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University of Pittsburgh
Newsletter and Department Title

Dean of the Universe
The English Department Remembers Richard Tobias

 

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Above: Richard Tobias celebrating his 80th birthday with English Department colleagues.
Back row L-R:  Bob Marshall, Mary Briscoe, Phil Wion, Mary Brignano, Richard Tobias, and Chris Rawson.
Front row, seated:  Austin and Jane Flanders.

 

When Richard Tobias died in September 2006, the English Department lost one of its best and brightest professors.  Tobias was bright not only in wit and intelligence but also in temperament:  exuberant, warm, and open to experience. He inspired admiration and transformation.

 

By training, Tobias was a Victorianist whose scholarship was mainly about poetry:  works by well-known poets such as Tennyson and works by less familiar poets such as T.E. Brown (known as “the Manx poet”).  During the last years of his life, he worked on a study of Rhoda Broughton, a bestselling Victorian novelist.  However, he read widely and also published studies of Shakespeare, African-American literature, and James Thurber.   

 

Raised on an Ohio farm by book-loving parents, Richard Tobias enlisted in the Army and served in the 100th Infantry Division during World War II.  Although one of Tobias’s favorite stories was about having flamboyantly garbled German verbs while talking to German soldiers, he later became a serious reader of German and a lover of Germany.  His travels included several summers spent teaching at the University of Augsburg toward the end of his life. 

 

He enrolled in Ohio State University upon his return and stayed to earn his doctorate.  Theodora Pitts West (PhD ’60) was a graduate student at Ohio State before completing her doctorate at Pitt.  She and Tob (as he spelled it; it was pronounced “Tobe”) sat near each other in the graduate student office, known as the Bullpen, in 1950-51.  “We were a motley, inexperienced crew, but we bravely attempted to teach Freshman Comp to large groups of Ag majors,” West remembered. 
           
West was even on hand for one of Tobias’s surprises as a young teacher.  “It was early on, and Tob was determined to give the lecture of his life to his young students.  He said he was fully prepared to engross them for the entire session.  He had papers and books and handouts, and off he went.  Fifteen minutes later, a haggard Tob slunk back to the Bullpen.  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.  ‘I ran out.’ ”

 

Tobias earned his PhD in 1957 and took up a position in Pitt’s English Department.  With him came Barbara Nietzsche Tobias, whom Tobias had met as an undergraduate.  The couple had three children, Leslie, Emily, and Alan.  In Pittsburgh, Barbara Tobias earned a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science in 1967 and worked in Pitt’s University Archives.  She was an excellent editor who worked on projects with her husband and with other scholars.  Richard Tobias had a strong commitment to bibliographic work, editing or supervising several bibliographies of studies of Victorian scholarship, and this commitment was something the couple shared. 

 

In Pitt’s English Department, Tobias became an inspiring undergraduate and graduate teacher.  “He was a strong believer in students having individual, idiosyncratic responses to the text,” Phil Smith remembered.  Marianne Novy team-taught two courses with Tobias, an undergraduate Shakespeare course and a graduate course on Victorian women novelists.  From working closely with Tobias and from years of friendship, she carried away an appreciation for his remarkable range of interests as well as for his humility.  “Every fall, he said about his classes, ‘This time I’ll get it right,’ ” Novy recalled.  Norman McWhinney (PhD ’68), whose dissertation Tobias directed, doubted he would have finished his degree without Tobias’s “careful nurturing.”  “He also had a marvelous sense of humor,” McWhinney noted, and he tolerated puns.

 

Tobias built community.  The Tobiases and other families linked to the English Department used to spend weekends in Cook Forest playing touch football and badminton.  They held convivial parties in which guests tried to best each other at quoting poetry.  “Tob believed in institutional collegiality, and he spent much of his time here building a department that operated through friendly relationships,” Phil Smith explained.  “People who didn’t agree on anything else agreed on Tob,” according to Nancy Glazener, and the result was that Tobias’s presence helped to bring colleagues together. 

 

Richard and Barbara Tobias were deeply hospitable.  David Brumble, who arrived in 1970, remembers being welcomed first and foremost by the Tobiases. Jonathan Arac, who first taught at Pitt in 1987, was hosted by the Tobiases during a conference in 1980, and the invitation was prompted merely by Tobias’s knowing that Arac was a fellow scholar of Victorian literature.  “I knew Tob for thirty years, and I still consider this a memorable gesture, an intimate association through hospitality, because it showed me the best part of academic life—extending oneself in a human way,” Arac recalled.  Jean Ferguson Carr was similarly grateful for being taken under Tobias’s wing in the 1970s and introduced to the members of Pittsburgh’s Dickens Fellowship, a community group whose members adored “Young Tob.”

 

Dennis B. Ledden (MA ’80), who studied with Tobias in the 1980s, remembered Tobias entertaining his graduate students at the end of term. Ledden was a student in Tobias’s bibliography course, which was notorious for its rigor.  Ledden called it “PhD bootcamp” and was impressed by how knowledgeable Tobias was about the range of research topics undertaken by students in the course.  “He was a true expert in his field but not vain about it,” Ledden observed.  Ledden went on to work with Tobias closely, editing one of the bibliographies of Victorian scholarship that Tobias supervised, and he appreciated Tobias’s kindness in working out a research fellowship for him at a time when he especially needed it.

 

Tobias’s awareness of graduate students’ tight budgets led to his establishing the Barbara Nietzsche Tobias Fellowship in 1996 after his wife’s death.  Tobias began donating his salary to the fellowship as soon as it was established and continued to do so for as long as he taught.  Tobias’s friend and student Jeff Aziz was the first Tobias scholar, and more than a dozen PhDs since Aziz have completed their dissertations thanks to Tobias Fellowships. 

 

Beyond the English Department, Tobias was a leader at Pitt.  He served for two stretches as President of the University Senate, and he served for forty years on the University Senate’s Tenure and Academic Freedom Committee.  As Chair of the University Senate’s Anti-Discriminatory Policies Committee, he was a strong supporter of the movement at Pitt to secure benefits for same-sex partners.  Jane Feuer remembered going out with Tobias and number of gay and lesbian Pitt faculty members to celebrate Pitt’s eventual decision to grant the benefits, adding “He was just as much at home with this mixture of gay and lesbian people and a couple of trannies as he was with very formal German professors.”

 

“He was highly respected by the administration,” said Marcia Landy.  “He was never a servant to the administration, but he was always consulted.”  Landy also remembered Tobias’s passionate convictions about political questions.  “There was one faculty meeting at which Tob got so excited about something that he fell right out of his chair.  He just got right up with dignity.” 

 

Toward the end of his life, there was a rumor circulating that Tobias was writing a history of Pitt’s English Department.  If it was indeed underway, the history has not been made public, but no one doubted that Tobias would have been in a good position to elucidate many institutional mysteries.

 

Regan Morris (A&S ’95) got to know Tobias on one of his international travels, his semester teaching in the Pitt in London program in the mid-1990s. Barbara Tobias’s death was recent, and Morris was impressed by Tobias’s determination to see all he could of London in spite of his grief.  He also pushed the students to make the most of London.  “I think he enjoyed trying to expand people’s worlds,” said Morris.  The program held classes in the former Libyan Embassy across from Imperial College, and Morris remembered Tobias working on a plan for the Pitt students to read Shakespeare with students from Cameroon studying science at Imperial College. 

 

For Morris, the semester in England was transformative.  She came to England planning to stay for three months and stayed for three years, working her way into a job for Reuters News Service that headed her in the director of her current career as a producer at the BBC’s Los Angeles bureau.  “I honestly don’t think I’d have the life I have, which is really fun and interesting, if it hadn’t been for him,” Morris insisted.

 

Perhaps the most glorious of Richard Tobias’s travels was a stint as dean of Semester at Sea during the 1980s.  The ship was called the Universe Campus, so Tobias took as his title “Dean of the Universe.”  There could be no better title for a professor who left so much expansive wonder in his wake.

 

Dana Edmunds and Nancy Glazener

 

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Top Left: Richard Tobias (author photo from The Art of James Thurber, Oho UP, 1970). Top Right: Richard and Barbara Nietzsche Tobias (photo from the 1960s). Bottom: Richard Tobias in Luxor (probably when he was Dean of the Universe).

 

More tributes to Tobias:
David Bartholomae’s memorial published on the English Department website
Richard Tobias’s obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pitt Magazine’s profile of Richard Tobias in connection with the Barbara N. Tobias Fellowship
A eulogy by a former student on the blog Major Generalist

 

 

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