by Donald L. Shaw

Many years ago, when the School of Journalism and Mass Communication was still located in Howell Hall, I ran into Bob Stevenson walking glumly toward his first-floor office, dragging some computer output on the floor. He was mumbling, but I could not make it out. So I asked him what he was saying. “I’m going to publish it anyway; I’m just going to add a footnote saying the data were changed to make them come out right.” I asked: “Another busted hypothesis?” It was, but of course he did not publish it anyway. He was a model of professionalism, researching the literature, devising a question, and testing it, often with the latest statistical technique (or even statistical fad). He put his work to what we all came to call various “Stevenson Tests” which amounted to asking if the study was significant. “Who cares?” he would ask.

He did, and he cared about the work of many doctoral students over the years, many who kept in touch with him, along with the many scholars and friends with whom he made contact in his frequent travels as a visiting professor or scholar. Bob had wanderlust that took him to perhaps 40 or more countries over the years, far from the tiny Wisconsin farm community where he grew up. He remembered that he was sometimes lonely when he taught abroad and so he made his Chapel Hill home a home away from home for dozens of foreign students, for holidays, for visits to Durham Bulls baseball games, and for trips to the beach or elsewhere.

He carved out a special place for his undergraduates, devising a course that acquainted students from many departments with the issues of world politics and the press. Bob’s love of Europe was clear but also apparent was his awareness of the growing importance of Asia, Africa, South America, and most certainly the Middle East. His undergraduate course balanced readings from newspapers and magazines and films and television programs with scholarly texts and articles. Undergraduate students related to him and he to them, although I always thought both Bob and students had to reach around his shyness. Certainly an eligible bachelor, Bob never married but he had a sister, cousins, nieces, nephews and parents. They were his special family.

I heard him speak many times; he was always prepared and passionate. Like most scholars, he wanted a better world and produced both articles and books that helped students and colleagues sort out historical and contemporary issues. He read, read, read, always completing two of the latest books ahead of the rest of us. Also he did not skim; he read.

Looking back we should not have been shocked by his death, but we were. We still are. After suffering a heart attack in London last summer, then recovering some, then relapsing in the fall so that he had to drop out of teaching, Bob thought he was finally on recovery road. He chided Jeanne Chamberlin and me once for being “well-meaning but over-protective friends,” and so we thought perhaps we were. But we were not, and we were all surprised when the slow road to recovery ended so abruptly. Certainly Bob did not expect it.

But we have so much of him to keep. Dozens of stories and memories crowd our minds, and many were shared at the January memorial service held at the school. He took his last flight home on American Airlines, an airline on which he had earned at least a million frequent flyer miles. The idea of his final flight made me feel sad, sadder even than when I saw him at Rex Hospital in Raleigh five minutes after he died. In his final days, I had an opportunity to see him almost every day, along with family members and close friends, and never saw him less than optimistic. It was a gift. It is a gift. ♦

Donald L. Shaw is a Kenan professor in the school.