James Arnt Aune: A Historical Remembrance

I first met Jim Aune 33 years ago, when we were both starting out as assistant professors at the University of Virginia (UVa). Jim had come to UVa after just a year at Tulane, and I was fresh out of graduate school, ABD from Wisconsin. I was thrilled to be making $17,500; Jim, with his Ph.D. in hand, started at $18,000. We were both surprised and a bit overwhelmed to find ourselves in tenure-track jobs at a prestigious "public Ivy,"¹ Mr. Jefferson's university. Beyond that, however, we had almost nothing in common. He was the bookish intellectual, the editor of his school newspaper, involved in speech and theater, a poetry lover, and a serious student of the human condition. I was none of those things. In high school, I did not hang out with kids like Jim Aune, and he avoided kids like me. At Virginia, however, we developed a very special friendship—a friendship that reminded me of those old war movies, where privates from different backgrounds bond under fire.

I will never forget the question Jim asked me the first time we met: "So, what's your religious background?" I had never been asked that question before, and certainly not by a complete stranger. Where I grew up (in the Black Hills of South Dakota), that sort of personal question could get you shot. But Jim believed that religion and ethnic heritage could tell you a lot about a person. The fact that one was a Norwegian Lutheran or an Irish Catholic was, for Jim, an important marker of cultural identity. So when I declined to answer the question he seemed a bit suspicious. Nevertheless, he helped me move into the little house I had rented outside Charlottesville, and he even gave me a portable dishwasher he didn't need—one of those compact units you roll up to the sink and connect with a hose. I was grateful for Jim's help and impressed by his generosity.

The next morning I stumbled into the kitchen in the predawn darkness and felt something crunchy, yet squishy, under my feet. When I flipped on the lights, I saw at least a half-a-dozen cockroaches scurrying for cover. And these were not ordinary, run-of-the-mill Midwestern cockroaches, but huge, two-inch-long cockroaches that apparently had hitched a ride all the way from Louisiana in the bowels of Jim's dishwasher. In later years, I would look back on that incident as something of a metaphor for our friendship. Over the years, we reached out to each other in many a good-will gesture, only to have those gestures go horribly wrong.

Now don't get me wrong. Jim and I were close friends from the start, and in many ways those early days at Virginia were very happy and exciting for both of us. There was a really remarkable group of faculty and students at UVa in those years—a time that Jim liked to call the Golden Age of Rhetoric at Virginia. John Sullivan, who was the department head at the time, was a generous and thoughtful man. He was determined to transform a mediocre speech department into a first-rate rhetoric program. He hired both of us and some other good young faculty, building the new Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at UVa into the best M.A. program in the country. Along with Sullivan, our senior colleagues included Michael Prosser, a colorful and iconoclastic scholar of intercultural communication who joyfully defied the button-down culture at UVa with his shark-tooth necklace and Hawaiian shirts. And John Graham, a classic southern gentleman married to the best-selling novelist, Alexandra Ripley.² We did not fully realize it at the time, but Graham was an accomplished literary scholar in his own right—trained at Johns Hopkins, Göttingen, and Oxford, and a leading authority on physiognomic imagery in art and literature. But as one of those rare academics who "disdained careerism," John cheerfully ignored the "real world" and was "steadily impractical," pursuing "learning for...