RIP Doug Edwards

Douglas Ray Edwards, 1950-2008


For the second time this year I pay respects to a colleague and friend born in 1950. [See "RIP Michael Denning" supra at March 18, 2008.] Like Michael, Doug Edwards succumbed to cancer. The genetic code that erected him brought him down when it became altered. Thus does biology play its own version of the parlor game "telephone."

We boomers are entering deadlier years. We so enjoy extended life-expectancy that we do not savor every day as a gift that our forebears not so long ago neither expected nor received. However, boomers who mourn should recall that another boomer sang, "Only the Good Die Young," itself an alteration of an ancient aphorism. If only the good die young, most boomers have many years to go.

I have the solace that I am not, never was, and never hope to be as good as Doug Edwards was. If my extended span of scholarly life be decades, I shall still fail of Doug's virtues.

Doug's greatest virtue was fidelity. Doug adhered to scholarly ideals and professed not to comprehend academics who betrayed those ideals. When Doug discussed with colleagues standards for professional attainment, he made the unaccomplished or less accomplished fearful. Colleagues had learned that at Puget Sound professional excellence was attributed far more than achieved. Doug gave every evidence of expecting achievement. Ghastly!

Some of the trembling colleagues did what one would expect. They lashed out at Professor Edwards's "extremism." Dr. Edwards was extreme. He was extremely faithful to professional ideals. He was extremely faithful to scholarship. He was extremely faithful to evidence and objectivity. He was extremely faithful to thinking and speaking the truth. Doug's fidelity did not make him popular with sycophants and shammers, narcissists and nincompoops. [You know who you are.]

Doug's fidelity to truth, objectivity, evidence, scholarly attainment, and idealism made him an unattractive, therefore unlikely candidate for the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Somehow Doug clambered onto the FAC in 2004. Almost instantly, he made a difference. The difference Doug worked was less in results -- the design of the FAC, its traditions and rituals, and its personnel militate against adhering to rules, upholding standards, or reading files straightforwardly -- than in reasoning. Only one as civil as Doug could ask where exactly the department had located "excellence" in a file before the FAC when it was obvious that no excellence was extant. Only one as courteous as Doug could then greet risible rationalizations and sophistical subterfuges with a gentle "Well, I do not quite understand your argument." I have esteemed perhaps five colleagues more after we served together on the FAC than before, none more than Doug. That increase in admiration is all the more remarkable because Doug started so high in my estimation that he had little room for improvement.

I raise the FAC amid a memoriam to make the point that Doug Edwards had so much character and integrity that service on the FAC became him. He saw that the system was corrupted in ways that I have mentioned in various previous entries. No student of religions ignores the blandishments of group-think, but Doug resisted them heroically.

Doug was designated "distinguished" by the FAC. In this instance, the FAC was not designating one of its own for special praise. Doug would have merited special praise if he had never served on the FAC. However, were Doug to epitomize distinction at the University of Puget Sound, the university could save itself a generous sum. Perhaps a half dozen colleagues could approach Doug's attainments. I know I could not. I know as well that almost everyone designated "distinguished" during my stints on the FAC would be distinguished from Doug in a downward direction. Here was a professor who was distinguished more than titularly.

Doug could afford idealism and honesty because he measured up to the standards he used. In teaching, Doug so exuded sincerity that he could be intellectually rigorous. Doug never joined the Wigger Patwol -- those who project rigor that they do not possess -- but lived rigorously. Indeed, Doug's teaching and scholarship frightened some self-aggrandizing colleagues into extolling their own fanciful virtues all the more fulsomely. In scholarship, Doug exhibited more devotion than any other scholar I have known. In service, he was generous and dedicated, not just putting in time.

Already others have lauded Doug as family man, community member, and bass singer. Of these virtues I know little, so I defer to those who do know. What I knew, I have written above.

I offer to my friend and colleague and to his admirers Robinson Jeffers' eulogy to a dead hawk:


#####What fell was relaxed,
#####Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
#####Soared: the fierce rush:
#######the night-herons by the flooded river
#######cried fear at its rising
#####Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.


And to colleagues who adhere to the maxim "Let no great men walk among us," I offer my own sentiments less poetic. Doug's death means not just serenity for Doug but for surviving colleagues. The bar has been lowered by Doug's passing. I find it unlikely that the bar will again be raised so high for so long by performance rather than by PR.

Sleep well, Doug. Like Randall P. McMurphy, you had the courage to try. May I live long enough to discover the Chief Bromdens whom you inspired.


Next: Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.