Yesterday I went to a memorial service for Vince Barnett, a man who had been a faculty member at my college for many years and had served as Chair of my department years before I arrived. He retired in 1984; I came in 1989. Our only real contacts occurred at annual department dinners, where all members, past and present, come together for food and conversation. It was at one of those gatherings that I learned he had served in Italy in the early 1950's, the same time my grandfather was the Labor Attache in the American Embassy in Rome. They had known each other.
I didn't know Vince all that well but I learned something about him at the memorial service. He had an accomplished public life. He was a diplomat, a college president, an adviser to foreign governments, moderator of our local town meetings - a position of some honor. Listening to the eulogies, I thought of how academic life was so different in the 1950s and 60s. Fields of study were not as narrow as they are now, social science was not as mathematized. A person with a political science degree, like Vince, could manage an economics program, something highly unlikely today.
A piece of local institutional history came out. One past president of the college mentioned that Vince had almost been selected president himself, but the job went to John Sawyer. It turned out that when he retired, Vince made a brief farewell speech in which he said that it was better that Sawyer had been named president instead of himself. That moment of public humility set my Confucian sensors tingling.
But the full measure of Vince's Confucian gentlemanliness was expressed by his children. Their stories of the warm and close home life they shared, Vince's commitment to his mother's care in her later years, and the openness with which he welcomed friends brought to mind Confucius's "greatest ambition:"
"...to comfort the old, to trust my friends, and to cherish the young."
I think Vince lived just like that.
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