Your childhood hero Ted Williams has nothing on you. Nineteen seasons with the Red Sox? You have had forty-six at Williams. Two MVP Awards? You have won three national teaching honors, including Outstanding Baccalaureate College Professor of the Year. Most notably, you both, over long careers, strove to bring your A game. Every. Single. Day. An active and wide-ranging scholar, you relished the most complicated texts—Ulysses, Infinite Jest—books we suspect your hero never cracked. Your Fenway was the classroom, where you reveled in the joy of literature and learning and of engaging bright, young minds in them both. “I was wired for verbal elation,” you have said, which has been obvious to your students. It was an elation that spilled well outside the classroom, as you ended almost every session with the same refrain: “I’ll be in my office. Come see me. I love to hang out.” And just as “The Kid” naturally became a batting instructor, your legacy includes launching our Project for Effective Teaching, which, now under a new name, has helped so many faculty members, including this one, to get more comfortable in the box.
I hereby declare you Frederick Latimer Wells Professor of English, Emeritus, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 3, 2018
Megamenu Social