This eulogy was written by Wayne Carver, very slightly revised and then read by George Soule at a meeting of the Carleton College Faculty on November 4, 2002. Paragraphs in brackets were added by Soule.
Owen Jenkins came to Carleton College in early September 1954, as a newly appointed instructor in English. At this point, he said many times, his education began. So, too, did the education of thousands of Carleton students who over the next 48 years trembled with joy and fear in and out of his classes in literature and rhetoric. His courses became things of legend, his way with student papers became exercises in enchantment and terror, his insistence on examining the assumptions behind what we think, say, and, alas, write so persistent that “enthymeme” became working vocabulary for bruised and pummeled students who had thought Aristotle was Greek for oil-tanker. When he retired in September, 1997, for five years he continued to teach at least one course a year of his classically-based rhetoric–the remnant among the ruins, he insisted, of the one year course in Rhetoric Carleton freshmen were required when he came here to take as part of a core curriculum, a curriculum whose passing away Owen never stopped regarding as a major sign of the barbarism engulfing the College and that the College eagerly embraced. He died at his home in Northfield on October 6, 2002, of throat and lung cancer, still lamenting the failure of the Chicago Cubs and eager for the World Series. He was indispensable to his family, friends, colleagues, department, and College. If we do not know it now, we will know it soon. There are no replacements for him. He was not a spare part.
Owen may have lived among the universals of history and ideas and the particulars of pronoun antecedents and transitional phrases, but he was Mid-western to the core. He was born in Roger’s Park on the Cub’s side of Chicago, not much later moving [up the shores of Lake Michigan] to Glencoe, and then to Libertyville, where the Great Depression made small acre subsistence farmers of the family for a few years. Owen made much of his boyhood on a farm, with his father, who had graduated from Amherst during the Meiklejohn period going on to a job in Chicago, and his mother, a Phi Beta Kappa in economics from Vassar, managing a small chicken farm. Owen sold eggs to neighbors, became a member of the 4-H club, and managed a flock of chickens for his club project. We should probably have to try hard to imagine Owen as a barefoot boy from Libertyville, and, while we are failing in that stretching of our imagination, we should also wonder for a moment how those chickens turned out: poor little gooey chicks, pecking and peeping their way into a world of blinding light, hoping to be understood and loved, only to meet Owen, ready to put them through the equivalent of Marine Basic at Parris Island: that’s how he later described freshman English, Rhetoric 1, as he taught it.
Owen graduated from Libertyville Township high school in 1944 and immediately went down to Robert Hutchins’ University of Great Books and Accelerated Learning at the University of Chicago. He graduated with a B. A. in December, 1945. He was 18. Drafted into the army, he did an infantry basic and shipped out to the Philippines, where, now in a Special Service Detachment, he became a writer and sports editor for the Daily Pacifican, the Armed Forces Newspaper for theWestern Pacific. He was discharged ahead of schedule so he could enroll in the Graduate School of the University of Chicago. He took his A. M. there in March of 1950, in history and English. Owen always took an unseemly pride in never having been an English major. He delighted in giving the impression that the mere English major was at odds with his true interests in rhetoric and history. It probably was.
After Chicago Owen taught two years at Georgia Tech (day school, night school, summer school), tutored the football team, and chaperoned the school band on road trips. In 1952, encouraged, if not lured, by his favorite teacher at Chicago, who had been fired and was now at Cornell, Owen became a Ph.D. candidate there and completed the degree in two years. [That is, I think, still a record.] He liked to talk about his speedy course through graduate school: “The dissertation gave me the most trouble,” he said. “But I broke its back on a weekend. Once I lost all respect for my subject, the department, my examiners, the English language, the world of scholarship, and myself, I sat down and wrote the thing in a couple of long spurts. It came out just fine.”
He married Barbara Jones on June 15, 1954, the day Barbara graduated from Cornell as an English major. In September of that year, they arrived at Carleton. They had found a home, and Carleton had found a professor who, for the rest of the century, would in his way wage an unrelenting war against the people, the money, the co-opted institutions–all the burgeoning and overwhelming forces that would destroy the idea of education that he had learned under the tutelage at Chicago and Cornell of those great teachers he never ceased to revere: William R. Keast, R. S. Crane, and M. H. Abrams, and, here at Carleton, Scott Elledge, Bruce Morgan, and Larry Gould.
[Note here that Wayne is slightly wrong. Bruce Morgan did not teach at Carleton. He was a revered and effective Dean of the College. Owen thought the world of him.]
That idea [of education] is not a simple one, and one of the delights of going through Owen’s papers is to watch him struggling with it as he confronts the Destroyers on campus, for if they are not here they are nowhere–and they are everywhere. He quotes R. S. Crane: Seeking to be educated, men and women accept the assumption “that we can become educated … only by contemplating in our youth, and learning the arts by which we may understand and emulate, the best achievements of all kinds of which men have been capable in sciences, institutions, and arts.” This quote was part of an argument with the Dean about the content of the Freshman Year. Owen looked at the Freshman Year his students were having, measured it against this statement, and grew first very, very sad, then very, very bilious. The College was having a committee look into the matter of the Freshman Year. Owen interrupted one of the meetings with what the Dean described as a “lusty snort ” and asked Owen to try to be constructive, since derision is not. There ensued from Owen close to 5000 words in three different letters on three consecutive days: The file containing these letters is a monument to the folly of asking a faculty member to explicate his snorts, snorted in faculty, staff, or committee meetings. Owen’s attack cannot be detailed here. But it comes from his first sentence, which he capitalized: “The most important fact about the freshman year is that it comes before all the rest of higher education … ” In other words, before the over-specialized experts in their fields and their departments get hold of the students and destroy them.
Owen sometimes did overstate his case or over-decorate it with tropes and excursions. Since he thought that administrators are more bother than they are worth, he did not allow for how his sometimes burdensome persiflage was received by well-meaning people–busy, busy with their jobs of sifting and shoveling chaff. Once an Admirable Dean said in reply to a letter from Owen: “I will continue to read your jeremiads in the continual hope that I will learn something.” Another admirable administrator bucked a few thousand words from Second Laird down to an Admirable Dean with the note: “This is vintage Jenkins. Even so, there may be a point here.”
But Owen was one of the Gould boys (he may have been the last one on the active faculty) hired to teach and to be available almost around the clock to students who wanted his help. President Gould never hired a teacher to help run the College. It was clear from his first handshake who ran the College. When Owen said that the Golden Age of his academic life was the first seven years at Carleton, he meant that he joined a department of teachers devoted to his idea of education in a College run by a President who said “You are here to teach ” and saw to it that he had the time and opportunities to learn his trade. Owen never lost his devotion to that period and those people. He never lost his scorn for whatever he construed as working against them. “I don’t have to please you,” he sometimes appeared to be saying to certain people and institutions, “I pleased Scott and Larry.” The consecration was for life.
[I might add here that Owen had only one truly scholarly publication, one on Richardson and Fielding, and a number of more informal pieces in The Carleton Miscellany. But his unpublished works are legendary: a bibliography of the history of literary criticism and commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric. A philosopher friend of mine says these commentaries are superb.]
Owen was a great teacher if the student was available for his unique and aggressive manner of instruction. Intimidating, caustic, witty but punishing, exhilarating, oblique, tough but fair (and unfair), demanding and too demanding, abusive, generous–one could fill a page with such contradictory epithets and they would all be true. The respect, admiration, energizing bewilderment, gratitude, and love that so many of his 4000 students had for him says that here we have a phenomenal instance of a transforming scholar and teacher. Some could not take him. Some could take him in small doses. Some could take one dose of him and that was enough. But some could not get enough of him, and they stayed in touch with him all his life. He answered the letters he received from them and met them from time to time at reunions and special gatherings. At his retirement he was presented with a book of grateful letters from his students. It took a long time, but he answered everyone.
From his office on Second Laird his colleagues could hear his typewriter going at all hours of day and night. He was answering mail. Or he was writing out his long, precise, to-the-point responses to students’ papers, sometimes two or three pages of comment and instruction to a threepage essay. He came to teach literature and writing. He did it and was loved for it.
[Let me add here before Wayne’s concluding paragraphs a sentence or two from a tribute, which I must second, from Jim McDonald: “Like one of his great heroes, Samuel Johnson, …[Owen ] valued his reason, and happily he kept an ‘animated and lofty spirit’ to the very end. He died with dignity and in full possession of his faculties. To those of us who are only a few years younger than he that is a precious gift and source of hope.”]
Especially in this a time of political correctness and easily bruised feelings, we need Owen. But he has gone, leaving the atmosphere of his department and of his College thin, bland, proper to a fault. We will have to get along without him. We can remember how his presence disturbed and excited the air we live in. We will have to find other ways than his to do what he did. He hated the babbling cant of our talk about “role models.” He would not want to be any such thing. Nor should we want to copy him. It is a truthful old maxim that one should not try to emulate what one cannot possibly resemble. We must find our own way of doing what Owen did in his. There are other ways.
We are fortunate creatures to have had him among us with his power, bite, and laughter for what is already beginning to feel–even as we breathe–like a very short time. Forty-eight years! It was not enough.