Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 16, 2001

Volume 29, Number 22

Greene and Brisman awarded DeVane Medals

Two members of the English department, Thomas McLernon Greene and Leslie Brisman, were awarded this year's William Clyde DeVane Medals in recognition of their distinguished scholarship and outstanding teaching.

The medals, awarded each year by the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, were presented at the annual Phi Beta Kappa dinner.

The medal is named for William Clyde DeVane, who was dean of Yale College 1938-63 and served as president both of Yale and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. Conferred since 1966, the DeVane Medal is both a prestigious tribute to excellence of scholarship and the oldest and highest ranking award for undergraduate teaching at Yale.

Graduate members of Phi Beta Kappa select a retired faculty member for this honor and Yale College seniors who are members of Phi Beta Kappa choose an honoree from among those active faculty members who have been teaching at Yale for at least five years. Thus, Greene was chosen for the medal by alumni, while Brisman was elected by current undergraduates.

Greene, the Frederick Clifford Ford Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, has served on the Yale faculty for nearly a half century. He received both a bachelor's degree (1949) and doctorate (1955) in comparative literature at Yale, and except for two years at the Sorbonne and two in post-war military service, he has lived in New Haven throughout his adult life.

An authority on the literature of the Renaissance, Greene is the author of four books and countless articles. The former include "Poésie et magie," which he wrote in French, and "The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry," which won prestigious awards from the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modern Language Association when it was published in 1982. He is also founder and director of "Open End Theatre," an innovative program presented in New Haven high schools that explores such issues as drugs and teenage pregnancy. The dramas feature student actors, and the students in the audience vote to choose how the plays end

"Tom Greene has always seemed to me the complete scholar, as learned and distinguished as any member of our humanities faculty," Marie Borroff, Sterling Professor of English, said in presenting the award to her long-time colleague. She added, "I venture to say that, in the course of his career, Tom Greene has trod more paths than most of us, both in the academy and out. He has negotiated this labyrinth with his characteristic grace and modesty."

Brisman joined Yale's English department in 1969 as an instructor soon after receiving his doctorate from Cornell University. He became a full professor in 1979. Brisman has long been popular among Yale students. As early as 1973, he was mentioned in the student-published Course Critique as one of the "ten best" teachers at Yale College. An expert on the Romantic poets, Brisman is equally identified with his study of the Bible as literature. He writes on that subject frequently and in 1991 received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to direct a seminar for other college teachers bridging the gap between the disciplines of contemporary literary criticism and conventional biblical scholarship.

In presenting Brisman's award, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner made note of the professor's eclectic and witty teaching style. "He is justly famed for the anecdotes that enliven his challenging seminars on English poetry and the Bible," Pollack-Pelzner said. "Without ever diminishing the rigor of his analysis, he teaches us how to enrich our reading with our experience and how to enrich our experience with our reading. ...

"His compassion, his wisdom, his trust, and his conviction that's it far more important to have the freedom to get it wrong than the burden to get it right make him a wonderful mentor," he said, adding, "With Leslie Brisman as your shepherd, you shall not want."

Frank Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History, was the master of ceremonies at the awards dinner. Part of the ceremonies was the presentation of a poem commissioned expressly for the event, a tradition that was revived six years ago. John Hollander, Marie Borroff and J.D. McClatchy are among the acclaimed poets who have been asked to contribute work for the occasion. This year's Phi Beta Kappa poet was Karl Kirchwey, a 1979 Yale graduate and fellow member of Phi Beta Kappa. The author of three books of poems, Kirchwey's work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Yale Review and The New York Review of Books. He is currently director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. The eight-stanza poem he wrote for the gathering of the Yale chapter of Phi Beta Kappa is titled "Late Beauty."

Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest undergraduate honors organization, was founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Four years later, the original Phi Beta Kappa Society was abruptly forced to cease operations as the British army under Cornwallis advanced on Williamsburg. The year before, however, the society had already granted charters to Yale and Harvard, making them the second and third chapters of the society, respectively.

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Campus Notes