Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Kennnick, William

In his essay “Teaching Philosophy,” published in Teaching What We Do, a group of essays by Amherst professors, W.E. Kennick considers vulgar uses of the word “philosophy,” as in the pronouncement of a condom manufacturer: “The philosophy is that the issue of safe sex has to be relaxed before people are comfortable enough to buy condoms.”  Kennick comments, “This is not what I teach.”  Emphatic, with a humor verging on the sardonic, the utterance is echt-Bill Kennick and a wonderful gloss on his decades of teaching philosophy, most of them spent at this college.

He was born in 1923 in Lebanon, Illinois, but after his parents divorced when he was five years old, he and his younger brother moved with their mother to Pittsburgh. His mother entered into domestic service, and he, with his brother Robert, were placed in a series of homes, most notably The Ward Home for Children, a Methodist Orphanage where he spent three years. The experience left an indelible mark on him, and it may be that his extreme gratitude and appreciation of the educational experiences to come in high school, college, and beyond had behind them a sense of hard beginnings.  “I had to earn my way all the way,” he wrote in a memoir completed near the end of his life, noting also that the shame of poverty was perhaps the dominant feeling of his childhood.  No one would testify more passionately to the virtues of the liberal education that was to be his.

In adolescence, he discovered the consolations of art, especially the activities of looking at pictures and listening to music.  He took free drawing lessons at the Carnegie Museum and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which provided stimulus and preparation for the first-rate painter and draughtsman he would become.  He sang in the church choir of the Calvary Episcopal Church, being paid at the rate of three cents a service, six times a week--yielding a grand total of eighteen cents weekly, not to be sneezed at.  Although he later left the church, having decided the ministry was not for him, and though he had only scorn for the revisions to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, he remained, as he called it, an Episcopalian in spirit. His knowledge of the Bible and of theology generally was wide and deep; indeed, his own introduction to philosophy came when he read an essay by Étienne Gilson on Thomas Aquinas. He then went on to immerse himself in Aquinas and would later teach medieval philosophy as part of his survey course in the history of philosophy.

Bill graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, co-valedictorian, and entered Oberlin College on a full-tuition scholarship.  During the summers of his college years, he worked in the steel mills—World War II was on at the time—three months, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes the 8 PM to 8 AM shift.  He would later see this as learning the value of a liberal education the hard way.  At Oberlin, he made a number of important intellectual and aesthetic discoveries, along with the delights of philosophy.  “I think I enjoyed college life more than anyone else ever had,” he has written, adding that he would never understand why students didn’t feel the same.  He read the Latin poets—Horace, Catullus, Juvenal and others—having already been enthralled in high school by Virgil’s Aeneid.  He studied Greek—Xenophon, the Iliad, Aeschylus—also French and German literature.  His entry into modern poetry was affected serendipitously when, one day in a course in The Bible as Literature, his professor paused, looked out the window where the sun had suddenly appeared, and began to recite Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” (“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree/ And a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made”).  After class, Kennick asked the professor who had written the poem, found out how to spell Yeats’s name, and headed for the library to sign out the Collected Poems.  It changed the way he looked at all poetry, no longer “as a dark glass through which we try to make out what’s going on in the world, but as a fabric of words.”  Oberlin served his aesthetic needs superbly well, with its conservatory of music, where he acquired a large listening repertoire and the Allen Memorial Art Museum that helped him continue his painting and drawing.  (There is a charcoal drawing of his in the museum’s permanent collection.)  He studied as well the history of prints and printmaking, which was the beginning of his and his wife Nancy’s, impressive collection.  He graduated summa cum laude in 1945, the only summa in his class.

His graduate study at Cornell was interrupted by the military, where he served in the Army Medical Corps for eighteen months as a clinical psychologist.  (He had a comic tale to tell about how this fraud was perpetrated on him and how he gained such a distinguished but inappropriate title.)  After the army, he took his Ph.D. at Cornell and taught briefly at Boston University, where he had a memorable schedule: four sections of Introductory Philosophy, three days a week, complemented by two other courses adding up to eighteen hours weekly in the classroom. (Overworked Amherst professors, take note.)  In 1949, he married Anna Perkins Howes, who had been his student at Oberlin; they would have three children, Christopher, Justin, and Sylvia. Returning to Oberlin, he was named permanent head of the philosophy department, but in 1956, accepted a job at this college where he replaced the venerable Sterling P. Lamprecht, who taught a once-famous course in the history of philosophy.  Kennick would teach this two-semester course, from Plato to Kant, with pretty much the same syllabus as Lamprecht, though very much in his own manner.

The course met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9 AM, usually with forty to sixty students enrolled.  Coursework included a number of papers in which the student was asked difficult questions about an argument in Spinoza or Locke and was obliged to construe that argument by showing in careful detail how it proceeded from one point to the next.  He regularly handed out to his students a four-and-a-half page single-spaced document he compiled titled “Some Rules For Writing Presentable English,” a cautionary list that has lost none of its relevance. When papers were handed back, Kennick, a very good user of the blackboard, explained the grades he’d given: a very few A’s, a few more B’s, quite a number of C’s, then some unmentionable ones.  Students were invited to rewrite papers but guaranteed no automatic assigning of a higher grade.  His seriousness as a teacher, sometimes felt as severity, brought out responsive efforts in his students who wanted to be taken seriously and who looked not just for a degree but an education.  He also gave courses in aesthetics and metaphysics and regularly offered a seminar on the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  As Kenan professor for two years, he taught courses with younger faculty members, much to their enlightenment and sometimes his own.  He served as acting dean of the faculty in 1979-80 and faculty marshal from 1972-1993.  His published work includes a number of densely argued essays—titled, for example, “The Ineffable,” or “On Solipsism”—and a textbook, Art and Philosophy, containing a generous amount of his own commentary.  His 1958 essay, “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” was one of the more influential and reprinted essays in aesthetics for decades after its publication.

He found the late 1960s and early seventies a period very much not to his taste—“the most dispiriting period of my professional life,” he called it.  In the spring of 1972, during the war in Vietnam, there were attempted disruptions of classes on the part of dissident students, six of whom invaded Bill’s class the morning he was demonstrating a particularly thorny philosophical argument, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.  Kennick invited the intruders to sit down and listen; they declined; eventually, members of the class rose up and suggested the six leave, which they did and class resumed. During those years when, for some faculty, “business as usual” was used as a sneering phrase directed at those who insisted on keeping on doing what they were doing, Bill never wavered from his business of teaching philosophy. He ceased only when, in 1993, he was forced to retire, the last Amherst professor to do so because he had turned 70.  This pained him very much, but he returned to teach part-time for a number of years at the invitation of the Philosophy and European Studies departments.  Although he was perhaps closest in spirit to the philosopher David Hume, in his retirement, he read, for philosophy, mainly Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein.  But his most important reading over those years was in literature: novels, poetry, criticism, biography.  He returned to the classics, specifically to Greek tragedy and to Virgil, both of which he read in the original.  With some assistance from his brother-in-law Joseph Cary, a professor of Romance Languages, he translated a large selection of poems from the Italian poet Eugenio Montale, one more testament to his originality as an intellectual.

On the non-intellectual side, Bill Kennick loved parties and ballroom dancing and, in the golden age of Amherst faculty parties, was a leading participant and organizer.  He liked to quote lines from a poem by Thomas Hardy: “O the dance it is a great thing/ A great thing to me.” So was cooking a great thing to him, as more than one person in this room will testify from experience at the dinner table where he and Nancy presided.  There were courses at these dinners, and there was carefully selected wine, both red and white, as the course demanded.  The accompanying conversation was full of anecdotes, remembrances of things past, various Amherst follies, celebrations of friends, and execrations of enemies no longer around.  The essence of it all was laughter, the result was exhilaration.

He more than once proposed to himself that he would someday offer a course titled “Fine Things.”  Like philosophy, art, music, cooking, dancing, party-giving, and party-going, Bill Kennick thought lyric poetry an especially fine thing, so he might have approved of the following short poem by a poet he admired, A.E. Housman.  The poem knows that life in its trouble is a serious, nay fatal, matter; also that there is nothing for it but to say a troubled truth with wit and music:

I to my perils   
    Of cheat and charmer    
    Came clad in armour    
        By stars benign.   
Hope lies to mortals    
    And most believe her,    
    But man’s deceiver   
        Was never mine.   
The thoughts of others    
    Were light and fleeting,    
    Of lovers’ meeting   
        Or luck or fame.   
Mine were of trouble,    
    And mine were steady,    
    So I was ready   
        When trouble came.   

Respectfully submitted:   

Alexander George   
Rebecca Sinos   
Robert Sweeney   
William H. Pritchard