Remembering Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.

I knew Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. (he liked to have the full name acknowledged) for a long time, from when he interviewed me for the assistant professor position here at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1989 (he chaired the search committee) to the day he died. Almost twenty-six years. He was a loyal friend, with a devotion that never wavered through all that time. Joe had a lot of friends; he cultivated friendships, and steadfastly kept them. I was a beneficiary of that.

To describe Joe as a colleague, I think the word that would come to the lips of everyone in the English Department here is wise. Bundled into that adjective would be: shrewd, fair, informed, judicious, and more. He knew how our profession operated, and he served as an adviser and mentor to me and to many, many others as we tried to navigate our way through it. He knew how departments and administrations operated, and he could acutely assess a bureaucratic problem and know what to do about it. A typical scenario at a department meeting might involve vexed deliberations over an issue, with some long-winded contributions that would end, at least in my estimation, with a concise comment from Joe that would settle the issue—so right, so perceptive, so thought-through.

Informing his integrity as a colleague were his principles and commitments, especially his commitments to diversity, to justice, to making opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities. From its start he was a central member of our American Studies Concentration, partly because he thought that it—along with the department’s longstanding strength in ethnic American literature—brought students from minorities to our graduate program. He was the mainstay for the teaching of African American literature in our department. Without him we are bereft. His was the voice that always persuasively insisted on increasing the ethnic and racial diversity of the department—and on hiring African Americans. His devotion to the society for the study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and his editorship of the MELUS journal connected him to a vast web of national and international colleagues, and those connections became resources and channels of vitality for the department here in Amherst.

Finally, as a colleague, Joe was modest, humble, kind, generous, compassionate. With a kind of benign, good-hearted chuckle, he could make hard things laughable, and make pretentiousness look just silly. He was a man with a big heart, and he inspired those of us around him to be the same.