Most people can remember a select few teachers who inspired them not only in the classroom, but in their lives outside of school. Jim Slevin will always be one of those teachers for us.
We came to Georgetown four eager-eyed graduate students in the fall of 2001, each with his own hopes and expectations. What we shared was a desire to learn, to enlighten our intellects. For Jim Slevin, with whom we attended our first-ever graduate seminar in Georgetown, education wasn’t simply about collecting credentials.
He taught that knowledge took on a profound resonance when shared; it was to this pursuit—the intellectual growth of others—that he dedicated his life. It is thus with unique sadness that we, and countless students and colleagues Professor Slevin touched throughout the years, mourn his passing this month at the age of 60.
Perhaps what we came to admire most about Professor Slevin was his fascination with beginnings. By the time we arrived, the only students he taught were freshmen and first-year graduates. We didn’t know that at the time. But in his “Approaches to Teaching Writing” course, which would shape the four of us as we moved through academia, and life, he immediately set us to thinking about beginnings. It was a self-aware exercise of the kind he had employed in the service of young minds at Georgetown for years. How had we learned what it meant to “do English?” he asked. Who had introduced us to the standards, like the five paragraph essay? How? Slevin asked because he knew beginnings mattered. Beginnings conveyed values, and they could invite, intimidate or scold.
For his part, Professor Slevin taught beginnings to invite. His critiques of our prose, gaudily constructed by arrogant first-years, made that clear. With characteristic honesty and compassion, Slevin wondered whether we might employ introductions as “interruptions”—something you’d say politely when you want someone’s attention and want to keep their generosity for a while. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you may be interested in this.”
Slevin so appreciated the intellectual exchange, the questioning, the marshalling of evidence and rhetoric that he stationed himself at its borders, making sure that no matter where we had come from, we felt invited into its norms, not spurned or denigrated. Georgetown was something we might be interested in, and though we weren’t necessarily so sure of it at that point, Slevin was.
More professors than we can count, especially those with socially vital but academically untraditional fields, confided in us upon his death: “He’s the reason I’m even at Georgetown.” It’s not clear whether Slevin thought of what he did in these terms (we suspect he did), but, for a teacher, scholar and writer of such enormous generosity and sparkling wisdom, there is comfort in thinking that perhaps his greatest composition was a generation of Hoyas who, after learning with him, now wanted to learn more.
Slevin’s own beginnings were in Cervantes, that most literate of writers. But his passions were soon directed toward other pursuits, specifically those pursuits of the mind whose chief end was the intellectual benefit of others, freshmen and first-years like us. Inspired in part by his time at traditionally-black Lincoln University, Slevin soon allowed Cervantes to yield to Walter Ong, the Jesuit who rethought what it means to be literate; Frederick Douglass, who saw emancipation in literacy itself; Paulo Freire, who fused pedagogy with economic justice.
The Professor’s chief concerns, Slevin told us, were not justice and peace, but injustice and war—he felt that by focusing on the former we would lose sight of those conditions that give rise to the latter. If we stuck to understanding injustice in historical, political, cultural, and economic terms, we could eventually make a contribution toward its opposite. Though rightly admired within the academy (he won a prestigious Modern Language Association award months before his death), Jim Slevin made his life’s work about bringing the light of literacy to those whose true beginnings were yet to come.
As his teaching assistants, we saw this work put into practice where it was truly needed. Students prone to thinking of writing as a burden regularly came to recognize it for the privilege it is; students forced to adapt to alien ways of reading and writing were ushered expertly into a new community of thinkers. For Slevin, language, communication and literacy held the key to that greatest of successes, self-awareness. In graduate school (at least in the field of English), it’s all too easy for academia to become your life. Professor Slevin was that rare teacher who teaching asked us to think critically about education, encouraging us to question the very nature of our undertaking.
Since learning of Professor Slevin’s death, one weekly moment we shared with him has come repeatedly to mind. At the end of just about every seminar, there would be a knock on the door. Professor Slevin would walk over and feign ignorance to the knocker’s identity. It was always his daughter Lucy. She would burst in the door, run around the room and eventually jump into his lap.
“This is our dog, Lucy,” he’d say and let out his wonderful, high-pitched laugh. It’s hard to say which – his dogged determination to spread understanding to those just starting out, or his uncanny joviality in their presence, marked above all by the laugh —will be more missed.
—by Ian Martinez, Christopher Warren, Adam Wells, and Joseph Wenger, Jr.
