To the Williams community,
I write with the promised commemoration of our late colleague, Robert G. Scott Class of 1968 Professor of English and former Dean of the College Steve Fix, who died on April 23, just a few months short of his planned retirement.
A native of Dorchester, MA, Steve graduated from Boston College High School, then Phi Beta Kappa from Boston College, where he won the “Scholar of the College” award, along with honors for scholarship and service. Dual graduates of the two schools call themselves “double eagles.” In a 1999 oral history Steve recalled, “I had briefly considered being a triple eagle, which our listeners may not understand means Boston College High School, Boston College, and Boston College Law School. And I had thought actually for a little bit during my college years that I might go on to be a lawyer, but one day I woke up and realized I just wasn’t going to do that.”
We are fortunate that Steve realized he “just wasn’t going to do that.” Instead, he earned his Ph.D. in English at Cornell with a dissertation entitled, A Parable of Talents: Samuel Johnson’s Criticism of Milton. From there he came straight to Williams in 1979 and spent the ensuing forty years studying and teaching a great span of literary works, from Johnson, Sterne and Fielding in the eighteenth century to Nabokov and Pynchon in the twentieth.
Steve was his fullest self in the classroom, especially in seminars and tutorials (he directed the tutorial program 2000–04). When speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education for a 2002 feature about the latter program, he said, “In some ways, it’s the hardest thing: to trust that the hour will unfold without your aggressive management.” As his colleague and friend, Professor of English Steve Tifft, recalls, “Steve’s students often spoke about how, in his seminars, he would induce them to carry the discussion themselves, with few and brief interventions from him. He required that all of his students know the names of every one of their classmates by the end of the first week, and insisted that each of their comments be directed not to him but to the student who had spoken last. His former students marveled that, despite this, unobtrusively and almost uncannily, the argument that Steve wanted to develop somehow emerged, by his invisible hand.”
Steve also required his tutorial students to start each session by reading their papers aloud. The sound of a work and the rhetorical quality of its presentation were, in his view, important complements to rigor of research and argumentation. Similarly, he would often ask students in his lecture courses to read the first few lines of a chosen work (Nabokov, for example) out loud together on the first day of class.
One of his former students, Mack Radin ’19, offered this remembrance: “‘Good points, but try to speak slower,’ I still hear Steve saying all these years after our tutorial together, anytime my nerves start to get the best of me in a public speaking engagement. Steve had the remarkable ability to listen as well as he lectured, and effortlessly made students’ contributions feel just as worthy as his brilliant monologues. He could take my breath away with a masterful end-of-class mic drop and a wry smile, but I think his greatest gift to students was a lesson in time travel: when he taught, centuries vanished, and it felt like the writer in question was sitting just across from us in conversation—be it our old friend Henry Fielding, the elusive Thomas Pynchon, or of course, Samuel Johnson. Though I miss Steve dearly, I will always be grateful to him for teaching me to reach across the years and foster warm relationships with those separated from us by seemingly immeasurable time and space.”
This depth of sentiment was the rule among Steve’s students, rather than the exception. As Steve Tifft says, “he was known for fostering a sense of community among his students by regularly inviting them to the Lee Snack Bar after class, where he treated them to snacks and encouraged them to speak to one another, not necessarily about the course, but about their lives or any thoughts that had been preoccupying them. So strong were the bonds that he formed in his classes that, at the end of the semester, students were seen leaving the last class of his celebrated course on Samuel Johnson weeping.”
Indeed, Manami Diaz Tsuzuki ’18 recalls, “I took my first class with Professor Fix, on lyric poetry, in freshman year, knowing that I wanted to major in STEM and go into medicine. I was often moved to tears by what we learned, because he encouraged us to read poetry with our whole self. Later I signed up for his course on Samuel Johnson without knowing who Johnson was, simply because he was teaching it. Shortly before the semester started my family was forced to leave the U.S. because their visa had expired, and a friend passed from cancer. He encouraged me to write a final paper about Johnson that enabled me to navigate loss and grief. While I didn’t enter the course expecting to relate to Johnson, he taught it in a way that was deeply human. I had the privilege of taking my final class with him (Nabokov and Pynchon) during my junior year, and I still have every essay from it, with his written comments. The last conversation I had with him was at my graduation, and he told me was proud of me and excited for my future, not because I was smart, or a good student, but because I was a good person.”
Steve valued such closeness—even a sort of academic communion—as a feature of the best kind of learning. He was fond of quoting President Emeritus Frank Oakley, under whom he had served as dean, in praising Williams’ “intimacy of scale”: the idea that our college combines the opportunities of a large, well-resourced school with the rewards of a small, close-knit community.
Such insights equipped Steve to ably lead the college’s reaccreditation self-study in 1986-87. A decade later he was recruited back, this time to help organize the 2017 self-study and write its opening section on our mission: the section that begins with the now oft-cited phrase, “In the gentle light of the Berkshire hills, Williams pursues a bold ambition…” It was a fine expression of his love for this place and our work, expressed with characteristic flourish.
President Oakley himself recalls, “When I became president of the college in 1985, one of the first, and certainly the best things I did was to choose Steve as dean of the college. Although he was only 29 or 30 years old at the time, he speedily became a warm friend, a deeply thoughtful colleague and of course a first-rate dean. He was not only highly capable, but marvelously creative and great fun to work with. His death constitutes a huge loss for the college, and he will long be sorely missed.”
Steve published a number of important scholarly works during his career, including an edition of Johnson’s Life of Milton and the co-edited volume The Selected Works of Samuel Johnson, both from Yale University Press, as well as articles in Modern Philology and Modern Language Studies, among other journals. In 1981 he also edited an important special issue of The Berkshire Review, entitled “Modernization and Its Discontents,” based on joint colloquia held by faculty at Wesleyan, Amherst and Williams. He was a member of the editorial advisory board of Princeton University Press’s Hyde-Princeton Edition of the Letters of Samuel Johnson and of the Johnsonians, and received several grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, including one for his work on Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare and Milton.
He was an extraordinary campus citizen and leader, as well. Selected by President Frank Oakley as dean of the college, he served in the role from 1985 to 1992, followed by two terms as chair of the Department of English, 1994-98 and 2000-02. He was a member of the presidential search committee led by Board Chair (now Trustee Emeritus) Greg Avis ’80 that selected President Adam Falk, an officer of Phi Beta Kappa and deputy college marshal. He also served on numerous committees and was elected to multiple terms on both the Faculty Steering Committee and the Committee on Appointments and Promotions. He even gave the Baccalaureate address in 1992. The Scott Professorship, which he held until his death, “is awarded by the president to recognize a member of the faculty who has shown exceptional distinction in teaching and service to the community.” It was a fitting match for someone so generous with his time, concern and skill. “Steve had a seamless and vital sense of the interrelation of teaching, scholarship, and service,” says his friend and colleague, Professor of English Anita Sokolsky. “For him, thinking, counsel, and learning were all communal acts.”
That commitment to community didn’t end at the campus bounds. Steve served on the board of Northern Healthcare and as a trustee of Boston College, 1976-80. Appointed by Governor William Weld as a trustee of North Adams State College (now the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts), he was an active member of its board for 10 years. Closer to home, in 2004 he narrated a joint performance of Peter and the Wolf by the Williams Student Symphony and the Berkshire Symphony, with sets designed by members of the Pittsfield Adolescent Support Program. Perhaps less known, but no less influentially, he purchased for the college a neon sign in the shape of a life-sized purple cow, which we sparingly and gently trot out for special college events. It brightens any room, as did Steve himself.
Steve Fix is survived by his sister, Mary Ann Skjold, and two nieces, Suzanne ’97 (Robert) and Christine Skjold.
The family will host a celebration of life for Steve, open to all, on Saturday, September 21, at 12:30 p.m., in the Thompson Memorial Chapel. A reception will follow at the Faculty House. Please RSVP to help with planning. For questions, please contact the Chaplains’ Office. The family also welcomes donations in Steve’s honor to the Boston College High School Scholarship Fund.
Our thoughts are with Steve’s many loved ones, colleagues, former students and friends in the wake of this loss.
Maud