Remarks at a dedication ceremony on the IU South Bend campus, October 5, 2013.

Planting a tree in autumn takes me back to Westover Greenhouses in St. Louis, where I worked when I was in college. Our customers knew that there were a few choice weeks in the fall, just right for planting trees, but you could see the uncertainty on some of their faces when they looked at the trees themselves, which might very well already have started dropping their leaves. Even though a laborer like me didn’t need to know very much biology to earn a paycheck at Westover, we all knew how to check an autumn tree. Out there near the end of the smallest branches, you would use your thumbnail to scrape away just a little bark. And if you weren’t standing on a highly fertilized lawn like this one, what you would see when you scraped away a little bark was easily the most brilliant green you could find in October, the undercurrent of green cells called the cambium that is the fiber of life in a tree. When I checked this tree the other day, it was beautiful to see that undercurrent of green, not just because that’s what you want to see in a tree but because living in this town and working on this campus I feel the beautiful, lively undercurrent that still flows through us from the lives and spirits of our friends Eileen and Harvey.

Let me give you a few quick examples. Just over there in the quad a couple of months ago I was chatting with a former student of Eileen’s, and I asked him if he was reading anything good. He mentioned a novel he was enjoying and said that it was the perfect sort of book to talk about with Eileen. And I could tell that a conversation about literature that went back to one of her classes was still flowing—still flowering—in his mind months, maybe years later. He is one of those lucky people who knew she kept her office door open for hours a day and with great generosity made herself available to students and colleagues who wanted to talk long and deeply about literature and education and society. The example she set is still green in our memory.

I think I will never forget the care Harvey took of Eileen in her final years of teaching here. He would fetch her from work at the end of long days. I would see the two of them walking through Wiekamp Hall, Eileen walking really pretty slowly because of her vision, and she and Harvey talking about their days. And while I saw them leave the building together many times, I never could spot the slightest impatience in Harvey even though it cannot have felt very natural for such a tall man to walk so slowly. But it was as if he had somehow over time distilled in his heart a blend of love and service that meant that walking the speed Eileen walked was the perfect speed to walk through life if you get to walk next to Eileen. His example, for me, is evergreen, and I aspire to be as decent a man as Harvey.

Harvey was a learned man but wore that mantle lightly, I thought. There was the playfulness of his FACET lecture on genetics a couple of years ago, and a light playful streak in everyday conversations that always put another person at ease. I’m tempted to say that people who are really smart and at the same time humane, as Eileen and Harvey were, are likely also to be playful, or even mischievous. I remember Eileen revealing a small portion of her theory of leadership. She said once, “You know so-and-so is a good leader. He gets other people to do his work for him.” I think what she meant was that there’s a way of respecting people and inviting them to join you in a worthy project that makes our lives better, and people will do a lot of work when they feel that respect and believe in the shared mission. I think that’s the secret of FACET, by the way. Eileen figured out a way to get dozens and dozens of good teachers to aspire to be even better teachers and to work together playfully, for years and years, on the quality of Indiana University. Eileen, we’re on to you—you wanted IU to be a better place and you figured out how to get the rest of us to do the work.

Oh, but she worked and worked too. I don’t know that I ever talked with her about religious faith, but I saw the dozens and dozens of hours she put in on projects like the IUSB campus self-study, and in that work she quietly testified to her faith in teachers and students and public higher education. There’s something evergreen, too, I think, in the example she set—being able to return day after day believing in the good work of the university and in its improvement.

So it’s true that we’ve lost Harvey and Eileen, but at the same time I feel the undercurrent of their lives still as green and present as the bright cambium of the tree that is planted here in their honor and memory.