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English Professor Robert Dupree Retires After 57 Years of Service
May 3, 2023

English professor Debra Romanick Baldwin, Ph.D., delivered the following speech on behalf of Robert Scott Dupree, BA ’62, Ph.D., at the 2023 King / Haggar Awards Ceremony on January 18. Edited for style, the speech is being published today on the occasion of Duprees last class.

IRVING, Texas (May 3, 2023) — 57 years. That is how long Scott Dupree has been teaching here at UD, from the spring of 1966, when he was asked at the last minute to fill in teaching for Sister Francis Marie Manning, who needed to take that semester to finish her dissertation in Canada. Scott was then in the Ph.D. program at Yale, with only the beginning and end of his dissertation written. He was being asked at the beginning of January to start teaching at the end of January, and was faced with two problems: the need to finish his own dissertation, and the residency requirement for his program at Yale. Now, most people would be daunted by the thought of bilocation. Not Scott Dupree. He flew back to New Haven, wrote two chapters in two weeks, flew back to Dallas, taught several hours every day for three weeks, returned to Yale for two months, corresponded via telephone while finishing his dissertation by April 15, then flew back to Irving on April 17 and resumed teaching every day for another three weeks, and, without missing a beat, taught two summer courses. I begin here because it rather sets the pace for his next 57 years.

But let us back up and consider how Scott Dupree got to UD in the first place, six years before that. Living with his family in Lancaster, TX — population 12,500 — there was no Catholic church, so his family attended a church in Oak Cliff. The priest there happened to ask him if he knew where he would be going to college. Receiving the answer “no,” the priest mentioned a new college that had recently started up in Irving and suggested that Scott check it out. The Dupree family could not afford private college, but this new college, the University of Dallas, was holding a competition for a full tuition scholarship. When Scott arrived for the admissions exam, having come from a small school whose one strength was a strong physics teacher, he was surrounded, he said, by students from Jesuit and Ursuline, and thought, as he put it, “I don’t have a chance.” Of course, his essay won him first place and full tuition. UD, meanwhile, won Scott Dupree.

Despite his accomplishments in physics, he encountered in his sophomore year a charismatic, newly hired professor who would cause him to declare English as his major: Louise Cowan. He flourished, and when he was a senior, she told him that he was to go and get his Ph.D. and come back to UD to teach. He says that he responded, “Yes, ma’am.” And that is exactly what he did. 

In his 57 years, his research has been prolific and wide-ranging, including dozens of articles, from Homer and Jane Austen to contemporary writing by Jane Jacobs to his book on Allen Tate, his anthology of 17th-century poetry, his translation editing of 8 volumes of Gaston Bachelard, his reading companions for Literary Tradition courses, his countless talks, whose energy has not abated despite blindness. Last month, he gave a sweeping and comparative talk on Myths of National Destiny to a full and energized room. He has won two Fulbrights. He has been instrumental in shaping the English program, the Literary Tradition sequence, the Institute for Philosophic Studies and a host of visionary interdisciplinary courses that over the years have become hallmarks of UD, from music in Shakespeare’s plays to Old English taught via Beowulf to, perhaps most famous of all, Menippean Satire. As associate professor and former student Andrew Moran put it:

No other course offered at UD changes the way one sees the world in the way Scott's Menippean Satire course did. ... The course invites one to be a spoudaiogeloion, one who laughs while thinking about serious things and takes seriously humorous things. The way that Scott dwelt on narrative complexities in the course’s works so that they weren’t ‘problems’ but approaches encouraged one to take on a whole new cast of mind. No other course at UD felt so liberating.

Scott chaired the English Department twice and ran the Rome Program, during which, in 1976, he created the Art and Architecture course in Rome. Regarding it, he said that his proudest achievement was not so much its content, but figuring out a series of chronological walks that used the Roman bus system in a way that, because it required 37 students using the bus at one time, always began with the first stop on the line and ended with the last one, when the bus would be empty.  

Scott served as library director for 15 and a half years, from 1998 to 2013, while teaching. He was chair of the Modern Languages Department from 2007 to 2010, which culminated in his founding a new major: Comparative Literary Traditions. He has taught in six different departments, including Drama, Music and English. And with typical humility, he attributes all this not to himself, but to the early encouragement of parents who, as he described them, “were modest enough people. My father had one year of college, my mother none. Every time I had one of these interests, they would find some way to support them.”

We can easily imagine a young Scott Dupree not so different from the older one. He made a crystal radio in third grade and, at the age of 12, began experimenting with poultry husbandry, learning about poultry diseases from college textbooks. Around the same time, he was developing his own Kodak Ektachrome film using a pantry as a darkroom. He played trumpet in the school band, which led him to investigate Dixieland, and then 17th- and 18th-century music, and then to begin making his own musical instruments — an activity that would continue into adulthood, be it a hammered baroque trumpet, a harpsichord or an Anglo-Saxon harp. 

Scott’s facility with electronics has always been ahead of just about anyone else. In the early ’80s, he bought an early Apple 2 Plus computer — before Macs existed — and sold it again because the program he bought with it to do his banking budget told him he couldn’t afford it. He said that what he wanted was not so much the computer itself, but to learn how to use it. Of course, you can imagine in 2020 when things went remote, and everyone else was bewildered and befuddled by online teaching, it was not so with Scott, who had in the 1970s at UD overseen one of the first remote learning programs in the country, and who had been cobbling together various voice-to-text and text-to-voice programs to serve the needs of his sudden blindness — what would have been debilitating to others, but what for him was an opportunity to use some new gadgets. Time and again, he has been way ahead of everyone. When in 2018 Matt Spring inquired about making audio versions of some of the Lit Trad 2 poems, Scott replied with a video attached: 

About a decade and a half ago, I made a series of videos based on ekphrastic poems. Among them was Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux-arts’ with all three of the paintings mentioned in the course of the poem. That one [I’m attaching for] anyone who would like to use it.

Notice here not only the technical imagination, but the sheer generosity of spirit. And did you know, in addition, that Scott himself writes poetry?  Andrew Osborn, poet and associate professor of English, has written that Scott’s poems are “witty, formal … some as clever and well-made as Wilbur’s.” 

This space cannot include all the tributes that news of his retirement has elicited. That will require another venue — and I encourage you to send your own memories of him to Tower. But a few can be shared here. Professor Scott Crider remembers:  

In my first year at UD, I was teaching Romantic and Victorian literature and casually, randomly asked Scott a question about Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan.’ He gave me an hour of his time to answer the question, and I came away informed about the poem and equipped to ask good questions about it. It was the first, but not the last time, I thought to myself, ‘He has read, knows and can remember everything.’ He has long been the most learned member of our department, but he wears it ever so lightly and has also been its most humble — a rare combination. 

Another former student of Scott’s, now teaching, wrote: “He seemed to us then to have read everything, and to know it intimately.  He astounded us by the breadth of his knowledge, whether it was about the Renaissance instruments he had made and played, or the intricacies of Thomas Campion’s lyrical output.” Also recollected was a specific interpretive insight: 

He told us, ‘Roses are symbols of romantic passion, not love; they are beautiful but wilt very quickly. That’s why I’ve never given my wife roses; I give her orchid lilies, which last a long time.’ We naive students thought, ‘Oh, poor Mrs. Dupree!’ until we realized that someone married to Dr. Dupree would be his intellectual equal and know exactly what he was doing.

On that note, you might like to know that she who would become Mrs. Dupree had been newly hired as the Dean’s secretary in 1973 when she overheard the charming Dr. Dupree discussing a harpsichord he was in the process of constructing. He noticed her, and asked her if she was interested in harpsichords. They talked a little about historical music and he thought, as he put it, “Hmm… I wonder what other things she is interested in?” Six weeks later they were engaged and married by Christmas. For her support, too, we are grateful.

One of Scott’s first students, now Emerita Professor Eileen Gregory, offered these words: 

I first knew Scott Dupree as my teacher, in his very first semesters at UD, when he was commuting to and from Yale and Dallas. He was a phenomenon to us all.  He seemed like a boy still, but so erudite and knowledgeable, summoning so much of everything he knew and we didn’t yet know, bringing ideas and texts into this digressive and expanding and bewildering spiral, and then bringing it together somehow in the last milliseconds of class. His exuberance carried us along, even when we were losing altitude. He was very young then. And so were we. And we worked many years as colleagues at this place that we dearly love. And Scott has never lost that desire and ability to summon a literary world with the full dimensions of its import, and he has never lost his exuberance, his ever-renewed curiosity, and his very great generosity toward students and colleagues.

It is that generosity that impresses, as much as his encyclopedic knowledge, as much as his polymathic abilities, as much as his buoyant, ever-youthful energy, even as much as his irrepressible curiosity. Having taught over fifty different courses, he is willing to teach anything, indeed is developing new courses, new material, new media, even now. When asked to do a reading course, he never says no. When asked to add students over the caps, he always says yes. Confronted with difficult or contentious situations, I have heard from him only generosity and charity towards others. When in 1962 Louise Cowan asked Scott to come back and teach at UD, could she ever have imagined the generosity of his response? So it is with that hope in that generosity that we ask him, as long as he is able, to continue helping to guide UD, be it through an ongoing archival history project, through individual courses or guest lectures, or through adjunct symposia. And it is with gratitude for the generosity, curiosity and wisdom that he has modeled — for all that he has given and continues to give to UD — that we honor him, thank him and wish him all best in his continued, astonishing orchidean bloom.    

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