Always home at OHIO

During my undergraduate years, I lived in Bush, Tiffin, and Lincoln Halls on the East Green, the only green there was then, and made daily treks up the steep stone steps behind the women’s dorms to University Terrace and the quad. As an English major, I spent much of my time in Ellis Hall, but I took as many classes as I could elsewhere, gobbling up philosophy, history, psychology, speech, drama, and art.

A few favorite teachers: 1964 Distinguished Professor and poet Hollis Summers (for his attention to detail and gentle, almost genteel, demeanor); his English department colleague, the 1959 Distinguished Professor Paul Murray Kendall (for his colorful, and sometimes risqué, stories); Troy Organ (for his pithily profound questions) in philosophy and still another Distinguished Professor, honored in 1965; and speech authority Lorin Staats, AB ’26, MA ’31 (for his insistence on precise pronunciation). Dizzied by this wide-ranging learning, I attempted to declare a triple (or even perhaps a quadruple) major—until told that I was taking on too much.

As a graduate student, I settled into the English department, earning two degrees (and another simultaneously from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, motoring between the two schools for several years). Then I spent a year as a full-time member of the English department here, but I never quite adjusted to calling my former teachers, now my colleagues, by their first names.

A few years after I left for other campuses in other states, and even other countries, I was happily surprised to be invited back to OHIO as a member of the Board of Visitors formed by Bill Dorrill, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I saw some of the changes that had occurred since I’d left the Athens Campus and helped steer the department in new directions.

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In 2004, I was asked to write for the bicentennial issue of ohiotoday. I observed that I, and many of my generation, had come to college ignorant, hoping to find our futures. Now that that future has come and gone and I’m recently retired from the long years of teaching that started at OHIO, the future has almost become the past and I look back fondly.

I haven’t returned to Athens or to Ohio University for a number of years, but it seemed less long than it literally had been—until I was reminded by a recent e-mail from the alumni office that it had been five decades since my first graduation.

And then this opportunity to contribute another piece to ohiotoday, in this case to discuss goodwill. And so here I am again, still a student, still with the fondest memories, going back to the first time I stepped on campus. I know I knew what it meant to me then, but I think it means even more to me now.

Goodwill is reciprocal, something you take and attempt to give back in return. The goodwill I took from OHIO I have attempted to return, in my teaching and in my writing.

—William Virgil Davis, AB ’62, MA ’65, PHD ’67, is an award-winning poet and critic. The poem that follows is from Davis’ Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New (Texas Review Press, 2015)

Feature photo courtesy of the Ohio University Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections