Remembering the Life of Professor Donald Anthony McQuade | Obituary by Kelefa Sanneh

Donald McQuade never liked to be underoccupied. As a boy in Brooklyn, he was happiest when he was reading or swimming, and if there had been a way to do both at once, he might have been happier still. Both were solitary pursuits, but McQuade was not possessed of a solitary temperament. He was not simply a swimmer but a water polo competitor and, later in life, an Olympics-certified water polo referee. And he turned his boyhood love of reading into a career as a trailblazing English professor and a consequential university leader; he served for seven years as vice chancellor for University Relations at the University of California, Berkeley. “When you teach well, your whole purpose is to make yourself obsolete,” he once said, but his own life seemed to prove the opposite: he never ran out of things to learn, lessons to teach, or people to help. He died in Oakland on August 17, at the age of eighty-three.

Donald McQuade was born in Brooklyn in 1941, the son of a parole officer and a bookkeeper, and for a time he stayed close to home. He attended St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights and then earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers, where he studied the work of Robert Frost and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But his interest in literature was transformed in the 1970s, when he went to teach at Queens College, which had recently adopted a policy of open admissions. The result of this policy was an influx of students who had little background in literature, and often little interest in it. “We were seeing people who had never been in a university before,” McQuade later recalled. “No one knew who they were. No one knew how to teach them.” At many universities, the teaching of reading and writing was considered unglamorous work—a way to pay your dues. In an essay published in 1976, McQuade noted that “the reward for ascending to the status of a ‘distinguished professor’ at a ‘prestigious university’ may very well be not having to teach at all.” But he was determined to find ways to reach the wide variety of students he encountered at Queens College. He fell in with a cohort of like-minded professors, led by Mina P. Shaughnessy, who urged her colleagues to think creatively about how to nurture readers and writers. For McQuade, that meant starting with the kind of writing that was ubiquitous in everyday life: advertisements, newspapers, comic books. By paying careful and respectful attention to these texts, he showed students how to harness and improve their own powers of interpretation. “At the end of the year, they were asking to read Henry James,” he said.

This program also had a transformative effect on McQuade, instilling in him a lifelong ambition to expand the traditional boundaries of literature and the traditional ways of teaching it. He published a series of influential writing textbooks that incorporated a wide range of words and images, including Seeing & Writing, which he wrote with his daughter, Christine McQuade Hsu. And in 1985, he curated an exhibition called “Advertising America,” at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. The next year, he left New York for Berkeley—not an easy decision for a Brooklyn boy. By then, he had married Susanne Batschelet McQuade, his lifelong companion, a fellow educator who shared his devotion to teaching and his competitive spirit, too. (She was a former member of the Swiss national ski team and also, he was willing to admit, a better golfer than he was.) With their two children, Christine and Marc, they resettled in the Bay Area, which McQuade embraced with characteristic enthusiasm. At the University of California, Berkeley, he was not only a popular English professor but also an influential figure on campus, helping to found the university’s American Studies program. He had become “a ‘distinguished professor’ at a ‘prestigious university’ ” by any definition, but he never shed his commitment to the classroom.

McQuade also never stayed still. Looking beyond his own classrooms and his own department, he became a leader at the University of California, Berkeley, taking on the kind of administrative responsibilities that many scholars flee from. He served as a dean and then, starting in 1999, as vice chancellor, at which point his calendar filled up with travel and formal meetings—one of his first tasks was to buy himself some suits. McQuade was by all accounts a tireless ambassador and cheerleader for the university, using his erudition and enthusiasm to make connections between donors and scholars. He helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and took quiet delight in the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, which opened in 2008, thanks in large part to his skill at bridging the gap between academia and the wider world. “I was extremely fortunate to inherit Don McQuade as the vice chancellor for University Relations,” remembers Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. “Don was smart, hyper-talented, and socially sophisticated.” 

When he left the vice chancellorship in 2006, McQuade returned to teaching and to scholarship. His bookshelf of published work is testament to both his dedication and his generosity: readers of his many textbooks and collections will find little of his own writing, and lots of excerpts from writers he cherished; over and over again, he celebrated other people’s work, from William James—whose letters he helped edit—to the many undergraduates whose lives he changed, and whose essays he published in his “Student Writers at Work” series. As chair of the National Writing Project, from 2008 to 2012, he helped shape and inspire a new generation of English teachers. And he co-founded a start-up, WriteLab, which was one of the first platforms to use artificial intelligence as a way of helping users improve their writing. Fellow members of the Bohemian Club knew him not just as great company, but as the scrupulous editor of Library Notes, the organization’s official publication, which he transformed into what one member called “a lively and erudite record” of the Club’s culture and history.

Many of the people whose lives McQuade transformed never knew his name. And, equally, many of the people who knew him never knew how many lives he transformed. He is survived by Susanne and by their two children and their families: Christine, her husband Michael Hsu, and their daughters Sky, Maya, and Yuan; Marc, his wife Elizabeth Hodges McQuade, and their daughter Louise and son Wolf. To those five grandchildren, he was just Grandpa, although he answered to G.P., a jaunty initialism that better matched his unceasing energy and curiosity. He was always eager to hear the latest report about a school play or an after-school baseball game; he wanted to know what the kids were learning, and he never doubted that they, too, might have something to teach him. Donald McQuade saw a world full of people and full of stories, and he wanted to know them all.

-Kelefa Sanneh

Staff Writer, The New Yorker