Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Towne, Dudley H.

Dudley Towne joined the Amherst faculty as an instructor in physics in 1952. Half a century later, after 45 years on the teaching faculty and 5 years of retirement, he died at his home in Amherst. With his passing, the college has lost one of its greatest teachers.

Dudley entered Yale in 1941, but two years later, he was in the US Army Signal Corps, where he became chief radio operator in Chungking, the headquarters of the Chinese Nationalist forces. This began a lifelong interest in China, its culture, and its language (just one of many languages in which he became proficient). In talking about his army days, Dudley was fond of telling how he personally ended WWII. In August 1945 MacArthur wanted to inform the Japanese authorities of the precise procedures for ending hostilities and sent a message to Chungking, instructing Dudley to resend it throughout China, assuming that the Japanese would be monitoring the American transmissions and would forward the message to the emperor. Then, having brought the war to a successful conclusion, Dudley returned to Yale and went on to Harvard, where he completed a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and then to Amherst.

Throughout his time on our faculty - in introductory courses in physics and mathematics, general education courses such as Science 1-2 (part of the core curriculum), Problems of Inquiry and. ILS, intermediate and advanced physics courses, or senior thesis advising - his teaching was admired by his colleagues and by his students. Elegance, beauty, and intellectual rigor describe nearly everything Dudley touched. "Quality of mind" is a characteristic we attribute to those among us whom we admire - few could match him in that regard.

As one modest example of Dudley's style, here is a simple homework exercise in introductory physics. If an object were released at a distance from the sun equal to the radius of the earth's orbit, how long would it take to fall into the sun? A pedestrian physicist (of whom there are a few, but not, of course, at Amherst) would begin by looking up the values of Newton's gravitational constant and the mass of the sun, then set up a rather nasty-looking integral and eventually grind out a numerical answer. The elegant approach, Dudley's preference, is to realize that in falling toward the sun, such an object would be entering a highly elliptical orbit about the sun, and it is then but an easy step, using Kepler's laws, to calculate the desired time as a certain fraction of a year.

In a 1979 letter to a visitor who was to be teaching thermodynamics, a course Dudley had just been giving, he writes: "Generally we favor emphasizing Physics as `Natural Philosophy', and highlighting the intellectual accomplishments rather than merely how to deal with certain formulas. ... I am unsatisfied with my own understanding of some fundamental matters ... and hope to have a chance to discuss them with you." And, as he goes on to describe his own classes, he interjects: "It must be admitted that I have included some details [of my own approach] for the purpose of bragging about them". Dudley was a good teacher, and he knew it!

And there is a wonderful document titled "Personal Knowledge of the Universe" that he wrote to clarify his own thinking in preparation for an ILS course. It begins: "The following is a list of cosmological assumptions which I accept not merely on the basis of somebody else's say-so, but because the `facts' (observations I have either made for myself or at least know how to make) seem to support no other conclusion. Proposition I. The earth is approximately spherical and has a radius of approximately 4,000 miles." There follows a page of "Evidence", and then Proposition II: "The stars are very far away compared with the radius of the earth". And so it continues, through 25 closely argued pages, what we know about the dimensions of the universe and how we know it. That was his style - emphasis not merely on what we know, but how we know what we know.

Dudley's reputation for fairness, intellectual seriousness, and clarity of argument was by no means limited to the science departments. In 1961, only nine years after his appointment, he was elected to the Committee of Six, only the 2nd associate professor in the history of the college to be trusted with that responsibility. That was only the first of several times that he was chosen for the Committee of Six, and he served as well on all the other important college committees.

When Dudley first came to Amherst, he created a new undergraduate course on "Waves", a course for which there was no model elsewhere. "Waves" became a central feature of our physics curriculum, and in 1967 he published a textbook, "Wave Phenomena", a book that received rave reviews - and which is still in print and still in use. Unlike some theoretical physicists, Dudley never lost sight of the fact that science is rooted in experiments, and laboratory work in optics was a vital part of the course. The optics lab was his territory, and the wonderful instruments there were his friends. Many of his colleagues and students can remember times when he would summon one of us into the lab to see some beautiful optical effect. Sometimes on looking through a slit or telescope, we might only be able to see our own eyelashes, yet Dudley's enthusiasm for the phenomena was such that we often felt compelled to lie a little bit. Many of us can tell of late-night phone calls when he would awaken us in the early hours with exhortations to go outdoors to observe a curious ring around the moon or a spectacular auroral display, and much of what his colleagues know about the night sky is the result of his patient instruction.

His "Wave Phenomena" book was an instant classic. Owners of the first edition treasure it not only for its content but also for its dust jacket, featuring a beautiful photograph of a diffraction pattern, a photograph taken by the author. But although he was a scholar in the best sense of the word, he was not by any means a frequent publisher. His well-deserved Amherst reputation was based almost exclusively on his superb teaching.

And a superb teacher he was, in Spanish as well as in English. He went to Colombia in 1962 to teach for a year at Universidad del Valle. A colleague there recalls a lecture, which Dudley began by quoting from La Voragine, a classic in Colombian literature. He illustrated the book's description of the beauty and colors of the jungle with elegant and lovely demonstrations of polarized light; the lecture was followed by three minutes of sustained applause.

Some of Dudley's ancestors lived in Amherst and nearby towns. Dudley, too, was a part of the community beyond the college. When the Amherst Cinema Center was first being dreamt of, Dudley kept it going with an extraordinarily generous gift. And now, though he had chosen to be an anonymous donor, the Board of Directors has decided to name one of the performance rooms, appropriately, "Towne Hall."

Dudley loved music, he was an actively engaged listener at live performances of all kinds, and he himself, an excellent countertenor, was a performer. At Yale, he played Mabel in a production of Pirates of Penzance and later, in Amherst, sang with the Gay Men's Chorus and the Da Camera Singers, not to mention his impromptu presentations at Physics Department Christmas parties of some little-known songs such as "The Professor's Song", "The EpsilonDelta Love Song" ("For every little epsilon, there's a delta"), and "The Derivative Song".

Dudley was gay, but for his first 26 years on the faculty, this was known to very few, if any, on the campus. For most" of that time, he was at risk every day of being "discovered" and of instantly being dismissed, bringing his academic career to a premature end. Dudley came out in 1978 at age 54, the first Amherst faculty member to do so who did not get fired.

In 1993, Dudley put on his army uniform one more time. The occasion was a gay veterans march on Washington. At that time, Colin Powell (then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was threatening to resign unless Clinton backed off from his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. In the procession, Dudley carried a homemade sign with the legend "Colin Powell is afraid of ME!" Someone took a snapshot of him with his sign, a snapshot of which he only learned when it was made into a postcard and sold, a card that a friend sent him in the mail. In that way, his likeness (without his name) has been circulated around the world. It was in keeping with Dudley's sense of integrity that he wanted to be known as much as it was for his gayness and his esteemed reputation as Professor of Physics at Amherst College.

Since his retirement in 1997, he has collected his papers and written essays about various aspects of his life and about the college. Some 16 boxes of his papers (including the postcard and the WWII radio message) now reside in Frost's Special Collections. On most Tuesdays, he has come up to Valentine to have lunch with his colleagues. At first, he would walk up the hill from his home on Dana Place. Increasingly, in the last year or two, he has needed transportation help, but he continued to enjoy the interaction and the conversation. The night before he died, when a colleague called to arrange for lunch the next day, he said: "I don't feel up to it this week, but I really enjoy these Tuesday lunches. I'll see you next week."

Howell D. Chickering    
Joel E. Gordon    
Kannan Jagannathan    
Donald S. Pitkin    
Robert H. Romer