Celebrating 50 Years of Service
At the close of December 1994, Leo Van Scyoc—Mr. English, in the minds of many—completed thirty-seven years of service and began a new career as a retiree. Fortunately for the department, he continues on part-time assignment, characteristically contributing far more than his supposed quarter-time serving as co-Director of Composition and assisting with departmental administration and academic advising.
One of the University's best-loved and most respected teachers, he was an early winner of one of its most prestigious prizes, the Alumni Award for Outstanding Teaching. He has taught 28 courses, ranging from basic writing to graduate seminars in the English language. His Shakespeare course not only has been a favorite among English majors but has drawn widely from other departments and colleges. Graduates often affirm that Shakespeare was their favorite—and most valuable—class. His delight in language and literature infectiously pervaded his classroom and was undoubtedly one of the secrets of his legendary success as a teacher. He has deep roots in the Great Depression and in a small Kansas farm community (near the Nebraska plains which were the home of Willa Cather, one of his favorite writers) and consequently has never lost an appreciation for the privilege of higher education, an appreciation which he has communicated to his students.
He prepared successful grant proposals for four NDEA and EPDA summer programs for public-school teachers and secured for the department four NDEA awards for doctoral fellowships and three annual EPDA awards for a program to prepare teachers for two-year and four-year colleges. Substantial purchases from EPDA funds provided the nucleus for the department's now extensive holdings in audio-visual materials.
His commitment to education has not been limited to the University campus. He has participated as officer, invited speaker, committee and panel member, and discussion leader in state, regional, and national professional organizations, including College English and the National Council for Teachers of English. For years he was liaison officer for Arkansas to the NCTE.
He has been no less successful in his role as adviser, having won the first Outstanding Adviser award in Fulbright College. A genuinely concerned, well-informed, and discerning counselor, he knows when a student needs sympathetic encouragement and when he or she needs a bit of stern but fatherly straight talk.
The confidence of his colleagues is indicated by his election to important campus offices, including Chair of the Campus Faculty, Chair of the Campus Council, Chair of the Arts and Sciences Cabinet, and member of the Graduate Council (for 21 years) and of the University Tenure Committee. The University community has been accustomed to seeing Leo crossing the campus, clipboard in hand, to attend a meeting of one of the countless committees on which he has served. In those meetings he could always be counted on to contribute reasonable, common-sense ideas supported by careful study of facts and issues. In departmental matters as well as in committee service, he was well known for the forthright and cogent statement of his own point of view and for his continued support and service when another view prevailed.
Customarily his professional day began no later than 7:00 in the morning. Involved in the nuts and bolts of everyday departmental administration, he was director of all composition courses; supervisor of the Junior English Exemption Examination; supervisor of registration; general supervisor of graduate assistants; and indispensable associate of four successive departmental chairmen. A number of graduate students who have worked closely with him and have themselves gone on to become successful directors of composition and academic administrators say that he is the model they have chosen to emulate.
His appointment to a University Professorship in 1989 was a fitting recognition of his years of service to the University and his profession.
Leo is valued as much for his personal qualities as for his professional abilities. Love of literature has instilled in him a deep sense of the tragedy and joy in human experience—in fact has become a part of his way of life and thought—and doubtless is an important source of the generous kindliness which has characterized his relationships with students and colleagues. He is a meditative man but nonetheless a companionable one and a lover of a good joke. "I like to see Leo laugh," says one of his colleagues. "He laughs all over the office." Friends, students, members of the custodial staff, colleagues across the campus—all like to stop by his office for a chat. He is a thoroughgoing realist, always able to face the worst. But in the end he is also an optimist, as revealed in these lines from Browning's Epilogue to Asolando posted in an obscure corner of his office.
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
Lyna Lee Montgomery
Professor