Out of Love for His Students

Will Volding spent the last 30+ years teaching young men how to read, think, and write. As an employee of Strake Jesuit, he served many roles: Chair of the English Department, moderator of Magis, assistant theater director, assistant water polo coach, assistant quiz bowl coach, faculty mentor, chaperone on student trips and retreats, and classroom teacher. As a judge of character, there is nobody more shrewd; as a lecturer and discussion leader, nobody more lively; as a reader and a thinker, nobody more perspicacious; as a colleague and friend, nobody more generous. Whether watching him teach The Age of Innocence, demonstrate accountability, laugh heartily, gesture wildly, or hold a writing conference in his office, I witnessed Will do everything out of love for his students. 

 

A Jesuit institution needs a steady voice like Will’s. His ability to show students how to write a sentence, a paragraph, and an essay, while an astonishing gift, is but a facet on the larger prism of what makes him an extraordinary educator: He knows that being demanding means following through; he know that rigor is rigor; accountability, accountability; deadlines, deadlines; he knows that when a student needs to hear the answer “no,” he needs to say the word “no.” He knows that young men need a balanced, consistent, clear, and (sometimes, even) firm voice. Will has his ideas of what is right and what is wrong, and he sticks to them as any person of integrity should, without shilly-shallying, without wavering, without giving in to pressure—and he does so out of extraordinary love for his students. Will knows that loving a person doesn’t always mean saying the easiest thing to make problems go away—that loving strength cannot be replaced.

 

Most powerfully, Will’s magnetic ability to draw from students and colleagues what they never knew they were capable of stands as his greatest gift. That’s the best trait a teacher can have, and he has put that gift to work in ways big and small—drawing out a student’s interest in Dante, modeling for a colleague how to grade an essay, showing students why Hafez matters or how P.G. Wodehouse can make you smile or why Agamemnon should make you squirm or how Iago should frighten us all. I cheer my good friend’s magnanimity, his bellowing laughter, his confounding hand gestures, his delightful wisdom; I cheer his standards, his tough love, his reprimands, his meaningful praise; I cheer his visits to my office, his shouts of joy, his childlike excitement, his impressions, his reading of student essays aloud in the English department; I cheer his wit, his quirks, his charisma, his spirit, his spark, his backbone—his backbone most of all. 

 

I met Will for the first time in 2012 via Skype when he interviewed me for an English position; I said goodbye to him as a colleague on his last day in May. The moments in between—discussions in my office about Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, arguments over reading lists and assignment requirements, lunches in the English office suite, conversations about students’ successes—remain and will always be the best moments of my professional life. Titanic Mr. Volding deserves the happy retirement he earned.