There follows the text of a eulogy delivered by Emeritus Professor Robert Tisdale at Wayne Carver’s Memorial Service, April 18, 2015, in Skinner Chapel. The Second Laird Miscellany thanks Professor Tisdale for permission to reprint it here.
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I was honored to be asked by Cindy and Patrick [Wayne Carver’s children] to speak about their father. But how can anyone say anything as entertaining as what Wayne would have said himself? Here, for example, is what Wayne himself said about being honored—in this case for being nominated for a Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award:
It is almost enough just to be nominated by you and President Nason for the award. You flatter me, and I thank you for flattering me. Do it often. I am one of the few people I know whom flattering does not corrupt. I was, in fact, so stirred to responsibility by your note that last night I read a set of papers I had been doing a dance around for a week.
You can see why my strategy this afternoon is to let Wayne speak for himself as much as possible—to bring his voice into the room and remind us what he meant and still means to us. So I have gone back to one source at Carleton that is seldom consulted. I took an afternoon and read through all the memos to and from Wayne that now reside in the archives of the DOC [Dean of the College Office]. And I should say that in the remarks I have excerpted from the Dean’s files I have chosen to concentrate primarily on education, students, and the discipline of teaching literature.
In both his conversation and written prose, Wayne had a way of sneaking up on you that always reminded me of Mark Twain– folksy, quick-witted, and deeper than his preamble suggested. Like Twain, Wayne tuned his voice to the vernacular. He detested language that might be called either “bureaucratese” or “academisoid.” He sought directness and lack of pretension but he was not put off by an awkwardly eccentric style. He celebrated one of his teachers in these words that start with the man’s personality and proceed to define one essential of teaching:
There was just something about the man. He liked us. We worked hard to earn his respect. Within that fussy, exasperating, maneuvering was a person whose respect we wanted to deserve. Schools of Education and other cans of theory please copy.
After Wayne had taught at Carleton for quite a while he spoke out about a tendency he saw developing in higher education. He feared that committees, institutes, grants, and the grant-giving process demeaned and debased what teachers should really be about. And yet, since he did from time to time request a grant, he did it in a manner that tempered desire with self-critique: Here he is requesting a grant from the Mellon Foundation:
Would a small slice of the Mellon be available to an aging pedant who says he wants to move out of American literature and into the modern period . . . I had—and have—no special competence as either a modernist or a Westerner. Not that I had any as a teacher of American literature, but fortunately that is a field where no one is likely to notice such a lack. Any assistance that could be given me from these funds would be extremely beneficial to me and I think, to my department and the College. But mostly—I can’t deny it—to me . . . .
In his report to the Dean on one leave supported by the College, Wayne wrote of taking a trip west to work on an oral history of his the place he grew up—Plain City, Utah. He wrote that he …
… stayed alone for three weeks—loving not man, nor—no, nor woman [n]either—composing aphorisms along the line of “Either it is all vanity or all is lost,” destroying them as fast as I wrote them. The end of this brief spell away from my school, my department my “discipline,'” my dog Gredo . . . my debts, my students, . . . my dandelions, my crabgrass, . . . and the trivial, incessant flow of campus mail—the end of this three-week respite from clinging, crawling things was the return with a rush like a sudden spring thaw in the hard, hard mountains of my old, familiar conviction that very little of it is vanity, that the deep prejudice, the faith of my bones that I began to teach with 42 years ago as a kid just out of the war—that teaching literature is the greatest job in the world and still important in all the old ways that modern literary studies deny and that yet saved my life—that all those things that brought me to the classroom still hold if you just trust your animal faith and do not let your mind fill up with all the unmentionables that foul the meetings, the journals, the books, the academic atmosphere of “post-modern literary studies.” I looked out from the backyard of my sister’s place in just out of Ogden, Utah, and my still small voice spoke: “There is dung one does not have to eat, air one does not have to breathe, the child is not only the father of the man but a hell of a lot wiser.”
Wayne liked to keep things in perspective, and so he occasionally expressed other more practical views on education. He said:
I do not have any large thoughts about education, though a few years back I discovered that rhetoric papers file best if they are stapled rather than clipped together.
Wayne humbly, and then somewhat proudly reiterates that he is not a scholar. When he did what might be regarded as the usual activities of a true scholar, he did not find it gratifying:
I researched in the archives and the libraries—and I discovered the truth of a historian’s life in the days of the microfilm reader, that the reward of research is to get piles and go blind . . . .
So he did his own brand of scholarship—interviewing and endless reading of literature and history. Wayne’s deepest literary research consisted of reading, rereading, and coming to know a text, its antecedents, relatives, and reception so well that it seemed he inhabited it. But he wore that deep, active learning so lightly it seemed intuitive. He continually astonished me by how much he had read and how much he remembered; and he remembered students amazingly well. He was deeply interested in students and colleagues and their roots. He traced his own roots to the village of Plain City; he returned there and explored his many connections to the place and its people—and he wanted to know his students’ roots as well. For example, a decade or more after a former student had graduated, Wayne said to me, over coffee—and I will condense and paraphrase here a bit:
You know that smart, red-haired girl who became a lawyer? graduated about nine or ten years ago? Her father was a dentist. The family came from Ohio and had been there a couple of decades when they moved to Colorado? she had what must have been somewhat buck teeth well corrected—not at all obtrusive—Well, I found out from another alum the other day that she had given up on law and is now getting her PhD at Michigan. Hope she can find a job! She wrote an excellent paper on Portrait of a Lady. She’ll make a fine teacher. The students will love her.
But he did not always approve of how the young were being brought up and educated. Here is one of Wayne’s comments on students in general as greater emphasis was put on helping them gain self-esteem:
Grouped in the first grade, accelerated in the fifth, enriched in the twelfth, and advanced-placed in the summer before college, . . . dedicated to creativity and the radiant and productive life, a lot of college students discover they would be perfect if they could only read and write but that no one has cared enough to teach them. We assume that the hard fundamentals . . . were mastered elsewhere, while elsewhere was assuming the same.
His own education began more harshly—and profitably, he believed:
Professor Christiansen of BYU [Brigham Young University], who, back when the earth was still cooling, told me to shake BYU from my heels and go to Kenyon. “Your mind needs to be placed on an anvil and pounded with a hammer.” Kenyon had the anvil and the hammer. My mind was like pizza dough. But my life was changed, or the changes that were happening took on a shape never expected.
Notice how carefully Wayne rephrases his remark on changing.
Wayne sometimes invited a colleague into his class, as he did with Dean Beth McKinsey. Wayne wrote to her towards the end of her first year as Dean of the College, thanking her for visiting his seminar, “Tales Out of School”:
The students and I discussed, after you left, the matter I had asked their help on. We considered the rhetorical strategies of your extemporaneous remarks and the candor of your impromptu ones. . . . We reached an easy consensus . . . it is my pleasure to inform you that you have met the College’s Writing Requirement and that this information will become part of your permanent record. We congratulate you on your foresight in getting this pesky requirement disposed of during your first year . . . . We wish you great success in your position. We cannot help but envy you somewhat, since you are the first member of the seminar to find gainful employment.
And finally, since my time is short, I will end with the note Wayne wrote to the Dean asking for airfare to attend an institute to which he had been invited: The topic of the Conference, “What Is a Classic?” Wayne feared that the institute might eventuate in a plan for some curricular program:
I know of all kinds of programs that have succeeded on paper . . . [but] that have not touched the students’ sympathies or quickened their minds and hearts. I do not pretend that students’ minds, hearts, and sympathies are easily touched in a productive way. My point is that a teacher can do it, now and then. A mere program—apart from the teacher—cannot. Sometimes we deceive ourselves in this.
I could—and would love to—continue to quote from his remarkable memos. But I should take no more time. So I’ll just conclude by reiterating Wayne’s last comment :
A mere program—apart from the teacher—cannot touch the students’ sympathies or quicken their minds or hearts. My point is that a teacher can do it, now and then.
Wayne did it so often that we sometimes wished that he could be cloned or bottled—but that would have involved creating a program, and Wayne would not have approved.