Mourning Willard Pate

Furman University is mourning the death of longstanding faculty member Dr. Frances Willard Pate, who passed away in her home on Dec. 2. The most senior member of Furman’s faculty, Dr. Pate began her extraordinary career in the university’s English Department in 1964.

Dr. Pate’s contributions to Furman and its students are legendary. She was a notable teacher of writing at both the first-year and upper levels, and her advocacy for the importance of teaching writing within a liberal arts tradition helped make Furman’s English Department one of the finest in the South. A specialist in Southern literature, Dr. Pate’s course on the works of William Faulkner was a rite of passage for at least three generations of Furman students inside and outside the English Department. And it wasn’t just Faulkner. Students flocked to her classes on Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Alice Walker, and Ernest J. Gaines, among other greats.

Even before Furman had a program in creative writing, Dr. Pate arranged for visits to the university by notable southern authors: Pat Conroy, Mary Hood, Dorothy Allison, Mindy Friddle, Ellen Gilchrist, Josephine Humphreys, George Singleton, and, most recently, Jesmyn Ward. Because of Dr. Pate, Flannery O’Connor’s friend and biographer, Sally Fitzgerald, was a frequent visitor to the university. And Dr. Pate herself taught two other notable southern writers, Tommy Hays and Ed Tarkington, both of whom have visited the university to read for our students.

Dr. Willard Pate began her career at Furman University in 1964, teaching generations of Paladins for 61 years.

Dr. Pate believed that reading southern writers helped her understand her own identity – “Faulkner writes what I have always known,” she once said. And for years she communicated that understanding to her Furman students, many of whom, obviously, hailed from the South.

Her advocacy for women writers and educators was part of her legacy as well, especially in the years when the university, like other schools, seemed relatively inattentive to the contributions to literature and culture by women. In this regard, it seems important to note how many of the writers Dr. Pate brought to Furman were women.

Perhaps Dr. Pate’s most significant and influential contribution to the university was her work with her then-colleague and future Dean of the University, John Crabtree, in founding Furman’s semester-long program in the British Isles in the 1960s. Before travel study was taken for granted at colleges like Furman, Drs. Pate and Crabtree established a relationship with the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham in England that enabled students to study the staging of plays in the repertoire of the Royal Shakespeare Company. That association has changed over the years, but it remains in existence today, as a testimony to both professors’ foresight. It has given Furman students the advantage of studying with some of the world’s best Shakespearean scholars and actors. And some of those scholars, too, have taught classes at Furman.

The program in the British Isles also afforded students the opportunity to study the history, politics, and economics of the United Kingdom and Ireland, English literature (in situ), and world drama in London. It was especially important to Furman when most students came from small towns around the South. But it remains an essential part of the educational experience of English and Theatre students. Indeed, the British Isles program has been a model for the type of engaged-learning travel experience that helps define what it means to have a Furman education today. Dr. Pate oversaw aspects of the program until her death.

Although Dr. Pate was a stylish writer who produced stories and non-fiction essays early on, she also schooled herself in visual arts in her later years. She was a catalyst in the creation of film studies at Furman. But more to her credit she developed into a lauded photographer. Her photos have been displayed in important venues in the South and in galleries in New York and Spain. A traditionalist, she nearly always worked in black and white, and in an age of abstract photography her subjects were realistic ones – the landscapes, people, and animals she met on her extensive travels to Italy, Cuba, South America, and the British Isles.

Her book With Animals (BazanPhotos Publishing, 2015) reveals her great sympathy with primarily domesticated animals. Her latest work in progress is a photographic exploration of the evolving history of Ireland’s fabled Aran Isles in the past 40 years and will be forthcoming as soon as possible.

Dr. Pate took her B.A. from Emory University in Atlanta (1959), her M.A. from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (1961), and her Ph.D. from Emory (1969). She is survived by her two well-loved cats, Faulkner and Flannery.

She will be sorely missed.