Gary S. Wihl

Gary was born in 1953, the 1st of 4 children in an English-speaking family in Montreal, in a well-established Jewish community in a French, Catholic province. After two degrees at McGill, he did a PhD at Yale. Gary believed the five years at Yale were the most transformative of his life. He also met his wife Sarah at Yale. She had a lovely voice and taught formidable, mediaeval German books. Their mutual respect and affection for each other was palpable. McGill welcomed him back as an Assistant Professor of English Literature; he and Sarah taught there for 15 years, both becoming tenured.

I met Gary in the late 1980s. His age was indeterminate because he wore suits, not jeans like our draft dodging professors. In fact, he was young, at the start of his career but his secular humanism was timeless. He taught us fiction that is morally complicated, subtle but ultimately redemptive. He prepared us for jobs like law and teaching that require an open mind, close reading and generosity tempered by scepticism. His classes offered a reassuring contrast to the world around us. Quebec was unstable, between separatist referenda, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic was in full swing.

I also worked for Gary in the Graduate Faculty in the mid-90s. He was beginning his career as an administrator and obviously talented at it. His supplicants went away content; I never heard an angry word spoken. Gary was thriving.

He left Canada to accommodate Sarah's wish to go home. She was American and had given up a job at Duke for snowy Montreal. Gary respected her desire to return to the US; they took the risks of relocation together. They worked for a series of elite, liberal, private American universities. Gary's administrative responsibilities and intellectual ambitions grew bigger - for more staff, students, budgets and programmes. At Emory in Atlanta, he was Acting Dean of the Graduate School, including bio-medical sciences, management and an Ethics Centre where he presented a paper on stem cell research. He moved to Rice in Texas, which he regarded as the peak of his career. He raised an unprecedented amount of money ($40 million) and set up collaborations between cultural institutions so the humanities could thrive in Houston with the participation of the University. His last job was at Washington University in Missouri which was not a happy move for them. Their marriage ended, and Sarah died unexpectedly of brain cancer in 2019. Prior to her death, they remained close and renewed their love for each other.

Gary loved America. He was not a snob about climate or geography, nor fearful of cultural differences. His professional success seemed to flow from his character - patient, intelligent, unassuming, and with a ready sense of humour. He found common ground with people despite differences in religion, politics, gender and ethnicity. These aspects of identity were factual matters, always relevant but not shackles. He understood why equal pay, capital funding and fair promotion opportunities are essential to making equality rights real. At Washington University, he found the money to bring the gender pay gap in Arts and Sciences down to 0.22%. Many people pursue feminist activism, but not many have that kind of success.

You will know for yourselves how his humanity enhanced your own life. He is survived by his two brothers and their spouses, David and Chrysanthi, Lloyd and Ivona, and his sister Joyce, as well as six nephews and nieces,

He has also left a significant amount of highly regarded scholarly work. Throughout his career as an administrator, he maintained a strong intellectual agenda and kept writing, despite coping with a series of serious health problems over many years. He wrote 51 articles and conference papers, 2 books, co-edited 2 more and published 16 reviews of serious books in peer-reviewed journals. He attributed his success as a dean to his scholarship which maintained his street credibility. It also gave him a context for his intellectual gifts to flourish in communion with like-minded people. The constellation of complex topics around which his thoughts evolved remained the same over decades - the central importance of art and literature to the project of liberalism in our time, our evolving understanding of democratic politics in multiculturalism, constitutionalism, and its effects on the legal status of the arts as property. People who miss him can find his voice in his writing; new readers will enjoy growing new neurons when they discover his work.

Harriet Nowell-Smith

In lieu of flowers or food, memorial contributions may optionally be made in name of Gary Wihl to the Sarah Greenberg Living Donor Champion Fund, online at https://www.foundationbarnesjewish.org/transform-health-care (Sarah is Gary's grandmother who first succumbed to congenital ESRD).

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