Alum Remembers David Love

To the Editors:

David Love was an imp with a great proud beak of nose. Did you ever see him? You would have grinned at the sight of him: the man carried a puggish dignity and raspy, parochial intonation that rendered caricature moot and adversaries mute.
You might have found him huddling in the cold outside of Cox, conspiring in the wake of a cryptically named committee meeting (EPPC, anyone? GFPC, perhaps?) and waiting eagerly for the next. That’s how I met him. Our first exchange was a battle, and I lost.
I spent dinner alone, fuming, plotting witty comebacks to a conversation already concluded. Over the years, I closed the distance to two steps behind, or perhaps he let me catch up a little. He recognized me as an activist, and paid me the unalloyed respect of acrimony in dispute. He also recognized me as a student, not just of books, but of life. After every policy clash, he would secretly find me out in a corner of Wilder, and, carefully hidden from his colleagues, proffer advice on how best to pursue my cause.
He loved learning. He loved teaching. He loved batting an idea back and forth like a terrier with a favored chew-toy, worrying it to a nubbin. He loved Oberlin. And he was not, in my time, an active professor. He was an administrator of the very best sort, the kind that decides, with great generosity, to be the means of the academy, and ease the path of ends.
Oberlin is filled with these folks, but they’re hard to find — they don’t teach classes, don’t hold office hours, and usually toil in dim basement offices. Find them. Trust me on this — you’ve got something to learn from them, and they, you. Harry Dawe was a kindly uncle to me, and taught me a good deal about poise and service. Michelle Gross is one of the most dogged, resourceful people I’ve ever met. Chris Baymiller and Tina Zwegat keep Oberlin a fiery place while regularly preventing it from blowing up entirely. I wonder how many wonderful administrators I missed out on meeting, but I can say that I was lucky enough to know David Love. For that, I’m grateful.
Find a Fussers. Give an administrator a ring. Ask them out to lunch: they won’t bite. They’re here for a reason: they love Oberlin. And, I’d suggest, we ought to do a better job of loving them back.
(Except the ee-vil ones: feel free to hold protests on their lawns, preferably with papier-mache pitchforks and gratuitously obscene chants.)

–Chapin Benninghoff
OC ’98