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IN MEMORIAM
WILLIAM REA KEAST
William Rea Keast, professor emeritus of English,
died June 27, 1998. Rea, as he was called by friends and family,
came to The University of Texas as professor of English and chair
of the Department of English in 1972 after a distinguished career
of teaching, scholarship, and administration at the University
of Chicago, Cornell University, and Wayne State University, which
he served as president from 1965 to 1971.
Rea was born on November 1, 1914, in Malta, Illinois,
and graduated from York Community High School in 1932. He went
on to the University of Chicago, where he was elected to Phi Beta
Kappa and received his bachelor’s degree in 1936. His doctoral
studies were interrupted by World War II. From 1941 to 1946 Rea
was on active duty in the armed forces, rising to the rank of major.
Returning to the University of Chicago on a Rockefeller Postwar
Fellowship, he completed his PhD in 1947 and joined the faculty
of the Department of English as an assistant professor. In 1951
he moved to Cornell University as an associate professor and was
promoted to professor in 1957. The focus of his scholarship and
teaching was English literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth
Century, and his greatest love was for Samuel Johnson. Later, when
he came to The University of Texas, he liked to tell young assistant
professors in the field that the surest way to an understanding
of this period was to read straight through Johnson’s Dictionary
of the English Language. The essays he wrote on the Dictionary are
models of scholarly inquiry and set a gold standard for all later
studies of Johnson and lexicography. In recognition of his scholarship
Rea was named a Ford Fellow for 1955-56 and a Guggenheim Fellow
in 1958-59.
By this time Cornell had discovered Rea’s
exceptional administrative talents, naming him chair of the Department
of English in 1957. Five years later he became dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences and in another two years vice president for
academic affairs. In 1965 he was chosen as president of Wayne State
University. His inaugural address to the academic community at
Wayne State concentrated on the role of the urban university in
a rapidly changing society. The tumultuous later sixties in American
cities and on American campuses were especially challenging to
university presidents, but Rea Keast faced them with courage, conviction,
and grace. At a critical moment in May of 1968, he articulated
his vision in an important address whose very title reveals a lot
about the man and the times: "The Object of the University
is not Power, but Truth." That such a view was not popular
in all quarters may be gauged from a novel of the period, Them, by
Joyce Carol Oates, in which the Wayne State president is proposed
by one character as a target for assassination. It is said that
Rea later queried Oates about this: "What made you imagine
that?" The story goes that she replied: "Imagine it?
I heard it." During his presidency, Rea gave a great deal
of thought to problems of academic administration, and at the end
of his term as president was chosen to chair the Commission on
Academic Affairs for the American Council on Education. One result
was an important book on university governance, Faculty Tenure:
A Report and Recommendations by the Commission on Academic Tenure
in Higher Education, that came out in 1973 during Rea’s
first year as chair of the Department of English at UT.
At UT, Rea was especially dedicated to promoting
the careers of younger faculty, especially those without tenure.
For someone who had achieved such distinction in academic life,
he was very sensitive to the needs of those just starting out and
generous with his time in reading drafts of articles, offering
encouragement, and suggesting avenues for publication. He was very
conscious that a department is not only an academic unit, but also
a social one. He and his wife Mary Alice opened their home for
gatherings, small and large, to which the most junior faculty were
as welcome as the most senior. He was unusually engaging in conversation,
amiable and charming in ways that seemed to acknowledge the ideals
of the historical period that he studied. One of the greatest luminaries
of the eighteenth century, David Hume, once wrote that life’s
two greatest pleasures are study and society. This is a view that
Rea must have shared, for he not only excelled in both but also
combined the two pursuits in ways that made him a splendid friend,
colleague, and mentor. He brought to the Department of English
knowledge and experience that served to broaden departmental horizons
and encourage the faculty to set the highest standards of scholarship,
teaching, and service. For this legacy, the Department of English
will always be grateful, counting Rea Keast as one of its most
distinguished members.
Honors
LLD (Honorary), the University of Michigan, 1967
University of Chicago Alumni Distinguished Service
Award, 1970
Who’s Who in America
President, Michigan Academy of Science, Arts,
and Letters, 1969-70
Scholarly Publications
"Some Seventeenth-Century Allusions to Shakespeare
and Jonson," NQ, 29 October, 1949, 468-69.
"Imagery and Meaning in the Interpretation
of King Lear," Modern Philology, XLVII (1949),
45-64. Reprinted as "The ‘New Criticism’ and King
Lear" in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane
(Chicago, 1952), 108-37.
"Johnson’s Criticism of the Metaphysical
Poets," English Literary History, XVII (1950), 59-70.
Reprinted in Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays
in Criticism, ed. J. L. Clifford (Oxford, 1959), 300-310.
"Killigrew’s Use of Donne in The
Parson’s Wedding," Modern Language Review,
XLV (1950), 512-15.
"Dryden Studies, 1895-1948," Modern
Philology, XLVIII (1951), 205-10.
"The Theoretical Foundations of Johnson’s
Criticism," Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern,
ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), 389-407.
"The Preface to A Dictionary of the English
Language: Johnson’s Revisions and the Establishment
of the Text," Studies in Bibliography, V (1952-53),
129-46.
"Some Emendations in Johnson’s Preface
to the Dictionary," Review of English Studies,
N.S. IV (1953), 52-57.
"Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird,’" Chicago Review, Winter-Spring
1954, 48-63.
The Shakespeare Folios in the Cornell University
Library (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954).
"Johnson’s Plan of a Dictionary:
A Textual Crux," Philological Quarterly, XXXIII (1954),
341-47.
"The Language We Speak" with L. F.
Powell, J. H. Sledd, and J. R. Sutherland, University of Chicago
Round Table, May 1955.
"Self-quotation in Johnson’s Dictionary," Notes
and Queries, September 1955, 392-93, June 1956, 262.
The Province of Prose, with R. E. Streeter
(New York, 1956, second edition, 1962).
"The Element of Art in Gibbon’s History," English
Literary History, XXIII (1956), 153-62.
"The Two Clarissas in Johnson’s Dictionary," Studies
in Philology, LIV (1957), 429-39.
"Johnson and Intellectual History," New
Light on Dr. Johnson, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New Haven,
1959), 247-56.
"Editing Johnson’s Lives," New
Rambler, June 1959, 15-29.
"Johnson and ‘Cibber’s’ Lives
of the Poets, 1753," Restoration and Eighteenth-Century
Literature, ed. Carroll Camden (Houston, 1962/63).
Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Oxford,
1962, second edition, 1971).
"The True University of These Days is a
Collection of Books," The Cornell Library Conference (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1964), 41-50.
"Johnson as a Subscriber" with J. D.
Fleeman and Donald Eddy, Johnsonian News Letter, XXV (December
1965), 2-3.
"Samuel Johnson and Thomas Maurice," Eighteenth-Century
Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York,
1970), 63-79.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting
of Professors James D. Garrison and Larry Carver (co-chairs), and Lance
Bertelsen.
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