This past Saturday I attended a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of Eva Brann as a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. I am hoping that the speeches made at this event will be posted by the College soon, and if it is, I will update this entry with a link to them. But to give you an idea of the kind of person Eva is, I will copy here something she said as quoted by Chris Nelson, the College’s president in Annapolis, when he was explaining why she was so loved by all her students even as Dean, a position that held some disciplinary responsibility. Calling it “the higher hypocrisy”, Eva said, “Try to respect even the fairly implausible claims to virtue, since the wish to appear good is not without some grace.”
Think about it.
The story in the Weekly Standard is lovely – except “nice old lady” doesn’t fit. All three of those words, individually, are true, but when put together they have this connotation of passiveness that doesn’t fit, as though Eva just sat around pouring tea all day. What phrase would better describe Eva? “Nice tough old lady” might do.