In Memoriam, Roger Rollin

Although he retired just as I was starting at Clemson, Roger Rollins was a generous colleague and a forceful presence to me, before I even started teaching here.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, I came to Clemson on a campus visit, as part of the interview process for the job.  It was Roger who drove me around campus–I mean the whole campus, from the y-beach in Seneca to the Experimental Forest in Pendleton.  I learned a lot about living in Clemson, and about moving to it from elsewhere, as Roger had done.  I couldn’t believe that he was recommending buying a house.  It was both inconceivable up north, and also seen as politically damaging on the tenure-track up there, too–presumptuous, implying one assumed one would get tenure.  Here, it was both affordable, and a sign that one liked the place.

When I was offered the position, an advisor on the English faculty was very enthusiastic about Clemson.  “The students are very strong there,” he told me.  When I asked him how he knew that, he said he was good friends with Roger Rollins, and Roger had told him so.  Roger was the first Clemson faculty I knew who was also known to my faculty at Columbia–he had a national reputation, and conveyed positive impressions of Clemson and its students.

When I moved to Clemson, Roger was the first faculty member to invite me to his house–and what a house, perched above the lake, with a dock and a motor boat.  After the meal, we all piled into the motorboat and somehow made our way from his house, past Clemson’s campus and out to 123.  I could never have reconnoitered my way back, but he did so with ease, probably while wearing his vintage bomber jacket with its insignia patches.  To this day, it is the only time I have motored past Clemson on Lake Hartwell.  It was totally generous, and it said, from the beginning, there’s lots to do and see here, and there’s always a way of getting a new perspective on the place.

When I started to teach here, I picked up the Milton course that Roger had long taught.  He gave me a tip–“the Milton class practically teaches itself,” which I hope I haven’t taken too literally, but I have always found it to be the case.

Finally, I remember Roger being the keynote speaker at a University-wide General Faculty meeting.  It was quite a performance from Roger, who always described himself as hamming it up in the classroom; he’d decided to make the case for the life of the mind, for the unencumbered exploration of ideas, without regard to practical application, to an audience that was not uniformly receptive to such a concept.  Everything about it was pure Roger–saying what he wanted to say, taking a stand in saying it, grinning and winking the whole time, showing what it was like to pursue an idea while defending the value of doing so.

We’ve missed him in the English department since he retired, but that won’t make it any easier to know we won’t see him around town, always asking after colleagues, always knowing what was going on.  We’ll miss him even more now.

And it was only a couple of years ago that I learned that Roger had marched at Selma: http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/2015/01/08/activists-recall-violence-triumph-selma/21434555/