Community members gather to mourn Calvo

On Tuesday, the Office of Religious Life hosted a gathering of remembrance for senior lecturer Antonio Calvo, whose sudden death last week has shocked and troubled students and faculty.

Held in Murray-Dodge Hall, the gathering drew nearly 80 students, administrators, faculty and community members who sat, many of them on the ground, around a lit candle.

The purpose of the gathering, Dean of Religious Life Alison Boden said, was to let University and community members “know that what we’re feeling and going through, we’re not going through it alone.”

After Boden’s opening remarks, eight minutes of silence passed while many attendees wiped their eyes. Calvo’s students, friends and colleagues soon began sharing personal stories. Most had interacted with him in his capacity as the director of the Princeton in Spain summer program in Toledo, Spain, as a Spanish lecturer or as an adviser in Butler College. The speakers acknowledged his passion for teaching, ineffable enthusiasm and ability to genuinely connect with his students.

Melekot Abate ’11, who attended Princeton in Spain after his freshman year, elicited the evening’s first laughs when he recounted his favorite memory of Calvo.

“He noticed I was growing stubble and that it was not very attractive,” Abate said in an interview after the event. He confessed to Calvo that he did not know how to shave and described how surprised he was that any professor would even notice, much less poke fun at, his facial hair and inexperience.

“The next day, he brought over his own electric razor and a new razor, ready to teach me. I said to him, ‘But you’re my professor!’ And then he shaved me,” Abate said, noting that no other professor would have gone that “extra thousand miles” to help him in that way. “Not just my Spanish, but also my manhood improved that summer.”

However, other attendees chose to share feelings of anger and frustration as well as of fondness and grief. The circumstances surrounding Calvo’s death, now known to be a suicide, and his leave of absence from the University have been called into question.

“I don’t think anyone is going to find closure until we have some kind of understanding,” James Williams ’13 said after the event. “The fact that everyone’s experiences and impressions of Professor Calvo resonate with his being so happy and lively and funny — to think that there was something more going on internally is something that needs to be discussed.”

Philip Rothaus ’11, who wrote an open letter to Nassau Hall calling for increased transparency regarding Calvo’s absence, said, “As much as this is a place to ask questions, we might be confusing the question of why that happened the way it did with why he took his life, and those questions are two separate things.” To Rothaus, Calvo’s suicide will remain a mystery, he explained. “There isn’t a satisfactory answer for that, for anyone,” he said.

Still, the gathering focused mostly on the positive influence Calvo brought to the academic and personal experiences of many University members.

When asked whether she felt the gathering had helped or affected her, Emily VanderLinden ’13 responded, “I just don’t have words right now ... But I think you can just tell how much Professor Calvo was loved.”