Wheatley Senior Fellow Dan Robinson passed away on September 17, 2018 from heart failure. The following are heartfelt sentiments from current Wheatley Staff about Robinson's impact on them personally and professionally.
I have had the privilege of calling Dan Robinson a friend and mentor for more than 30 years. It has been a singular privilege and a blessing. No one has had a greater influence on my intellectual life and my moral sensibility. He was endowed with a keen and creative intellect. This was coupled with a great capacity for work, and an unflinching commitment to truth, good and beauty. In this as in so many other things, Dan was man for the ages. His own time was not enough for him, just as no intellectual discipline was enough for him. He transcended time and topic, and lived in history – among friends and interlocutors in every age. He taught me, more than anyone else has, the importance of knowing and caring about “the best things thought and written.” He taught be me to be intellectually and morally serious. I learned from him also from him that true greatness is not given to vanity, and inclines to charity. With his passing, our nation and our culture loses one of the great minds of our time. On a more personal level, Dan taught me, and extended to me, of the highest form of friendship. It is this loss I feel most keenly, but it is only for a while.
-Richard Williams, Director
Dan’s passing is a great loss to the Wheatley Institution and to the larger community of scholars of which he was such an important part. But for anyone who knew Dan, this loss is also personal. Three decades ago as a graduate student I found Dan completely intimidating, but not for long. While it did seem as if he knew everything, had read everything, and had thought deeply through everything, I learned very quickly that he would put all of that at my service. “Of course you know these lines from Voltaire,“ he would say--and then quote two paragraphs verbatim. Of course I did <em>not</em> know those lines from Voltaire, but by quoting them he lifted me into the conversation, stretched me, taught me. And, what is more, he befriended and mentored me—and so many others. Few people have ever taught me as much or been a friend as true.
-Emily Reynolds, Assistant Director
I first met Professor Robinson in a drafty Oxford lecture hall in a haze of jet lag and nervous expectations. He began to speak, and I immediately sensed a depth of thought and more importantly, feeling. I felt like I was looking up at a building so tall that I could not see the top. As he taught, I experienced his wisdom but also his confidence in me that I could keep up. Because of his wisdom, I trusted his confidence, a confidence that I still rely on. His mind roared with the deepest thoughts, his heartbeat pulsed with warmth, and his eyes projected more light than they absorbed.
-Spencer Yamada, Communications and Media
I will forever be grateful for Dan Robinson. The first time I heard him lecture, I felt a certain kite-like levitation from the sheer force of his precise intellectual coherence, and the gravitational pull of his mind on my own toward the higher regions of expression and knowing that he inhabited. What a thrill to be on the borders of that mind! I will forever cherish the grin and twinkle in his eye before he would offer a particularly well-placed quip or sincerely meant pleasantry. Prof. Robinson gave to me in himself the meaning of tempered erudition. He will forever remain prominent in the constellation of Truth, a weightier planet situated and seen among the stars that are and will be.
-Jonathan Pike, Project Specialist
I have known and been influenced by many individuals in my life. There have been many whose love of the classroom made me want to be a teacher. There have been many whose insatiable curiosity made me want to be a scientist. There have been many whose fascinations with human nature and behavior made me want to be a psychologist. There have been many whose passion for life’s big questions made me want to be a philosopher. But there has only been one person who made me want to truly be a scholar: Daniel N. Robinson. From the moment I first heard him speak, first shook his hand, and first read the first pages of his book on the intellectual history of psychology, I wanted to be like him – a master of details, ideas, arguments, traditions, languages, events and their significance. I wanted to have read, and read deeply and penetratingly, the best thinkers again and again and again until their thoughts were inextricably woven into my bones and flowed through the blood in my veins. I wanted to learn how to navigate the complexities and nuances, the subtleties and simplicities of all there is that has ever been claimed to be known so as to sift the wheat from the chaff and find the wisdom and the truth and the beauty that is the passion of the life of the mind. Dan once wrote that “Progress in science is won by the application of an informed imagination to a problem of genuine consequence.” What Professor Robinson possessed, and what I wanted from the moment I met him, but which I am still seeking to develop, was exactly that – a profoundly informed imagination relentlessly devoted to problems of genuine consequence. With his passing, a brilliant light has gone out in the world. And we will be forever after so much the poorer for it. -Ed Gantt, Wheatley Institution Fellow
Dr. Daniel N. Robinson’s personality was so large and his heart so good that my words cannot serve his memory justice, especially when I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person. Through tongue-and-cheek email requests alone, however, Dr. Robinson’s witty and jovial nature always left me laughing. His love of friends, family, scholarship, and humor was truly inspiring, and I loved learning from him. His energy will continue to touch the lives of those he’s left behind perhaps much longer than he’d like, but in truth, it will never be long enough.
-Madison Savoie, Student Assistant