John Dings

Published November 6, 2014 This content is archived.

John Dings.

John Garetson Dings, 75, a member of the English department faculty for more than three decades, died Oct. 28 in his home in Boulder, Colorado, of Parkinson’s disease complicated by the effects of a fall.

Colleagues, former students and family alike call him a teacher in the finest sense of the word, with a kind, thoughtful style that was never pedantic. A lifelong environmentalist, they say Dings shared with them a sense of wonder and delight in the beauty of literature and the world around us.

Born in Covina, California, Dings attended high school in Denver. He received a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, in 1961 and in 1968, a PhD from Cornell University, where he specialized in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Dings’ book on the poet, “The mind in its place: Wordsworth, ‘Michael’ and the poetry of 1800,” was published in 1973 by the Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur at the University of Salzburg and reflects the deep interest of both poet and author in the natural environment.

It is not coincidental that Wordsworth’s politics, like Dings’, were fundamentally “green.” In fact, he was our first truly ecological poet and exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements. Many observers, including Dings, have found him of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today.

After teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Dings joined the UB faculty in 1968. He taught Victorian literature and courses on literature and the environment until 2001, when he retired and moved to Boulder to be close to his family and the mountains he loved.

Dings held a number of administrative positions at UB, including associate chair and chair of the English department, associate dean of undergraduate education and associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, later incorporated into the College of Arts and Sciences. He also was a master of UB’s Rachel Carson College, served on the university’s Environmental Task Force and was a key member of the UB Graduate Group for Marxist Studies.

James Holston, professor of English, called Dings “a rare combination of high principles and good humor: fearless, witty, passionate about literature, beloved by his students and colleagues. He was from Colorado and continued to be a mountain boy all his life, as evidenced in his environmental teaching.”

Holstun’s comments were echoed by several colleagues. William Fischer, associate professor emeritus and a colleague and close friend of Dings for 30 years, calls him “a wise and compassionate human being who cared deeply for his family, for the community of his friends and for the great natural world around him that he loved and fought to protect.”

Other former students and colleagues speak to his influence on them as well, including James Swan, emeritus associate professor of English, who wrote a lengthy and warm remembrance for the English department’s website; former student Susan Nygaard of the Marshall School in Duluth, Minnesota, and UB Associate Professor Stacy Hubbard, who said, “Over my years at UB I have been guided by the question: ‘What would John do?’”

Another former student, Joseph Brennan, former UB associate vice president for university communications and now vice president for strategic communication at the University of Iowa, notes that Dings was his dissertation director “and I had the pleasure and privilege to have been his student for many years. He was compassionate, good-natured and caring, and had a strong sense of social justice, coupled with a broad view of the world and the ability to listen respectfully to all points of view, even those that he didn’t share.”

“John was a modest man,” says Prudence Dings, his wife of 53 years. “He favored jeans and a plaid shirt, had a ready smile for everyone, loved babies, played the piano and additional instruments for enjoyment, and sang enthusiastically in quartets and barbershop groups.

“He enjoyed a good conversation, a great book, every imaginable pun, games and, above all else, his family,” she says. “He paid attention to detail, whether it was the text of a novel, the way the light caught a leaf, the planting of a garden, the course of a hike — in fact, Dings was an avid hiker who continued to walk extensively until the last month of his life —  the mechanics of a car, the arguments of a political debate. He brought a keen intellect to every situation, along with a kind heart and a sense of humor.”

A memorial service will be held at a later date. Contributions in Dings’ memory can be made to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation or the Rocky Mountain National Park.