My father-in-law died last week.  He was a remarkable man in many ways, and as I have spent time over the last several days reflecting upon his life as an academic, I've realized that he symbolizes all that was once right about higher education—and, sadly, he reminds me of just how much is missing in higher education today.

On the surface, my father-in-law was nothing like my own father. My father was six-and-a-half feet tall, an auto mechanic, and a regular subscriber to a magazine called Varmint Hunter. My father-in-law was five-and-a-half feet tall (in shoes), a poet, and an academic. He did not read Varmint Hunter. Although our fathers never had much to say to each other, my husband and I used to smile when holidays and grandchildren forced them together, and we would find the two men sitting on the back deck, chain smoking, each talking to the dog, and through the dog, in some strange sort of way to each other.  Fortunately, the dog lived well into his 20s, but after his death and my father-in-law's valiant efforts to quit smoking, the conversation between the two fathers ended forever. They never knew it, but in many ways they were far more similar than different, despite the obvious disparities in physical size and educational achievement.
 
My father-in-law, Dan Jones, was raised in Utah, the much younger brother of three doting sisters and the son of aging and overworked parents who had been unsuccessful homesteaders due to a drought. Dan earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Utah (the "U" ) while working as a janitor at nights to support his wife, and eventually their two sons. He found his way into a doctoral program in literature at the U,  and over the course of the next 13 years, he worked on his doctoral degree while teaching first as an instructor at a community college in Palm Springs, California, and then as a faculty member at Towson University (then Towson State University) in Maryland. His ascent through the academic ranks was remarkable. 

Dan was a fine educator. He loved to write, but not nearly as much as he loved to teach others to write.  He spent years as the chair of the English department before  becoming, in rapid succession, a dean, the provost, and eventually interim president of the university he cherished—a university whose mission he believed should always be to serve first-generation undergraduates by focusing on teaching and learning.  He was a favored member of the faculty senate.  But what mattered most to him was that he had inspired thousands of students over the years to explore their talents and master the art of writing, regardless of whether it was technical writing, creative writing or scholarly writing.  I know Dan was a fabulous educator because the best English teacher I ever had during my own K-12 years had trained under Dan's expert, caring, and demanding tutelage.  How strange it was when I realized, decades later, that the professor about whom my middle school English teacher so often spoke was the man I knew as the loving grandfather of my children.

Sometimes I wished that I had known academic Dan better, but most of the time I felt lucky that I knew amazing artist Dan, gourmet cook Dan, green-thumb Dan, gymnast Dan, and entertainer  Dan.  He taught me the very valuable art of turning a non-descript pile of leftovers into a meal that seemed quite deliberate.  On the night of his death I turned to his well-stocked fridge and did my best to throw together a meal that would have made him proud. I failed, but he would have appreciated the effort. 

Dan was the kind of professor upon which the strength of American higher education was built.  My husband grew up in a house that was always swarming with students who needed some extra help, or a home cooked meal, or a place to belong, or just a bed to sleep in when the dorms closed for the holidays. In fact, when my husband came home from graduate school to visit one weekend, he found that his bedroom had been given to a Towson student from Ghana—a student who became every bit the brother to my husband and son to Dan as those with biological ties to the Jones family.

Dan enriched the lives of his students and of his colleagues. He made Towson University a very special place for a large number of students who, for a variety of reasons, chose to attend this modest public university, despite the academic talents that could have taken them to more highly ranked schools. My sister, step-sister, and husband all owe their professional success to the experiences they had at Towson. Dan embodied the core values of the university, and he gave so much of himself to every day, every lecture, every paper, and every grade he ever issued. And the university gave back by providing him with the opportunity to do what he did best—teach and mentor. 

Dan wrote at least six novels and countless volumes of poetry over the years, none of which he ever sought to publish. He didn't do the conference circuit. He taught. In his free time, somehow he held together a group of faculty well known for their brilliance, their independent nature, and on occasion, their difficulty in getting along with each other. He was amused by people's quirks and inspired by their shortcomings. He touched lives throughout his own, and this did not stop when he retired from the university. Even as an aging man he managed to host writing groups and book clubs and cooking clubs in his community. He was still touching lives while his own was ending.  The doctors and nurses in the ICU cried with us throughout Dan's final day. Dan had a way with people. Don't get me wrong, he could be crusty, cynical, short-tempered, sarcastic, and sometimes downright argumentative, but it was better to have Dan say something nasty than to ignore you altogether. I think he enjoyed a good argument, as long as he was winning it!

Sadly, in today's academic world, someone like Dan probably couldn't become a tenured faculty member, and certainly not a dean, provost or president. He didn't publish. He wasn't a glad-hander, or a fund raiser. He created lots of new academic programs over the years to serve the needs and interests of students, but he didn't do so with a careful eye toward the current trends or pedagogical agendas of philanthropists and funding agencies. In other words, he developed programs that were needed and then tried to figure out how to pay for them, as opposed to what has become so common on campuses today, where the programs are designed to meet the whims of those doling out the cash, whether the programs are good or necessary or not.

In today's academic world, Dan would not have been afforded the time or opportunity to soothe egos and build bridges among fighting factions in his department, or to help students find their talents and develop the confidence required for the soul-bearing work of creative writing. Writers are extraordinarily vulnerable, and Dan helped young ones build their confidence, while also knowing when they needed space and permission to lick their literary wounds. In today's academic world, Dan could not have written unpublishable novels that chronicled crazy family history and captured so accurately the many idiosyncrasies of Jones family life. The books wouldn't sell, he said, because nobody other than our family members would understand the humor or identify with the characters.  Never mind that these cherished books will teach generations of Jones offspring about their family heritage and traditions. No promotion and tenure committee today would be impressed by richly woven novels that never made their way to a formal publisher. 

In today's academic world, Dan would not have been allowed to devote to future teachers the same time and energy typically reserved for those destined for the high-brow world of scholarly writing. How many lives would have been lived less fully had Dan been building an academic career during this, the corporate era of higher education? Dan knew for sure that he never wanted to go into business.    

At Dan's memorial service, we will remember his life with fondness and laughter, and will be sad that no new jokes will come from his mouth, no new drawings from his hands, no new stories from his computer, and no new best-food-you-ever-ate meals from his kitchen. In particular, my youngest son will be lost without Dan's companionship and guidance, most of which came casually at the kitchen island over a game of electronic solitaire or over the hot stove with a glorious stick of melted butter.

As we say goobye to Dan, somehow I think that each of us will be lamenting that we are also saying goodbye to an era of higher education and higher educators who were quite remarkable. We have lost much now that endowments, rankings and artificially-derived graduation rates are more important to administrators than are students and their futures. We are saying goodbye to an era in which faculty thought more about what they could contribute to their university than what the university could do for them. For better or worse, JFK did inspire them.  During Dan's day, you didn't need a glossy brochure or flashy Web site to convince students that teaching and learning were valued by the university. Dan's students knew they were his priority. I'm told that Dan's love for learning was contagious among his colleagues, and that younger faculty members sought his mentorship and guidance on a regular basis. He was not the bureaucratic department chair to avoid, but instead the wise and witty colleague to join on a Friday afternoon in a tightly packed, smoke-filled faculty office. 

Goodbye to our father, our husband, our grandfather, our teacher, our mentor, our cook, our artist, our wine connoisseur, our world traveler, our gardener, our neighbor, our colleague, our friend. 

Goodbye to an era.