When you know someone for almost all your adult life, you don’t expect to be surprised when you read his obituary. I felt that way when Jim Tatum routed me to Benjamin Fortson’s memorial on the death of Don Cameron.… But I was surprised, moved and enriched by it. Whether you knew Don or not, Fortson’s words are worth pondering. They catch the spirit of a remarkable human being, and of an era in American liberal education.
Over the years Don may have taught 15,000 undergraduates at the University Michigan, most of them Honors students enrolled in the Great Books classes he taught. He loved the texts he taught and teaching itself. It worked: eyes were opened and lives changed.
But it didn’t stop at the classroom door. Andy Szegedy Maszak told me a story about Don reaching out to him. While an undergraduate at Michigan Andy for various reasons never enrolled in any of Don’s classes,
“ … and yet I think of him as one of my cherished teachers. It was a turbulent time, and Don was not happy about a lot of the student protests, which I tended to support. I think I learned from him what it meant to have a spirited, civil, adult conversation. “
What a gift! I wonder whether that capacity was simply a feature of Don’s personality, or whether it was also nurtured by the books he so valued and taught so well. Synergy, I bet.
I admire the work he did on Aeschylus and Thucydides, but for me he was the embodiment of the study of the Great Books. That means of course than in addition to personal loss his passing marks for me the end of the era in which liberal education was nurtured by those books.
Where do we go now? I’ll explore that question in a subsequent post,; meanwhile, a moment of blog silence in honor of H. Don Cameron.