UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2004

Departments

Extended Family

Features

The Wildest Place in Boston

Manhattan's Hottest Property

Setting the Record Straight

Extended Family

Ellsworth

–Vince Cleary




	Mary ’34 and Ellsworth “Dutchy” Barnard ’28, shown sitting on a rock at High Ledges, the Shelburne Falls property which they donated to the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1970.

ELLSWORTH "DUTCHY" BARNARD, EMERITUS PROFESSOR of English, was a UMie through and through: Mass. Aggie grad, 1928. First teaching position at Mass. State College, ’30-33. His last teaching post brought him full circle, as he put it, back to the university, ’68-73.

Husband, naturalist, writer, activist, Romantic idealist, poet, publisher, he was above all a teacher. In his first year of teaching Freshman Composition, his favorite course at MSC, he met Mary Taylor of Groton. He described her as one of his two most brilliant students. In her junior year he proposed to his prize pupil at High Ledges, the family homestead in Shelburne. They married three years later, a year after he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, in 1936. (The 400-acre family property where Dutchy proposed became the title of his 1998 book, In a Wild Place: A Natural History of High Ledges. The Barnards bequeathed the estate to the Massachusetts Audubon Society.)

Photographs of students he and Mary invited to their homes around the country are a common sight in his four-volume autobiography, In Sunshine and in Shadow: A Teacher’s Odyssey, self-published under the imprint, Dinosaur Press. The “sunshine” reflects the many happy years he spent in the classroom; “shadow” describes two jobs he resigned from, rather than work under administrations he didn’t respect.
An unorthodox teacher, he sometimes commented on students’ themes with his own verse. In writing he championed “usage” over “the rules of the absolutists,” and his 1955 article in The New York Times, “Good Grammar Ain’t Good Usage,” rubbed some traditionalists the wrong way. A dedicated stylist, he also wrote English for Everybody in 1979.

Barnard did not confine himself to an ivory tower. He spoke out against, and often wrote about, controversial topics: American isolationism in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the ’50s, and the Vietnam War in the ’60s. Though a liberal, he found a surprising hero in Wendell Willkie, the subject of a book he wrote in 1966.

His Romantic idealism seemed to bookend his life. From the subject of his very first book, the poet Shelley, to his final lecture, he stressed knowledge, beauty, and art over money and materialism. Before he left the classroom for the last time, Barnard added, “Finally, I wish I could say ‘God bless you,’ and feel that it meant something. Since I can’t, all I can say is ‘I love you—and thank you for letting me.’”

Beloved by many, misunderstood by some, forgotten by very few, Dutchy Barnard died last December, just days after one of his frequent letters to the editor appeared in The Amherst Bulletin. He was 96. Married for 66 years, Mary survives him and lives in Amherst. They had no children.

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Ellsworth

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