An unusually mild winter has pushed the first, small flowers into a cold and unwelcoming spring. Despite the stresses and tensions of a difficult year nationally and internationally, the great work of this great university continues. Another generation of students is about to be graduated and, rising beneath the daily hum of thinking, writing, and conversation here, there's the excitement that comes in anticipation of yet another commencement. We faculty are immensely fortunate to have played a part in shaping the minds and imaginations of yet another class of soon-to-be Michigan alumnae and alumni. Everything is great about the climate here, except the weather. But come to think of it, maybe that's not so bad, either. Our minds, kept indoors most of the academic year, generate their own compensatory warmth and light, and these are shared widely among us, faculty, students, staff, and all.

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the surprise on the face of John Guillory, chair of the English department at New York University, when I told him that we had more majors than any other department in this College, with the exception of Psychology and Biology. (Where nationally only some 7% of all college and university students major in any of the humanities, here at the University of Michigan more than 10% of all graduating students have majored in English. And now that Biology has divided into two departments, only Psychology will have a higher number of majors.) Professor Guillory was here to speak before a splendid gathering of faculty, students, and members of the English Advisory Board, at the start of a day-long symposium that focussed on the question, why teach and study literature?

His talk began a lively and extended discussion that carried through the presentations of other visitors and a panel that teamed retired faculty with current graduate students-English professors past and future-as well as through lunch (there was much talking between mouthfuls and even some, a gauge of our excitement, during mouthfuls). The day was capped off by a stirring exhortation for us to become more involved as teachers and scholars with the world outside the university by our former department chair, Bob Weisbuch, now president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Some forty minutes after we'd been scheduled to clear the room in the Michigan Union where all this was happening, I was forced to call our proceedings to a halt. Even then the conversations carried out into the hall and the street, to continue over the next several days.

This has been yet another great year for the department. Six brilliant assistant professors will be joining us, five hired this year and the sixth two years ago, delayed in arriving because of a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale. These new faculty members are described elsewhere in this newsletter, and I'm sure you'll be hearing a good deal more about them in years to come. Further good news is that three of our current assistant professors are about to be promoted and to receive tenure, as you'll read elsewhere in these pages, pending the approval of the Provost and the Regents. All are fine teachers with major achievements in their special fields and rising professional reputations. We're proud to have them among us and extremely pleased with their impending promotions, which make us all the more hopeful and confident of our future as a department.

And there's still more good news to report about our faculty. Five have won prestigious fellowships for next year (as elsewhere noted in this publication), and other awards, prizes, and distinctions continue to pour in, too numerous to mention. Our sudden and impressive jump in last year's U.S. News & World Report rankings of Ph.D. programs in English, from 14th to 11th, certainly seems predictive of future rise. It's my impression, certainly, that recruiting new faculty has gotten distinctly easier over the past several years. I attribute this to our growing national reputation.

Among all these great gains, though, I'm saddened to report a major, indeed irreparable loss. Lemuel Johnson, author of Shakespeare in Africa and The Sierra Leone Trilogy, was much-loved and will be much missed. The obituary in this newsletter gives as full an account of his career as such occasions allow. One thing it doesn't mention, though, is why he came to the United States to go to college instead of England, which would have been for someone of his time and place the far more usual choice. At the Sierra Leone Grammar School, from which he was graduated and which was modeled on the best British principles, students greeted their teachers at the beginning of class with "Salve, magister!" They were also beaten for not speaking "proper" English. The absence of such practices in this country may have provided some motive for his coming to the U.S.

More important, I think, were the American films that Lemuel saw as a boy in the Freetown cinemas, especially the Westerns with their cowboys and large vistas of mountains and plains. But, as he would later ruefully admit, he and his friends even cheered Tarzan in the Tarzan movies. There was also the schoolboy pleasure he took in reading American literature. Nothing so impressed him as his first encounter with Moby Dick at age sixteen. I like thinking it was his reading Melville "six degrees above the equator," as he liked to say, that brought us all here at the University of Michigan the great benefit of his presence these more than 30 years. Salve, magister!

This is my last newsletter column. My term as department chair will be completed at the end of August. Patsy Yaeger will serve as interim chair over the next year, and then Sidonie Smith, on leave next year, will assume this office for the next four years. I leave this job with mixed feelings. It's important for me to get back more fully into the world of teaching and scholarly research, which is the world I opted for so many years ago and which remains so close to my heart. But I shall miss the opportunity to be of special use to my colleagues.

One of the things that supposedly wiser hands always tell incoming chairs is that they'll learn more about their colleagues than they'll ever want to know, meaning they'll be exposed to vices and foibles they hadn't hitherto dreamt of in people whom up until then they may actually have respected. I have to report that my past three years' experience gives the lie to this old nostrum. The sum effect of all I've learned about my colleagues has only made me admire and love them more. This department is truly a wonderful assemblage of scholars and teachers, and I leave this job feeling all the more fortunate, all the more grateful, for my many years among them. To my colleagues, then, who've been so much in my mind and among my concerns these past three years, I say as I once more join your ranks, Salvete magisterae, salvete magistri!