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Congregation Kehillath Israel, Brookline,
Massachusetts
March 23, 2006
Sheba, Deborah, and Jared - we share your loss and mourn with you.
Susan and I offer our deepest condolences to you and to all of your
family. The lives of each of us in this room are diminished by the loss
of a friend - but we remember warmly how much we each were enriched by knowing
Jim Freedman as a friend. That warmth can never be lost.
A few years ago, Jim Freedman said to a Boston Globe interviewer
that his great regret was that due to his illness, his grandchildren would not
know him. Isaac, Jacob, Sasha, and Noah: we resolve you will know
him. Let me record for you….
Susan and I have known Jim and Sheba Freedman for 19 years - good and full
years, but also years that tested him regularly. The cruel accumulation
of physical assaults upon his body never diminished his spirit or his
mind. He met the repeated challenges with grace and with courage and did
so in ways that inspired all who were privileged to be in his good company.
James O. Freedman was a man of many parts - husband, father, and
grandfather, a son of New Hampshire, law professor, university president,
academic spokesman and leader, lover of books, public intellectual, sports
enthusiast, a special friend who was so proud of his Jewish heritage. Each of
these he embraced to the fullest. He excelled in living a good and
generous life, always comfortable with who he was.
When I first met him in 1987 what stood out was his wisdom, the power of his
intellect and the range of his learning. He read so widely. He was
curious to know more about many things. And he came to know more.
But knowing things was not enough - reflecting upon them, learning from them,
relating them to life's problems and questions, sharing the wisdom derived from
this process, these things were the purpose of education at its best and they
shaped the intellectual meaning of his life. He was always a teacher,
always patient and wise.
As Dartmouth's fifteenth president, he focused consistently on raising even
more the intellectual sights and expectations of the College. He
encouraged the creation of new academic programs, affirmed and strengthened the
College's commitment to diversity, oversaw major construction projects, and
completed a successful capital campaign.
His passion for learning, for liberal learning, for discovery, these things
always shaped his administration. Dartmouth's distinguished reputation today
stands as a tribute to his vision.
We learned from his ideas, from his passionate defense of the liberal arts,
from his unflinching support of academic freedom. He willingly fought for the
ideas he believed in, and he challenged us to strive for the best. He did not
flinch from controversy nor did he step back from challenge.
I had the good fortune to serve as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
and as Provost with Jim, and, when he took a sabbatical in 1995, as acting
president. Jim was the sort of colleague you could spend hours with
talking over the day-to-day issues of campus and of the world. He loved to talk
about books, about the day's news, about baseball, and he had an ear finely
tuned to the academic rumor network! Many sought his advice and counsel.
He had a wonderful sense of humor and a laugh that would lighten the heaviest
of subjects. We spent many hours together - hours that I will never forget and
will always cherish.
If his wisdom and intellect shaped his approach to life, for the last dozen
years his courage marked his life and together these qualities made a strong
teacher the stronger and made his great passion for liberal learning the
greater. As he said at Dartmouth's 1994 commencement, just completing his
chemotherapy, his first chemotherapy, "although liberal education
isn't perfect, it is the best preparation there is for life and its exigencies.
It does enable us to make sense of the events that either break over
us, like a wave, or quietly envelop us before we know it, like a drifting
fog."
At that time none could have imagined that our friend would have so many
subsequent opportunities to test this preparation; none of us could have
handled these repeated assaults with so much dignity and such understated
courage.
The Anti-Defamation League recognized him twice, with their William O.
Douglas First Amendment Freedom Award and with the David Rose Civil Rights
Award. The testimonials that led to these tributes said so much about a
teacher who taught and who lived the value of liberal learning in making the
world the better.
A few years ago we talked about his dealing with what then must have been
the fifth or sixth recurrence of his cancer. I asked him about his
spirits and he acknowledged that sometimes he felt terribly depressed and
discouraged. But he said that he coped with these feelings by reminding
himself that if in 1994 someone could have promised him ten more years, time to
finish two books, to meet and to hold his grandchildren, Isaac, Jacob, Sasha,
and Noah, to enjoy old friends and to make new ones, he would have felt
blessed. But, he observed, those ten years had gone quickly, too quickly,
so that perhaps with ten more years he would feel doubly blessed!
He lived to see the Red Sox win the World Series. And many here will know
his passion for this team. He could recite details from Red Sox history that
would challenge the best historians and he loved speculating on trades or
moves. He was quite capable of second guessing managers - and he laughed
when I told him that even in this world of specialization the two things that
most Americans thought they could do better than the person doing the job was
manage a baseball team and run a college or university.
Along with his native intellect, his exceptional wisdom, his demonstrated
courage, there was another defining quality, increasingly important to Jim - he
was Jewish. I recall a conversation a few years ago when I said to him
that while of course I did not know him before 1987, I thought that his Jewish
heritage and values had become even more powerful forces in his life over the
last ten or fifteen years. He agreed that this was true, and it was
something from which he took great comfort.
He grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, the son of a high school teacher
and an accountant, and a member of a small Jewish community. As a child he
developed his passion for ideas, and books, and the life of the mind and he
understood early that so much of identity was tied to his being rooted in this
Jewish community.
Jim once wrote, "Growing up … I often wondered … what it meant to be a
Jew. I gradually came to understand that a devotion to learning was at the
center of Jewish identity. My parents were both readers. Our house abounded
with books and conversations about ideas. And so, as I matured, my search for
my most authentic self was ineluctably linked to my identity as an
intellectual, and that identity was inextricably linked to my sense of myself
as a Jew."
In his distinguished service for the American Jewish Committee, recognized
by them with their National Distinguished Leadership Award, that secular sense
of self became a profound sense of responsibility, a passion to protect and to
enhance Jewish life.
When Susan and I last visited Jim a month ago at Massachusetts General
Hospital, he was as eager as always to know news and to share views of the
world. Pitchers and catchers had reported but we all recognized that he
might not see another opening day.
He was nonetheless so pleased when he told us that Princeton University
Press was publishing the book that he had been working on for the last several
years, one that would provide reflections on his family, his community, and his
education. And through the bandages and patches and tubes he positively
beamed when he said that he was dedicating the book to Sheba. Left
unsaid, but surely recognized by those in that room - and all in this temple
today - is the reciprocity of this dedication, a recognition by Jim of how
Sheba Freedman has dedicated so much of her life to protecting the quality of
his life. Sheba, you inspire us all.
Eudora Welty, one of Jim Freedman’s favorite writers, once wrote,
"Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor
artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run,
denied."
Here we attest and shout out that Jim Freedman was truly a man of integrity.
Everything he did, he did truthfully and with integrity. Quietly, he encouraged
us to do the same. It is with sadness, for sure, that I stand here today. But
it is also with deep pride and affection for all that Jim Freedman accomplished
and meant to us.
In the 2003 Globe interview in which he reflected upon his
mortality, Jim Freedman hoped that his grandchildren would know of him that
"I thought it was valuable to try to nurture some values to help people
live better." Isaac, Jacob, Sasha, and Noah, your grandfather did
that. And those lessons endure.
He liked the line from The Education of Henry Adams, "A
teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
Today we honor a man whose ideas can have no end and whose values must have no
end - and we celebrate our good fortune in having known him.
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