A campus icon bids farewell

On the official first day of his retirement this summer, Professor John Fleming GS '63 will be teaching.

Fleming, an English professor who has taught at the University for more than 40 years, will lecture on Dante's poetry — but in a Tuscan castle, not McCosh Hall or East Pyne. And the students will not be undergraduates and graduate students but lawyers and CEOs on a Princeton alumni trip.

Teaching at the 30th annual Dante Reunion, Fleming will begin his separation from traditional academia by remaining an academic, teaching alumni whom he may have taught in the English department decades ago. This is typical for a man who, as a college master, department chair and member of countless committees, devoted much of his life to the University.

Fleming arrived at the University in 1961, an English graduate student from Arkansas, after spending three years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. After earning his doctorate, Fleming left for the University of Wisconsin but returned to Princeton permanently in 1965.

Over the course of his years of teaching at the University, Fleming, now the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, built a reputation not only as a distinguished scholar of medieval literature but also as the sort of professor whose name attracts students to classes they might not otherwise consider. His course on Chaucer was one of the University's most popular humanities courses.

Now Fleming looks forward to a slower pace of life. "I'm sure I'm going to enjoy retirement," he said. "I'm rather tired of running into people who say, 'Now that I'm retired I work three times as hard as I did before.' I want to retire because I don't want to work as hard."

But he will still be quite busy. He's considering writing a novel or other popular literature and already has travel plans, personal and professional.

"One of the things I'm hoping to do is to retool myself as a kind of guru of adult education," he said.

He and his wife, Joan Fleming, an associate chaplain at the Episcopal Church at Princeton, will lead a cruise around the western isles of Scotland with members of the Class of 1945. In September they will lead two week-long trips in England for alumni.

Service to Princeton

Fleming has long involved himself in the University outside the classroom. He was master of Wilson College from 1969 to 1972 and then from 1989 to 1997, and still serves as a Wilson fellow and academic adviser.

For a decade he wrote a weekly column in The Daily Princetonian called "Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche," discussing both world issues and University concerns. His final regular column ran on Monday.

Many see him as one of a dying breed of professors who care about students as more than just the people they teach and the University as more than the place they work. When Fleming started at the University, there was a de facto rule that faculty members live within 12 miles of Nassau Hall.

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Now professors live in New York and Washington, D.C., coming to campus only a few days a week, Fleming said. Even professors who live near the University are disconnected.

"Younger professors are, on the whole, less connected," Wilson School professor Stanley Katz said in an email. "And I do think civil society on campus is much weaker. I think the blame is on the University, the academic profession and the world, though, and not on the younger faculty."

"Professional competition has gotten so intense that now two books are frequently expected of assistant profs for tenure — and if you write two books in six years, and do a decent job of teaching (though that, too, must suffer), you do not have time for civil society," Katz added.

The Alumni Council gave Fleming an award for service to the University at Reunions in 2004.

Another professor of his generation, University president emeritus Harold Shapiro GS '64, praised Fleming's devotion to the University community.

"In addition to his scholarship and legendary teaching, Professor Fleming devoted himself to all those tasks that made a difference to student's lives and provided the essential glue that defines an academic community," he said in an email. "Moreover, his deep sense of humor and humility taught us all a great deal about the more redeeming aspects of our own humanity."

Fleming said he'll miss most the "excitement of being in on each new generation of students. It's one of the great things about this profession — probably the greatest — is that you're constantly surrounded by this ocean of young people who in one way are always the same and another way different."

"Given the fact that there's so much terrible stuff going on in the world, if all I had to count on was the front page of The New York Times, I'd be pretty depressed," he said. "But the enthusiasm, optimism of youth around me has been a great thing."