{"id":507,"date":"2014-10-03T14:30:37","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T14:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=507"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:09","slug":"coming-home-late-bert-stern-h62","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2014\/10\/03\/coming-home-late-bert-stern-h62\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming Home Late\u2014Bert Stern H\u201962"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back on the Wabash campus to be named an honorary alumnus, Milligan Professor of English Emeritus Bert Stern returned to Center Hall for a welcoming reception and to read from his latest book, Winter in China: An American Life.<\/em> See photos here,<\/a> then read the citation below:<\/p>\n

Herbert J. Stern \u201962
\nHonorary Alumnus
\nPresented at the 2014 Homecoming Alumni Chapel<\/i><\/p>\n

Herbert J. Stern, ragpicker\u2019s grandson, Milligan Professor of English Emeritus, poet, scholar, biographer\u2014your teaching and writing, your voice and your life, have been dedicated to bridging disparate worlds.\u00a0 You have done so splendidly, and you have left a formidable imprint upon generations of Wabash men.<\/p>\n

You arrived at Wabash in 1958 as a self-proclaimed \u201cEasterner in the Midwest, a progressive person in a very conservative school.\u201d You embraced being an \u201coutsider,\u201d and for 39 years you made your \u201cotherness\u201d the catalyst for connections and dialogue with more than 4,600 students.<\/p>\n

Let the words of some of those students serve as testimony:<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing taught by Bert Stern has been the single most dangerous fact of my life,\u201d says Auburn University English Professor Jim McKelly \u201981.\u00a0 \u201cHe showed me that the American classroom must always contain moral challenge, that teaching is art, that the line between faith and doubt can only be danced.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hugo Award-winning author Dan Simmons \u201970 recalls, \u201c\u2019Bert was the first writer to tell me I was a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Dennis Kennedy \u201980 expressed a sentiment that so many of your students would echo: \u201cI did most of my best work for Bert, although it was usually on the second try.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students from the early 1960s remember you knowing the coolest folk songs; those in the late 1960s and 70s recall a social activist protesting the war in Vietnam.\u00a0 Others remember your homestead on Sugar Creek, your commitment to the environment, your travels to teach in Greece and China, your LaFollette Lecture on Wallace Stevens. Some heard you revving up your motorcycle on the Mall, while others your return to your Jewish faith as documented in your second LaFollette Lecture.<\/p>\n

But whether their Bert Stern sported button-down shirts and skinny ties or wore a full beard and the Greek fisherman\u2019s cap, all of your students remember you as a master teacher whose explorations enriched the classroom and their own lives.\u00a0 As our own Susan Cantrell wrote, \u201cProfessor Stern is not a chameleon shedding one skin for another, but a rock adding layer upon layer until its shape is something firm and true.\u201d<\/p>\n

You once told Susan, \u201cThere\u2019s a sweetness to our students that has always drawn me. They\u2019re less jaded than students you\u2019d expect to find in big universities. There\u2019s a kind of openness. I can\u2019t tell you how much I love them, and how much I want for them \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

The affection was mutual: Dozens of your former students sent their messages for a book your daughter, Anna, put together to celebrate your 80th<\/sup> birthday.<\/p>\n

Your vast group of admirers extends to your colleagues.\u00a0 Professor Warren Rosenberg called you the Department\u2019s \u201cenforcer of excellence,\u201d and \u201cour model of the best\u2014the best scholar, poet, teacher, activist, intellectual, critic.\u201d\u00a0 Professor Tobey Herzog wrote that your \u201cvoice has been like a father\u2019s, which has provided us with a sense of compassion and guidance for those of us who must carry on without him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet without us<\/i>, you have been carrying on just fine, continuing to build bridges between different worlds.<\/i><\/p>\n

You helped a group of Vietnam War veterans working with Vietnamese poets. With your wife and fellow poet, Tam Lin Neville, you teach people on probation in the Changing Lives Through Literature<\/i> program; also with Tam, you co-founded Off the Grid Press, publishing books by accomplished poets over 60. And with Dr. Hilton Hudson \u201980, you co-authored The African American’s Guide to Heart Disease, Heart Treatment, and Heart Wellness.<\/i><\/p>\n

You once said, \u201cLife finally becomes a question of whether you\u2019re living in a book that somebody else wrote for you, or whether you struggle, with God\u2019s help, to write your own book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of your own books\u2014and their subjects\u2014serve as bookends to your remarkable Wabash career.<\/p>\n

Soon after you arrived at the College you embarked on an exploration of the art of the poet Wallace Stevens, who himself navigated between two worlds\u2014his \u201cday job\u201d as a lawyer and insurance executive, and his life of imagination as one of the Twentieth Century\u2019s most important poets.\u00a0 The final words of your 1966 volume Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty<\/i> might equally be written about \u201cEasterner in the Midwest\u201d Bert Stern:\u00a0 \u201cHe would remain the master of two styles, and the uneasy lover of two worlds\u2014the one that is and the one that might come to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your just-published book on Robert Winter, Wabash Class of 1909, returns you to research that you started in the 1980s.\u00a0 Winter was the College\u2019s oldest alumnus when you first met with him in China in 1984, and then returned for his 100th<\/sup> birthday celebration in 1987. In Winter in China: An American Life,<\/i> you have honestly told the story of a man you call a \u201cHoosier in Exile,\u201d a Crawfordsville native who\u2014in your words\u2014\u201cwished to devote his life to bridging the cultures of the West and that of the East,\u201d and who did so as an educator in China for over 60 years even at considerable personal costs.\u00a0 With the publication of Winter in China<\/i>, you have fulfilled an implicit promise made to this singular Wabash man on his deathbed, and, as his friend and Harvard historian John Fairbank said, succeeded in \u201cbringing Bob Winter back into the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

You left the Wabash classroom 16 years ago, but you never stopped teaching, showing us how to grow older with hope and imagination, embodying the Wabash mission statement that your friend and fellow professor Donald W. Baker H\u201957 wrote, \u201cliving humanely in a difficult world.\u201d You\u2019ve shown us that these can be the years we learn the most, give the best, and come to truly love those we\u2019ve been given to love. You bring to mind words Baker wrote in his own later years: \u201cI am in it with all my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cComing Home Late,\u201d your final Lafollette Lecture, you called yourself an exile here in Crawfordsville.\u00a0 Today, we honor, cherish, and embrace that outsider\u2019s perspective\u2014a vantage point that brought other worlds and ways of thinking to thousands of Wabash students\u2014by inviting you, Bert Stern, teacher of men, to come be at home with us, your fellow travelers.\u00a0 You made Wabash the place of your calling, and by doing so you helped make it home for so many. Wabash is grateful indeed that Bert Stern chose to serve almost 40 years of voluntary exile here.<\/p>\n

And, because attaching your name to the phrase gives it meaning in a way that will make your fellow teachers and students, from Baker to Bill Placher, smile, we say this with pride and deep affection: Bert Stern\u2014you are Some Little Giant.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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