By William M. Jones, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science
On Christmas Eve 2001, our beloved friend and collegue, master teacher Del Carlson died. We will not see his unique combination of excellence and commitment again, yet thanks to his influence, his work will live on in us and his students for generations to come--all this because Del poured his energies in extracting the very best from his life.
He modeled excellence through his 33-year marriage to a wonderful, gifted woman and through the exacting care and unbounded love he gave their two exceptional children. A lifelong Methodist, he continually shared the truth about what it means to be a human being and a child of God.
In many ways, Del was the quintessential American, proud of his old world roots, but passionately in love with the essence of the American experiment. His vantage point surveyed the elevation from the vast plains of everyday America to the lofty towers of the academy. For Del, a child of working-class America, college was not a birthright, but rather a great privilege and opportunity for liberation, so he expected from his political science practical outcomes that offered not only respect, hope, and opportunity for all, but also put government to work on behalf of those not so well favored by birth and estate.
Like Plato, Del had a vision of a perfect world, but was wise enough to understand that it could not be achieved by imperfect humans and that those who sought to create such things were more likely to engender hell on earth rather than heaven. Like Socrates, Del probed and challenged his students to question the obvious and easy answers, to look for the hidden truth of things. But like Madison in his vision of the American republic, he understood the practical value of creating an environment of structured intellectual freedom, in which students could undertake an orderly search for their own utopias within the framework of right reason and benevolent criticism and see their individual desires and motivations transformed into actions elevating both themselves and their community.
Del was taken away far too soon. How can we possibly get along without an award-winning professor who teaching was the living articulation of his scholarship lavished unstintingly on all who would but partake of it? But for his students, Del's life was just the beginning. Del had the ability to lay in the minds and character of his students the foundation of something new that combined the best of ancient wisdom with the improvements of the modern age, as well as that prophetic gift to see beyond their youthful awkwardness and imperfections the possibility of maturing excellence.
In Del's copy of The Federalist, which began life as a 95-cent New American Library Mentor Series paperback and was so thoroughly thumbed that it had to be rebound in a manner befitting an ancient family Bible, he had numbered each paragraph of each essay by hand. So also did he identify and count as precious each of his students--not as a number, but as a unique soul whose intellect and character had, for a little time, been entrusted to his care, and his work continues in them.