“I hold it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.”– Tennyson, In Memoriam

My alma mater back home lost two faculty members this fall– two professors that I had the pleasure to take courses with as both an undergraduate and graduate student.

Both were old school. Both greatly distrusted postmodernism. Both taught me what it meant to do a really close, close reading of a text, a skill that has served me quite well through the course of my graduate education. Both also taught me a key component of being a good instructor– toughness with a sense of humor. This they taught me by example. This was something I didn’t understand as a student, at least as an undergraduate, anyway. Both gave me well-deserved Cs in the undergraduate courses I took with them and those Cs mean a lot more to me than many of the As on my transcript. They pushed, but they were funny. They didn’t bend, stood by their marks, had no problem telling you that you had a lot more work to do to go beyond churning out average work– and had no problem joking about it with you, either, something not meant to cushion the blow in intent, but something that did and inspired you to do better.

This tough/humor thing is something I get completely as an instructor now, something I’ve tried to settle into as I reach my tenth year in the college classroom. It’s something that comes with experience, not with performance, with having a sense of humor about life itself and bringing that– being yourself– into the classroom. That much I know.

The deaths of both symbolize, to me, the passing away of an older model of professor and scholar. They don’t make ’em like this anymore and perhaps shouldn’t — we don’t work primarily as textual scholars anymore, at least not in literary studies. And I say this not to critique the more theoretical bent of the work that gets turned out more often than not, but these two put the text first. Theory, if it had any place, was secondary. I still work on that model in many ways in my own scholarship, and luckily, my dissertation director is of this philosophy (someone who tells me regularly not to “interrogate” anything because she’s tired of seeing that word in the theory she’s working with herself right now, which is mainly post-colonial). I owe my ability to do that to Doc C and Doc A and for this, I thank them. It is one of the things I like best about my own work (and that’s saying a lot, since there’s not much I like about my own work these days).

Since I received my MA from the same institution as my BS, I had the pleasure of redeeming my average-undergraduate grades with them in graduate seminars. Doc C, on old spinster who made it very clear that she had dedicated her life to her students, was American lit. I still remember the basic thesis of R.W.B Lewis’ The American Adam because I nearly memorized the whole damn book for a quiz in her course. I recall her rambling stories and seeming tangents, which you’d better pay attention to, because they always came back around to the text at hand, the lecture in progress. Doc A, an old medievalist with a lovely German wife, taught me the true meaning of “meticulous” in a Beowulf translation class. I spent more than 20 hours a week on the work for him, and it was time well spent because it was time spent in the bare bones of language. There was, is something strangely soothing about translation work. Doc A taught me that. I can still hear him reciting parts of the poem to us in Old English, all those appositives (how many different ways can you identify who Beowulf is? seemed to be the theme of our work most days). And I can still picture myself in his office once a week, going over my weekly translation quiz with him, meetings that involved not only discussions about Beowulf, but about life, about marriage, teaching, and good beer.

Both of these professors had a profound effect on me, I realize in retrospect. I don’t think I realized this when I was taking their courses, even as a graduate student. Maybe, in my memory, they rise above their dead selves to higher things, as Tennyson reminds us. But I think they really were that great, even for all the headache they gave you because they had high expectations of their students.

God speed, friends.