VASSAR COLLEGE
POUGHKEEPSIE - NEW YORK 12601
At a Meeting of the
Faculty of Vassar College
held
April 6, 1988
the following Memorial for
John Aldrich Christie, 1920-1987,
was unanimously adopted:
When John Aldrich Christie died last September, he was where
he wanted to be—-at his home in Vermont with his family. Born in
Northampton, Massachusetts——the son of a Congregational minister——
and reared in Connecticut and southern Vermont, John was an inveter-
ate New Englander. Away at college in Oberlin, Ohio, he read
Henry James's Roderick Hudson as a cure for homesickness. He
returned to New England to earn two M.A.s, the first at Wesleyan
and the second at Yale. In January 1946, as he was fond of say-
ing, Helen Lockwood "plucked him out of Yale" to teach at Vassar.
He liked being close to Vermont. He jokingly told friends that
he had wanted this written into his Vassar contract: in the spring,
during maple sugaring time, he would be permitted to leave for two
weeks in Vermont.
John received his doctorate in English and American literature
from Duke in 1955. Four years later as a Vassar associate pro-
fessor he was featured in a Pageant Magazine article entitled,
“A Professor to Remember: What Makes a Dynamic Teacher?" The
caption under one photograph read: "Rapt meeting of minds: Freshman
class, teacher Christie, and poet Milton." With Yankee resignation
and good humor, John characterized the article as "a spoonful for
the educational cause." "While not stirring me to my professional
toes,” John wrote, it "does Vassar and teaching no harm."
In his courses on American literature John relished teaching
that pantheon of New Englanders--Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson,
Emerson, and especially Henry David Thoreau who was the subject of
John’s book, Thoreau as World Traveler, published by Columbia
University Press and the American Geographical Society in 1965.
It was Thoreau's sense of the adventurous relationship between
observed and imaginative experience that stirred John's own sense
of himself as a teacher and a person. The first principle of his
teaching was always that knowledge is not knowledge until it is
experienced on the pulse. To him, as to Thoreau, the individual
experience was primary. "No matter how mild the human adventure,"
John once wrote, "it can be made inestimable" by what one imagina-
tively brings to it.
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John's appetite for the human adventure was hard to forget,
reflected again in his love of maple sugaring. When one visited
him, in Vermont, during sugaring, the air was full of the smell of
simmering maple sap. Maple syrup was used on and in everything-—
toast, cereal, coffee, ice cream. The sheer energy and physical
capacity of the man drew comment, especially if one should also
happen to notice he had only one arm. A fall from the rafters
of a neighbor's Vermont barn when John was a boy had left his arm
badly broken. Infection and the lack of penicillin led to its
amputation. John never considered himself handicapped, and neither
would anyone who ever saw him splitting logs. Once, as he and a
friend approached a toll booth while John was driving, the friend
realized that before he could help in any way John had gotten out
his wallet, paid the toll, shifted gears, and was leaving the toll
booth while simultaneously putting away his wallet and steering
with his knees. "Well," the friend thought, "if John is doing it,
it must be all right."
At Vassar John seemed to serve at one time or another on
virtually every faculty committee on campus. He was president of
the Faculty Club, when there was a faculty club, from 1947 to 1949.
With his first wife Dorothy Sexton Christie, and their three sons,
David, John, and Roderick, he brought visiting writers together
with students and faculty in his home. In 1951 when he became a
Cushing House Fellow, his family became the first faculty family
to live in the dormitories. The classes of 1951 and 1963 chose him
as their Class Advisor. For nine years he served as an officer
in the American Association of University Professors, ranging from
president of the Vassar chapter to member of the National Council.
He was one of a three—man AAUP investigating team which in 1966
charged the trustees and administration of St. John's University
h1Jamaica, Queens, for violation of academic freedom in their dis-
missal of thirty—one professors. He enhanced Vassar's financial aid
program by creating the position of student research assistant,
initially training students himself and paying them out of his own
pocket. When John joked about getting money for such projects, his
friends could recognize his deft ability to poke sly verbal fun at
himself or the institution he was so devoted to. When he was serving
as a consultant to Nyack High School in the early sixties, he told
Vassar he would need traveling expenses. "How much?" he was asked.
“Between twenty and thirty dollars," he said. Then, John would say,
“I got a check for twenty—one dollars."
John felt proudest of his contribution to multidisciplinary
education at Vassar. From the time of his arrival at Vassar he
was involved in what was then called the Related Studies Program
in American Culture, a program which collapsed in the mid—l950s for
lack of funding. In 1972, John was able to regenerate the program
by successfully directing a portion of Helen Lockwood's bequest
toward its financial support. As the first director of the
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multidisciplinary program in American Culture, John gave shape to
many of the distinctive goals and innovative principles of team-
teaching that now mark multidisciplinary education at Vassar. He
saw the College as being at the forefront of this experiment in
education, and twelve years after forming the Program, he saw
“genuine multidisciplinary teaching" now quite "come-of-age" at
Vassar.
In the summer of 1977 John married Elizabeth Garrettson Warner
and set off the following year for Greece where he taught as a
Fulbright professor. He had previously made two extended trips
to India, serving as a consultant to Indian universities on establish-
ing graduate programs in American studies, and helping the Univer-
sity of Delhi establish India's first doctoral program in American
literature. He also visited the University of Kyoto and lectured
in northern India, Nepal, Italy, and England. His appetite for new
experiences remained strong. When in India, he lived in old Delhi,
not the protected atmosphere of New Delhi. In Greece he learned
Greek.
It was in Greece that a melanoma was discovered on John's
shoulder. He was subsequently given a fifty—fifty chance of sur-
viving the year. Back in Poughkeepsie, a year later in 1980, his
son Matthew was born. For the next five years he energetically
continued teaching until he retired, on schedule, in 1985. After
fldrty-nine years of service to Vassar, or thirty-nine and a half,
as he reminded everyone at his retirement dinner——no detail is too
nmll for a scholar, he once said——he moved to Vermont where he and
Elizabeth shared their love for the details of life in the house
they planned and built together. Visitors heard talk of books,
maple sugaring, and music. He and Elizabeth had sung together in
the Christ Episcopal Church choir, and John had sung in a Vassar
group that sight—read madrigals. In one of the last photographs
he is happily watching his son Matthew play the piano. His last
gift to a colleague was a marvelous plastic bag to collect maple sap;
his last advice, where to get another. His last letter, dictated
in the hospital, was his response to another colleague’s book, which he had just read in gallets. His last wish was to be at home with his family. "Our experiences tell us all," John once wrote,
“we are the makers, the poets of our own experiences."
Respectfully submitted,
Frank Bergon, Chair
Susan Brisman
William Gifford