A tribute to Alan Bradford

Professor of English Alan Bradford speaks after his colleague Julie Rivkin honored his teaching career at CC with a special tribute during a special ceremony May 19. Photo by Vincent Scarano

By Julie Rivkin, Professor of English
(These remarks were delivered at the Trustee Dinner in Hood Dining Room on Friday, May 19, 2006.)

A number of years ago, Alan Bradford gave a post-sabbatical presentation of his research at a forum we used to have called “Faculty at Work.” His subject was “Time in Shakespeare.” What he made me see as never before was the way time runs differentially in Shakespeare’s plays, the way characters can live with a sense of the press of history or with an expansiveness unmeasured by any clocks. Time now is my topic—Alan’s 40 years at Connecticut College—and what I really could use to address it is Alan’s own nuanced understanding of how we live in time.

For more than 20 of those 40 years, I have been Alan’s colleague—fellow member of the English department, neighbor in Blaustein, friend and confidante. The time we spent together, then, was ordinary time—the ordinariness of ongoing college life with its rhythms and rituals, its 14 week semesters and 75 minutes classes and two hour department meetings. But all that ordinariness was also, in its way, remarkable. At an earlier English department gathering in which we celebrated Alan, I tried to articulate this more than ordinariness, and here is what came to mind:

Julie Rivkin, professor of English, speaks about Alan Bradford. Photo by Vincent Scarano

For years my office was right next door to Alan’s, and I knew I lived in a good neighborhood. Alan’s office is a kind of magnet for those who need to talk. Alan, sitting at his desk, a student in the chair—how many times have I witnessed that familiar scene—as the ideas for a Shakespeare paper got unfolded, unpacked, another paper ready to write. Around piles of papers, stacks of books, a great abundance of stuff, but in all that apparent chaos a sense of reassuring inner order, balance, proportion. I would follow the students, sit in the chair, work out—with Alan’s help—my own ideas. Not on a Shakespeare paper, no, but on a department project, a staffing request, a hiring decision, a conflict. Alan took everything in and thought about it. His response took time, but Alan gave things time, and when I would speak to him the next day or next week, there would be the most measured, fair, generous solution imaginable. In a department meeting, Alan’s voice would be the repository of good sense, the one that would bring us all back from our various edges to a judicious center. Alan would keep us to policy when we wandered into rumor, would remind us of good motives when we slid into suspicion. “Probity,” I think, was the word Ken (Bleeth) used after one such meeting, and he underlined his respect for that virtue.

But I don’t want this portrait to become too solemn, for that would not be accurate. Alan’s enthusiasms, like the images of whippets and Shakespeare that fill his favorite ties, are also always manifest, warming his speech and directing his course. That’s what one feels most centrally when Alan speaks of an idea he is working out in his research, a new book he has just read, a movie he and Mary have just seen.

Alan’s central place in the life of the English department and the College make it hard for us to imagine it without him. So many of us have spent so many of those 14–week semesters, those two–hour meetings, those customary and ritualized spans of college time, in Alan’s company and as Alan’s colleague, that it is hard to envision those hours and days and weeks in his absence. But we are lucky, for even in his retirement, Alan is giving us time. Scholar of time, teacher of time, Alan is phasing his time into retirement. And if that doesn’t quite stop the clock, or seize the day, it does gives us all that most coveted kind of college time—a generous extension.