What is more, I remember with some dis-ease the ACLS Annual Meeting in 1997 here in this hotel, when John, having recently been named President-Elect, joined the CAO toward the end of one of our sessions and stayed afterwards with part of the group for some informal conversation about his vision and priorities for ACLS. The session did not go particularly well, and, as chair of the group, I felt particularly bad about that. As well I should! I have since heard the encounter compared to "a firing squad focused on a target." Notwithstanding this, let me report that at the time of his death, John enjoyed not only the respect but also the great affection of the members of the CAO.

As I later mused on that rocky start, I came to think that the underlying difficulty had a lot to do with our respective roles. Here was John, seasoned university administrator, former ACLS Board member, distinguished public advocate for the humanities, and newly appointed CEO of the Council. Surely his call for a return to focusing on the Council’s core mission, with its centerpiece of a reinvigorated fellowship program, was not only exactly on target but also extraordinarily appealing to humanities scholars. But the problem was that he was not talking to humanities scholars so much as to persons in positions functionally similar to his own. Which is not to say—I hasten to add—that there aren’t scholars—and notable ones at that—among the CAO. But, qua CAO, we were ourselves a group of chief executive officers, running, if you will, our own small companies, some of them in fact not so small, some, in fact, larger (in terms of annual budgets and the like) than the ACLS itself. What is more, as those with executive and fiduciary responsibility for them, we likely identified ourselves with our own societies in a closer way than members of the Board and delegates do. Notwithstanding the formal governance structure of ACLS, we executive officers of the constituent societies tended to understand our societies as the American Council of Learned Societies. And we got the impression that John did not, or did not sufficiently, appreciate this sense of the ACLS as fundamentally a federation of scholarly societies.

So, one aspect of the frisson of that initial encounter had perhaps to do with an inadequate consciousness, on both sides, of relative understandings of the Council, rooted in relative authority positions and, even, positioning. But another, more fundamental one had, I think, to do with the peculiar character of the ACLS itself. Founded by a group of 12 learned societies in 1919, societies which themselves had been around by then for decades or even a century or more, over time the ACLS became more than the sum of its constituent parts. This duality is exemplified in the current mission statement. ACLS’s mission is "the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies."

As things developed and as became abundantly clear in the months and years that followed that somewhat testy overture, John really did want the second part of the mission to be integrated with, not separated from, the first. Indeed, John wanted the strengthening of relations among the societies to be about the advancement of humanistic studies. And he understood, certainly better than many provosts and presidents, the scholarly societies’ value within the ecology of American higher education. Look at the ways in which he fostered links, and I mention here simply some representative examples:

• Arranging substantive humanities events on campuses for the CAO in conjunction with our fall meetings;
• Visiting the Board of Directors of almost half of the 64 constituent societies;
• Championing our desire to give serious, focused attention to the mission and roles of learned societies in the twenty-first century—a desire accomplished with his help in our recent [2001] Boise retreat;
• Reading and absorbing our publications such that the presentations he made at various conferences and symposia are replete with concrete and specific references to various of our programs and initiatives;
• Nurturing strong relationships between learned societies and the research universities that host many of them.

John’s leadership in the ACLS was, as it unfolded, all about integration, about gathering and marshalling the diverse communities’ resources in support of what he understood to be, in his words, the "noble purpose" of the ACLS. It is worth summarizing here, for the record, some of his prodigious accomplishments in his too-short tenure at ACLS:

• Increasing the fellowship endowment by two-thirds and on the way to doubling it;
• Tripling the amount awarded in stipends in the core fellowship program;
• Establishing two special prize fellowships: the Burkhardt program for recently-tenured scholars and the Ryskamp program for advanced assistant professors;
• Sparking two major new ventures: the humanities program in the former Soviet Union and the History E-Book Project.

John’s extraordinary success in crafting innovative core programs and developing foundation support for them was rooted in collaborative processes of imagining. For John, it seems to me, the examined life was the life of colloquy and conversation. He immediately restructured ACLS Board meetings into a "committee of the whole" to foster common discussion of a few key issues every time, dispensing with routine through an assent agenda. He did something comparable with this Annual Meeting, emphasizing bringing the various groups, constituencies, and publics of the ACLS together for mutual reflection on important issues. He sought out and welcomed back ACLS Fellows and former Fellows; he built strong links and garnered strong support from the universities. ACLS is in all ways a larger and more capacious community because of John D’Arms.

Early in his tenure, with support from the Kellogg Foundation, John hosted a handful of Conversations at the ACLS offices with the aim of helping to define ACLS’s course under his leadership. As he wrote, "These meetings, which we hope will be wide-ranging but focused conversations among diverse constituencies, will be critical in leading to an enhanced sense of institutional identity and purpose at ACLS." Each was a mix of Board members, delegates, society executives, university administrators, directors of humanities centers, and distinguished scholars, some 20 or 25 every time, crowded around that conference table, chewing over a few core questions framed under the rubrics of ACLS as funder, convenor, advocate, and collaborator. Later he did something comparable with groups of many of the most promising recently tenured professors from across the nation.

Though hardly gregarious and perhaps even shy, John was remarkably conversational—and this way of being-in-the-world both grounded and nurtured everything he was able to do for us and with us. It strikes me that his very leadership was inherently conversational. Now, anyone who knew John knows that he wasn’t "laid back," that he was a man of clear opinions and well-formed ideas. That he was exacting and could be demanding. It was precisely because he was a person of strong views, often forcefully expressed, that he thrived on conversations. In the happy phrasing of one of his close colleagues, "while his mind was often made up, it was never closed. He respected, indeed elicited, strong counter-argument. He would gnaw on opposing points of view, but often altered his own in the process. To him, ideas developed in isolation were rarely splendid."

As a way of keeping faith with John’s classicism, I consulted the OED for the etymology of the English words "conversation" and "converse." The Latin verb conversare means literally "to turn oneself about, to and fro." In its substantive form, conversationem is characterized as a noun of action. Conversation—no less than conversion, which shares the same root—is about doing something; it involves transformation or turning oneself around! In its earliest English usage, conversation means the action of living or having one’s being among persons, as in "Where is his conversation but in the empire of heaven?" Conversing means dwelling somewhere, as in "How many years art thou old and where conversest thou?" Indeed, the transfer of sense from "to keep company with" to "to talk with" is quite recent in English, appearing only in the sixteenth century.

I find this etymology of conversation, with its historical mix of dwelling, talking, turning around, and acting, a remarkable fit with John. When I asked one of my colleagues in the CAO to characterize John’s contribution to ACLS, she responded, "He started with a point of view about what was going on, but he listened, and he was open to the tremendous mix of viewpoints and intellectual interests among the societies. You know," she said, "he was there." Surely it is not coincidental that John and his wife Teresa made their home in Manhattan just blocks from the ACLS offices.

What comes through in the various addresses John gave as ACLS President is his bedrock caring for the humanities, as he says, in all their "untidiness . . . their closeness to the patterns and flux of lived experience" (D’Arms 1999b). Well versed in the contemporary discourses and apparently irreconcilable ideological differences within and among our fields, he persists in a conviction that the humanities can be humanizing discourses. He holds to a vision of the academic humanist as one who engages "in exploring with students fundamental questions concerning human life and its meaning." His hope for a new generation of humanists, as he writes in the Chronicle, is that they forge a way beyond culture wars toward reconciliation, mapping a fresh common ground that weds the old and the new values. "Who will be both patient and bold enough," he asks, "to attempt to recapture a sense of the whole in the humanities?"

John could say and mean such things simply and without irony. At the same time, he knew the sheer slog of so much of our work and the pressing need to build the sound infrastructure essential to its flourishing. It is this capacity for mixing idealism with pragmatism, seasoned by just the right touch of wit, that Evelyn Waugh missed on first making John’s acquaintance: "He is not superficially very American. . . . [He] dresses somberly, parts his hair, and speaks in low tones. But he has the basic earnestness of his compatriots which I should find unendurable."

It is not these words of his famous father-in-law, however, that seem to me to capture John’s spirit best, but rather those of another great British novelist: "Only connect," writes E. M. Forster, "only connect." ACLS is both a federation of polyglot societies and our world’s premier advocate for the humanities and social sciences. Robust, imaginative, capacious, and conversational, John D’Arms’ presidency was, in the best sense, about going back to basics.

In an essay written just before he was named President of the ACLS (D’Arms 1997), John already left us our marching orders. If the life of learning is to continue to flourish, he cautions, then "more of us in the academic humanities will [have to], in Seamus Heaney’s words, 'make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all odds.'"