland as his examples, Nasser lays bare how haphazardly the rule of law was introduced to the colonies, but how once installed, it mutated unpredictably, creating new legal concepts and forms that, ironically, ended up shaping metropolitan legal theory itself. Equal parts legal history and legal theory, The Jurisprudence of Emergency was the first book to use archival materials to document how a central axis of modern legal theory—the conflict between state power and legal authority—was defined by practices that emerged first in colonial settings.

Reviewers showered the book with praise. While perhaps unaware of Nasser’s charming, somewhat antiquarian habit of writing almost entirely by hand, reviewers expressed admiration for the grace, poise and economy of his writing.  More to the point, as a work of scholarship the book was hailed as brilliant, insightful, innovative, and groundbreaking. Paul Gilroy, an eminent cultural critic, judged Nasser’s book “a work of international significance….It is original in both its conception and its execution and [it] uniquely combines historical scholarship of the very highest standard with novel and provocative juridical, philosophical and political argument.” The decade that has elapsed since its initial publication has confirmed Gilroy’s early judgment.  Today The Jurisprudence of Emergency is regarded as an authoritative work, widely cited by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, in fields ranging from law and political science to English and history.

For many of us, publishing works of scholarship is like tossing rose petals off the Grand Canyon, as our precious objects disappear soundlessly into the void. Not so with Nasser.  The Jurisprudence of Emergency had barely been a year in print when Nasser was contacted by of a group of lawyers representing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.  In challenging Bush administration arguments that habeas corpus relief was not available to extraterritorial detainees, the lawyers asked Nasser to clarify the common law history of habeas corpus in areas subject to the control but outside the territorial realm of the British Crown.  Through the winter months of 2003, Nasser worked the subject, ultimately becoming, along with a handful of other leading historians, a co-signatory of an Amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the cases of Rasul v. Bush and Al-Odah v. United States.  In 2004, in a landmark decision, the Court ruled that it had the authority to decide whether foreign nationals held at Guantanamo were indeed wrongfully imprisoned. Thus it was that the young assistant professor who had recently turned his dissertation into a book saw his book help guide the jurisprudence of the very highest court in the land.

Dedicated, then, to deploying legal history as a means of making sense of the disputes of the present, Nasser sought in recent years to study the contemporary law of armed conflict through the filter of colonial precedents.  Disturbed by Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ensuing occupation, Nasser set to work on this project with a series of articles on the so-called “War on Terror.” Beginning with a highly original essay in Critical Inquiry on indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, Nasser challenged the prevailing scholarly attacks on Bush practices, which focused on their alleged “extra-legality.”  By contrast, Nasser’s critique was altogether more radical, as it insisted that Bush’s practices represented the advent of what he called “hyperlegality”—the subsumption of all surveillance, interrogation and combat practices under a seamless architecture of legal justification.  Later articles would apply this argument to theories of counterinsurgency in Iraq and drone warfare in Pakistan.  Together these pieces were to have comprised a second book, which at the time of Nasser’s death was under contract with Cornell University Press and bore the title, “War by Every Other Name: colonial war, contemporary conflicts and modernity.”

In addition to his systematic inquiries into colonial and postcolonial legal history, Nasser co-authored one of the first reviews in English of the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. With Austin, he co-authored two articles about the relationship between mercy and the rule of law, and also co-edited two books, one on questions of forgiveness and another on the question of how governments that break the law are to be held accountable.

We could go on, but an inventory of Nasser’s published work fails to do full justice to the quality of his mind.  A visitor to Nasser’s office, secluded in the warren-like bowels of Clark House, where Nasser would sneak the occasional puff of the cigarettes he could never quite live without, would have noticed shelves cluttered not only with treatises on Roman Law and Islamic Law, not only with the works of H.L.A. Hart, Arendt and Foucault but also with heavily creased copies of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen and Art Spiegelman. Nasser was passionate about the poetry of W.H. Auden, whose enigmatic poem “Law, Like Love” held a special fascination for him. He long harbored the desire to write about Auden and on the question of poetry and law. Few of his friends will ever be able to read Auden’s poem again without feeling his eyes looking at it too, without finding themselves wondering what it was that he wanted to say about it. We will, in any case, never know. Many of us know the pain of living, sometimes for long periods of time, with our own unfinished work. Now we know a different heartache as well.

That quality of mind—at once intellectually generous and profoundly unsentimental; committed and impious; equally alert to the world’s beauty as to its absurdity—drew students to Nasser.  His courses addressed some of the largest questions we can ask of law:  what is its relation to the sacred?  How is it constituted in its relation to history and historical thinking?  Can law serve as a meaningful check on the exercise of armed conflict? How does law function in an age of globalism?  He translated those difficult conceptual questions into gripping classroom encounters with our students.  Teaching with Nasser was like traveling to a new city with a streetwise friend who knew the terrain intimately but who self-effacingly always drew attention to the unfamiliar. He could generate feelings of discomfort in his students as he would ask a seemingly straightforward question, patiently accept the answer, only then to ask “But don’t you think …?”—suddenly opening a simple claim onto a much more complex inquiry.  He had opinions and asserted them; in our co-taught course on “Law and War,” he would merrily attack Lawrence as a “lapdog of liberal neo-imperialism, a defender of phallic eurocentrism.”  But however political he was never doctrinaire in his positions; his sensibility always pulled away from grand claims and toward the local, the contingent and the overlooked.  Students adored him. “His classes,” one student wrote, “will spark interest in even the most bored of souls.  Do not miss a chance to soak up this professor's genius.”  Another also used the “g-word”: “serious head candy, combined with serious overall candy:  every class was a major sugar rush. He's a genius, really.”  Steve Vladek, a former student and now a prominent legal scholar in his own right describes his study with Nasser as a “life-changing experience”—“he opened my eyes to the transformative potential of law.”

Nasser was more than a great teacher and colleague.  He was a friend. We in Clark House looked forward to his dog Buddy, a mutt whose short legs and sturdy muscular frame was not unlike his master’s body type, nosing his way into our offices followed by Nasser himself, dressed either in black Hugo Boss blazer and Hermès tie or, if not teaching, in t-shirt and sweat pants, beginning many a conversation with: “Hey honey, how’re things going?” or “Tell me honestly, am I morbidly obese?” We looked forward to seeing him in the gym, which he visited at times twice a day, pedaling away on the Life Cycle, listening to Amy Winehouse on his earbuds and flipping through the pages of Entertainment Weekly, to which he religiously subscribed.  And we looked forward to his gossip.  And his gossip.  And his gossip.

But however wicked his wit, he was incapable of being mean-spirited.  He had a gift for true friendship—he knew how to reach out in the right way at the right time.  He knew Lawrence was feeling melancholy at the prospect of taking his older son off to college and wrote the following email on the eve of Jacob’s departure.  “Have a lovely, sad, life-affirming day on Saturday. I'll be thinking of you (you phallic Eurocentric pig).  Xoxoxoxo”

He was a friend who had insight into the lonely struggles that come with private tragedy, ready to loan his ear, his apartment, and his time. Tom recalls:

He was, in his matter-of-fact way, always there to remind me, when I had one of the largest challenges of my personal life in caring for a family facing the trauma of loss, that the caregiver must also care for himself. He did this with a light hand, checking in once in a while, suggesting dinner after my young kids had settled down for the evening. I remember in particular a time he volunteered to stay with my ten-year-old son when I had to leave town for the evening. They ended up watching soccer through the night – way past my son’s bedtime—and for their evening meal, spread newspaper on the floor, and ate takeout fried chicken with their bare hands. This elegant, meticulously dressed cosmopolitan sat on the floor and pigged out with a ten-year-old.

Austin recalls:

If anyone needed something Nasser was the first to offer help. And the first to carry through on his offers.  I vividly remember a very rainy Saturday in Boston’s Back Bay not long after Nasser started at Amherst when he volunteered to help move my daughter Emily into her new apartment. He came and stayed until everything was moved in and then left drenched without a complaint. A few years later, I organized a conference on the Killing State in the late 1990s. Nasser presented an extraordinary paper on clemency in capital cases. The next day he came to my office with a file filled with his notes. He put it on my desk and said “I want you to have this. I think you will do a better job with it than I can.” He insisted that I keep it and use it. That was Nasser, an unusually generous friend and colleague, willing to share his ideas rather than to horde them.

Just before the sudden onset of sepsis, in May 2014, that ultimately took his life, Nasser had tattooed on his shoulder a line from Auden’s poem “Precious Five”:  “Bless what there is for being.”  The full stanza reads:

That singular command I do not understand,   
Bless what there is for being,   
Which has to be obeyed, for   
What else am I made for,   
Agreeing or disagreeing?

By the end of his time at Amherst Nasser had stopped worrying about the strangeness of cows, finally settling into this landscape.  He planned a course on animals and biopolitics, took in strays (some human) and to our astonishment openly pondered retiring to a farm to care for abandoned horses.  He joined his brother Omar in mentoring—and choosing the proper fabulous clothing for—his niece Iman and nephew Saif, who have now headed to college.  In recent years he returned, again and again, to care for his father and his beloved mother Sultana in their household in Karachi; and he found happiness settling into a vibrant and caring community in Boston and Provincetown with his partner Jim Milke.   

We cannot end without noting how much Nasser would have hated this tribute. He shunned cameras, declined praise, ducked the limelight, and generally worked to train the spotlight on those around him. But our true regret comes not in paying tribute to this gifted scholar and teacher and dear friend, but in knowing that our tribute came so very prematurely.

We request that this memorial minute be entered into the records of the college and that a copy be sent to Nasser’s family.

Respectfully submitted,

Lawrence Douglas, chair   
Thomas L. Dumm   
Austin Sarat   
Adam SitzeMartha Umphrey

RICHARD WILBUR (1921 - 2017)

The poet Richard Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921, in New York City.  He was raised in North Caldwell, New Jersey, not half an hour from Manhattan, in an unimposing stone house his parents rented on a somewhat eccentric estate created and resided on by a retired British businessman.  Dick remembered the place fondly as both a gentleman’s farm and a modest rural retreat, complete with tennis court, swimming pool, and lawn bowling pitch, as well as an obligatory complement of chickens.

But Dick was not to the manor born: his father, raised in Omaha, made his living as a commercial artist in New York, and his mother, the daughter of the city editor of the Baltimore Sun, was a homemaker.  Dick and his younger brother Lawrie, who followed him to Amherst College and then into the military during World War II, made inventive use of the estate, in effect a small colony of supremely anglophilic British expat families.  Dick’s sustained and sustaining love of the natural world began there, a love that resulted in a large number of masterful poems, poems at once formally elegant, intellectually alert, and when called for, moving.  Take “Hamlen Brook,” set on the ninety-acre property in Cummington, Massachusetts that Dick and his wife Charlee lived on from the early 1970s, a property that had its own tennis court and pool, as well as deep woods and a stream.  Cats replaced the New Jersey chickens.

 Hamlen Brook

           At the alder-darkened brink   
     Where the stream slows to a lucid jet   
I lean to the water, dinting the top with sweat,   
          And see, before I can drink,

           A startled inchling trout   
     Of spotted near-transparency,   
Trawling a shadow solider than he.   
     He swerves now, darting out

           To where, in a flicked slew   
     Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves   
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,   
          And butts then out of view

             Beneath a sliding glass   
     Crazed by the skimming of a brace   
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,   
          In which deep cloudlets pass

           And a white precipice   
     Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down   
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.   
          How shall I drink all this?

           Joy’s trick is to supply   
     Dry lips with what can cool and slake,   
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache   
          Nothing can satisfy.   

After graduation from Montclair High School, where he wrote and cartooned for the school paper, Dick matriculated at Amherst College, happening to arrive on September 21, 1938, the very day of a devastating hurricane.  At Amherst he was a particularly loyal Chi Psi, at the time a fraternity filled with football players; perhaps unsurprisingly, he was also something of a prankster.  But he was an accomplished English major.  Much of his energy went into the Amherst Student, of which he became editor in his senior year.  A declared isolationist until Pearl Harbor, he wrote an editorial, published on December 8, 1941, titled “Now That We Are in It.”  That editorial has on occasion been reprinted as an exemplary response to the conflict that largely defined the lives of Dick’s generation.  As an enlisted man in the Army Signal Corps, he served in major combat in Italy, notably at Monte Cassino, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and then in France, Germany, and Austria.  He often recalled that he spent what seemed like endless hours of alternating shellfire and calm hunkered down in foreign foxholes reading poetry.   In a series of wartime letters to his teachers at Amherst, he recounted, often wittily, what he was going through.  Those teachers, principally Theodore Baird and Armour Craig, encouraged Dick’s poetry and prose.  He remembered them with great fondness for the rest of his long life.

Shortly after graduation in June 1942, Dick married Charlotte Hayes Ward, known to all as Charlee, a warm, high-spirited student at Smith.  A few days after the wedding Dick received his draft notice; he promptly enlisted in the Army Signal Corps, had stateside Basic and Signal Corps training for many months, and sailed for North Africa in November 1943, a few weeks after the birth of Ellen Wilbur, the first of their four children.  The third, Nathan, in due course, graduated from Amherst.  Charlee’s obituary in the Boston Globe remembers their marriage as, among literary couples, all but uniquely successful.

On the GI bill, Dick began graduate work at Harvard in 1947, intending to earn a doctorate in English.  He was happily sidetracked by being appointed a Junior Fellow in his second year, giving him the freedom from course work that allowed him to write the poems that resulted in his widely noticed first two books, The Beautiful Changes, 1947, and Ceremony, 1950.  Having received an M.A., he joined the Harvard English faculty, then taught at Wellesley for two years, moving on to Wesleyan, where he stayed for two decades, finally retiring, in 1986, after seven years as the writer in residence at Smith.  A year later, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States.  He concluded his academic career by returning to the Amherst College classroom in 2008, at age 87, as the Simpson Lecturer, a post held after World War II by his friend and mentor Robert Frost.  Dick retired from Amherst just four years ago; numerous Amherst students, including those who drove him from and back to Cummington, recall his warmth and generosity no less than his intellectual rigor.  One of them, a Geology major not in one of his courses, asked Dick why he wrote poems.  “To be of use” was the straightforward answer.

Richard Wilbur will be remembered as one of the major English language poets of his generation.  By common consent, he was the unrivaled master of lyric verse in his time.  He was scarcely less accomplished in meditative blank verse poems, modeled to a degree on the work of the poet he most admired, and for many years taught, John Milton.  He also published a number of critical essays, most strikingly on the poems and poetics of Edgar Allen Poe, the subject of the dissertation that gave way to the eight further books of poems he published, at regular intervals, after 1950.  In 1956 his third book, Things of this World, won Dick both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award.  From the perspective of 2018, it stands as one of the signal achievements in verse in the last three-quarters of a century.  Other prizes followed as the subsequent volumes were published, most notably a rare second Pulitzer, awarded in 1987 for New and Collected Poems.  Dick had another writerly career as the foremost translator of classic French drama; his many versions of Molière have been performed steadily for the last sixty-some years, and Dick’s translations of poetry in half a dozen languages only enhanced his reputation.  In translations as well as original verse he was a remarkably skilled rhymer.  Dick’s biographers, Mary and Robert Bagg (Amherst ’57) contend that one has to look as far back as Alexander Pope (1688-1744) to find his like.

Given his accomplishment, which included writing the brilliant lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s opera Candide, honors and offices followed.  In addition to the prizes noted above, he was awarded a Bollingen Prize, a Prix de Rome, a Ford Foundation fellowship, and, in his last years, the “Tell It Slant” award from the Emily Dickinson Museum.  He was justifiably proud of his service as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  And honorary degrees came his way, from, among others, Amherst, Wesleyan, and Yale.

In 1969 Dick and Charlee—to whom he addressed a handful of the finest love poems we have—bought a property in Cummington, Massachusetts.  They had spent significant time, on fellowships, in Rome and New Mexico, and they continued to spend winter months in Key West, but for Dick, Cummington was something of a return to the semi-rural idyll of his childhood.  He walked in his woods, raised vegetables in his garden, acquired a new set of Hilltown friends, played doubles tennis on his challenging court, and he wrote poems, his final book, Anterooms, appearing 2010.  In his 1998 three-part poem, “This Pleasing Anxious Being”—the title quotes Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”—he recreated three ordinary moments in his long life, moments he made more than ordinary in conversational blank verse.  The concluding section evokes a Christmas trip to Baltimore when the poet was seven. 

Wild, lashing snow, which thumps against the windshield   
Like earth tossed down upon a coffin-lid,   
Half clogs the wipers, and our Buick yaws   
On the black roads of 1928.   
Father is driving; Mother, leaning out,   
Tracks with her flashlight beam the pavement’s edge,   
And we must weather hours more of storm   
To be in Baltimore for Christmastime.   
Of the two children in the back seat, safe   
Beneath a lap-robe, soothed by jingling chains   
And by their parents’ pluck and gaiety,   
One is asleep.  The other’s half-closed eyes   
Make out at times the dark hood of the car   
Ploughing the eddied flakes, and might foresee   
The steady chugging of a landing craft   
Through morning mist to the bombarded shore,   
Or a deft prow that dances through the rocks   
In the white water of the Allagash,   
Or, in good time, the bedstead at whose foot   
The world will swim and flicker and be gone.

Richard Wilbur died in October 2017.  It was a long and fulfilling life.

President Martin, I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence, that it be entered in the permanent record of the faculty, and that a copy be sent to Richard Wilbur’s family.

Respectfully submitted by Daniel Hall, William Pritchard, and David Sofield (chair)