Edwin M. Yoder Jr., a journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his stylish and erudite editorials at the now-defunct Washington Star and went on to become a columnist syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, died Nov. 30 at a retirement community in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 89.
Obituaries
Please alert us to the recent death of any other Rhodes Scholar by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.
Dr Black was a CUF lecturer (now Associate Professor) at the [University of Oxford] English Faculty, and a Fellow of Oriel College from April 1978 until his retirement in 2010. He is remembered as a beloved colleague who worked tirelessly and with enthusiasm for our students. He was an early modernist, with wide interests, and will have been known to many as an editor of Notes and Queries for many decades. He was also a Proctor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the University. He will be missed by many at the English Faculty.
Peter H. Russell, was a distinguished Canadian political scientist, passionate educator, and esteemed member of the University of Toronto community as well as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Peter left this world on January 10, 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unparalleled contributions in the fields of political science, judicial politics, and Canadian Constitutional Law. He has left an enduring impact on the institutions he served. He died peacefully, surrounded by his family.
Born on November 16, 1932, in Toronto, Peter embarked on a lifelong journey of intellectual exploration that would become the hallmark of his distinguished career. He was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he immersed himself in the study of philosophy, politics, and economics, laying the foundation for a lifetime of scholarly achievement. Peter also distinguished himself through athletic accomplishments: he captained the Oxford hockey team and served as coxswain on the Oriel College rowing crew.
In addition to many other prestigious career awards, Peter was recognized by the American Political Science Association with the Mildred A. Schwartz Award, a testament to his significant impact in the field.
Peter dedicated nearly four decades of his life to the University of Toronto, where he served as a professor of political science and was honoured with the special designation of University Professor in 1994. His tenure, spanning from 1958 to 1996, saw the nurturing of countless minds and the shaping of political discourse in Canada. Peter's passion for his field was matched only by his dedication to his students, leaving an indelible mark on generations of aspiring political scientists.
Peter's illustrious career extended beyond the classroom. He served as the Principal of Innis College at the University of Toronto from 1972 to 1977, and he was the founding principal of Senior College at University of Toronto. He served as president of the Canadian Political Science Association in 1990-91 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His extensive involvement in various commissions and task forces included his role as Research Director on the McDonald Commission on Certain Activities of the RCMP, and the Federal Task Force on Comprehensive Land Claims. In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Peter was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, highlighting his profound influence on the nation's political landscape.
Peter was no less active and accomplished in his personal life. He spent his childhood summers in Georgian Bay, where he became an avid fisherman and developed a lifelong love of the Bay. Georgian Bay is also where he met his future bride, Sue Jarvis. Peter and Sue spent the following 65 summers on Minnicog Island raising four children, and teaching them the essentials of life on the Bay: swimming, fishing, boating, cutting trails through the woods, and playing cards. He will be remembered as a daunting opponent and the founder of the Minnicog Cribbage Tournament.
Appointed to the King County Superior Court in 2007 by Governor Christine Gregoire, Judge Craighead served as Presiding Judge during the completion of the Clark Children and Family and Justice Center and was a leader in efforts to eliminate racial disparities in the juvenile system. She retired in 2021.
“Judge Craighead was a good friend to many and a leader on our Court,” Judge Jim Rogers said. “She tirelessly worked her cases, spent many hours on the creation of the CCFCJ, and presided over trials despite incredible health challenges. I often told her that she was the toughest person that I have ever met.”
Judge Craighead served as a commissioner for the Washington state Court of Appeals for five years before her appointment to Superior Court. Prior to that, she was a staff attorney for the Seattle-King County Public Defender Association.
Judge Craighead also served as the law clerk for Justice Shirley Abrahamson at the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, worked as a reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal and the Washington Post, and worked for the Federal Defenders of San Diego and the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center.
Father James showed academic excellence from an early age when he was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1952. He received a BA degree and an MA in modern History from Oxford University and spent a year at Princeton as a university fellow, and then taught at the University of Saskatchewan. James was granted a leave of absence from 1958-60 for doctoral research at Oxford, where he obtained a PhD from the University in 1960 and a D.Phil in 1963. He then enrolled in the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and received a MA in Mediaeval Philosophy in 1964. He joined the Basilian Fathers in 1964 and was ordained on December 14, 1968 in the chapel of St. Thomas More College, Saskatoon. He obtained a STB from the University of St. Michael's College in 1968 and a LLD from the University of Saskatchewan in 1986. Additional degrees and honours included: Fellow from the Royal Historical Society in 1964, Fellows, Academy II from the Royal Society of Canada in 1987, Foreign Member from the Royal Belgian Academy in 1988, a D.LIT from the University of Windsor in 1989 and the Order of Canada from the Governor General of Canada in 2001. Among his significant leadership positions, Fr. McConica served as Praeses of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto and President and Vice Chancellor of the University of St. Michael's College, Toronto. He was also an Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, the first Roman Catholic priest to be a fellow of this prestigious institution since the English Reformation. A man of extraordinary scholarship, erudition and culture, Fr. McConica served the Academy and the Church with dedication, devotion and a genuine love for people. He mentored countless students and colleagues, not only imparting to them his vast academic experience but offered them a sterling example of a faithful Catholic priest who embodied and modelled the Basilian motto of "Teach me Goodness, Discipline and Knowledge."
Dr Rempel was an accomplished historian, both as a scholar and as a teacher at all levels, of thousands of first year undergraduates, scores of Master's students and over thirty successful Doctoral candidates.
Dr. Rempel attended the University of Saskatchewan after two years working in northern Alberta. He graduated with great distinction and with a double major in Economics and History in 1959, and as a Rhodes Scholar in history. While doing a doctorate in Modern British History at Oxford he met Ann Whyte who was finishing her nursing after spending two years in a repertory company after coming from India where she had spent her childhood. Among other pursuits, they enjoyed a mutual interest in theatre and in East Indian history. They married in late 1961.
He taught at the University of South Carolina from 1964 to 1975. In 1975 Dick and his family returned to Canada where he taught Modern British history and Western Civilization courses at McMaster University for many years. While he enjoyed his teaching of thousands of undergraduates, he especially flourished in supervising many PhD candidates, some eighteen doctoral students all of whom, after graduation, successfully took up academic positions in various universities in Canada and elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
Dr. Rempel was also instrumental in helping to establish the huge Bertrand Russell Editorial Project at McMaster and co-edited five of the volumes of Russell’s papers on liberalism, guild socialism, women’s suffrage, and his antiwar activities from 1914 through 1918, as well as Russell’s firsthand critique of Bolshevism in 1920. Dick was proud of the Graduate Teaching Award created in his name at McMaster University and equally prized his teaching award he received earlier at the University of South Carolina.
After his retirement in 2000, Dick returned to his roots by writing articles about Saskatoon and, especially, the University of Saskatchewan. On many of these research trips, Dick was accompanied by his wife and recently by their son, Robert. In 2013 Dick published a biography through McGill-Queen’s University Press of a former President of that University, Dr. W. P. Thompson, who had been the first geneticist in Canada and a founder of Medicare in Saskatchewan in 1962.
In a single lifetime, Ken Brecher lived many lives.
The longtime president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Brecher also spent more than a decade leading the Sundance Institute and served as associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles.
Each role provided him the opportunity to touch people’s lives and embrace their mutual humanity, an ambition that sprang from his studies as a cultural anthropologist, according to those who knew him.
Among those whose work and lives reflect his influence is journalist Susan Orlean, who credits Brecher with inspiring her 2018 bestseller, “The Library Book,” about the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. Brecher had reached out to Orlean after she moved to L.A. and led her on a tour of the historic library in downtown Los Angeles, telling her the story of the famous fire that planted the seed for her book.
“He was perhaps the most luminous, vibrant person I’ve ever known,”...
Read the full obituary here.
We are saddened by the news of Norman's passing. He came to Oxford in 1958 to study Modern Languages with a focus on Russian.
Peter was one of those selfless and talented people who have kept the movement for social, democratic and economic justice alive.
A cursory description of some of the episodes of Peter’s life and career make him sound like a true Renaissance person.
In his time, Peter was: a political aide to the only elected federal New Democrat from Alberta, a key advisor to the group that became the Dene Nation in the Northwest Territories, a producer and manager for CBC network radio, head of research for the federal New Democrats (when Jack Layton was leader), and a Rhodes scholar.
And that is only a very partial list.
In recent years, Peter described himself as “an economist, geographer and urban planner by academic training, and a political organizer/activist, development educator, journalist, policy wonk and political staffer by practice”.
To that, he added that he has had some of his poetry, fiction and non-fiction published.
Read the full obituary here.
By the time he retired from regular column-writing in 1996, Mr. Yoder was “a certifiable journalistic fossil,” as he put it, “a survivor from the linear age whose tenure has extended into the garish and glamorous electronic era of television, talking heads, talk radio and the Internet.”
Mr. Yoder, a political moderate, got his start at newspapers in his home state of North Carolina, where he wrote editorials in support of the civil rights movement and evoked the region’s history and culture while channeling the work of W.J. Cash and C. Vann Woodward, two leading chroniclers of the South.
His work attracted the attention of Texas financier Joe L. Allbritton, the new owner of the Star, who was seeking to rejuvenate the scrappy afternoon newspaper when he hired Mr. Yoder in 1975 to oversee its editorial page.
Mr. Yoder joined a staff that included Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mary McGrory, and in 1979 he was awarded a Pulitzer of his own, hailed by the prize committee for writing about “current national events with the confident understanding of the political specialist, the objectivity of the historian, and with masterful literary grace.”
Read the full obituary here.
We are grateful for his long service to the Rhodes community through his role as Class Leader.