"The Jack Reese we honor today, we thank and praise, is the one who came back to us, back home, and since then has given us a full, fine decade of service. Like most of us, he came into English loving literature and wanting to teach it; but his career has been nothing like ours--he came to the department in 1961[University of Tennessee English Department], left in the mid-sixties to administrate for 25 years, and returned in 1989 for a final, glorious act with us. We're not concerned here with Jack the administrator: he's been praised for that. If we were, then of his retirement we might say something appropriately administrative, and mercifully brief, it would go something like this: "All statements to the effect that Jack Reese is still a going concern are from this moment on inoperative." But for us, who share his loves (his sensibilities, nothing in his career has become him like the end of it, the leaving. So that, now, what we say of his career is this: that's one way to do it, Jack, that's one way to do it.

Let me now to is becoming an administrator admit complaint: quite the contrary--that was part of his way. Besides I was given his job here, his line, in 1969. Little remains of the Jack from before he left, from back before the flood (fewer and fewer can remember it). There is the story of Dr. Hodges, then head, mistaking Jack for John Tinkler, both of whom came in the same year. Tinkler was a medievalist and linguist, and a man of Falstaffian proportions, not at all this lean Prince who's with us today. Hodges, passing Jack in the hall one summer day, reminded him that he was to teach linguistics in the fall. Jack, startled and confused but ever responsible, set about in desperate panic working that course up and then teaching it, ever responsible. Moral: you want to make it in this business? --do exactly what the head expects, however stupid--that's one way to do it.

Oh, yes! A detail of Jack's administration does deserve mention, although we don't normally talk about such in public. Before leaving office as Chancellor, Jack had a look at the salaries of the English faculty: whereupon, I'm told, he promptly sent over thirty thousand dollars--his last official act. (Jack's good at last things, at finishings off.) Now that Jim Gill has introduced salaries into retirement celebrations--I am permitted to say that, before Jack's blessing arrived, my salary, as a full professor in 1989, was 32 thousand. And then, when Jack came back to us, which you wouldn't know, he told me that any discretionary money I had for raises should go to others, not to him.

When he came back he took on the job of looking after the best students on campus, College Scholars, many of whom took his courses, all of whom loved him. He got himself the perfect classroom, one that would hold only twenty students, the perfect number, and one with a monitor available overhead. He taught courses he genuinely wanted to teach and could teach well. He was the last professor, certainly the last full professor, to teach Honors Freshman English in this department, a course we all should teach. And he made available to students the finest collection of Shakespeare productions on film in private hands I know anything about, a collection he'll leave to the department. (Still leaving well, this Jack.)

I don't know what he does to teach so well. Bob Kronick, who did an analysis of one of those booklet collections of students evaluations, told me that Jack had the highest scores of anyone in the university, which means something. I myself, trying to get at his secret, suggested to Jack that he must be taking his clothes off in front of them--this was several years ago--and, for that matter, that he had a natural advantage, having such good students. But, you know, even good students deserve to be taught well. He came through for them. He must give them medicines to make them love him. I think he succeeds because he loves them, listens to what they have to say, knows their names and where they come from, and is not embarrassed to show his love for literature in class. And he brought white hair and all that authority from the Chancellor's office. Whatever, as an outgoing administrator, he was able to set up an ideal teaching situation--great classroom, excellent students, and wonderful courses; and he made himself worthy of that ideal, becoming thereby as well a sort of ambassador without portfolio for students and good teaching--that's one way to do it.

Jack, therefore, to everyone's amazement, has given renewed credibility to that old and cliched rationalization of outgoing administrators, the one about their desire to return to their "first love, teaching"--here was something miraculous! Who would have believed it? Reminds me of an old joke, with which I'll end. Old jokes are the best, after all (eh, Jack?); an old joke for old Jack. There was a man who simply refused to believe that the Wright Brothers had been able to make that machine fly, a hold-out, a life-time president of the never-get-it-off-the-ground club. Invited down to Kitty Hawk and placed within clear sight of the event on Kill Devil Hill, he saw it happen with his own eyes: the thing lifted off and flew! His immediate reaction? "Oh well, " he said, "of course it'll fly if you do it that way!"

Well, of Jack who-came-back we say, yeah, that's one way to do it: because when he came back the thing lifted off and flew."

Dr. D. Allen Carroll, May 4, 1999