In Memory Of J. F. Buckley

OSU English Dept Memorial of J.F. Buckley.

JF Buckley 

Susan Delagrange, Assistant Professor

 

Jim catered his own wake. Anxious that we 

might huddle in morose little clusters, he 

arranged for cheese, crackers, fruit, and wine 

during calling hours. A friend asked how 

many people he thought might be there. 

 

“I don’t know. Two?”

 

Of course, there were more than a hundred, 

come to celebrate a life well and passionately 

lived. 

 

Jim began his third career when he joined the 

English Department and the faculty at OSU 

Mansfield in 1995.  For 23 years, he worked 

for Rockwell, Inc. in Jamestown, NY, where he 

served as union steward and chair of U.A.W. 

Local 338. He pursued his second career as a 

stockbroker for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter 

while completing a BS in Business and Public 

Relations and an MA in English from SUNY 

Fredonia, and a PhD in English from The Ohio 

State University in 1993. 

 

Teaching, it turned out, was what he had 

been waiting for his whole life. He loved and 

respected his students enough to demand 

much of them, and after their first shocked 

immersion in his literary and theoretical 

worlds, they returned his love and respect by 

rising to his expectations, producing sparkling 

work, and asking for letters of recommendation 

for graduate schools, writing programs, and 

law schools around the country. And he was 

my teacher too. He said that the overheated 

atmosphere of graduate school was the 

most intensely gratifying of his life, and as I 

considered returning for a PhD, he gentled 

me into the current conversations of critical 

thought, and then poked and prodded me 

intellectually as I grappled with Foucault and 

Butler and the glories of rhetoric. 

 

He was good at poking and prodding. Jim 

did not compartmentalize his life, and his 

identity as a gay man was front and center 

in his classroom, in his scholarship, and in 

his astounding commitment to service. He 

was a fierce, sometimes intemperate foe 

of discrimination of any stripe, but most 

particularly discrimination based on sex or 

gender. He felt the anguish of every heterosexist 

or homophobic slight, intentional or not. Jim 

was the “conscience of the campus.” Among 

his many initiatives, he started and chaired the 

campus Diversity Committee, helped found 

and advised the LBGT Student Association, 

and organized a C.A.R.E. Symposium on 

Hate Crimes and Sexual Orientation. For his 

teaching of tolerance, inside and outside 

the classroom, Jim received the Humanities 

Diversity Enhancement Award in 2005. To 

honor Jim’s commitment, the faculty at OSU 

Mansfield established the J.F. Buckley Memorial 

Scholarship for Sexuality Studies, which will 

provide up to $1,000 each year to an OSU 

Mansfield student pursuing the sexuality 

studies minor.

 

Jim read (and remembered) voraciously. He 

insisted that his huge library (each volume of 

which he had read, cover to cover, at least once) 

be given away to the Department’s graduate 

students, remembering the books he wanted 

but couldn’t afford in graduate school.  Still, 

he believed that life’s most important lessons 

could be learned from the mythic American 

heroes of Westerns like Shane. Toward the end, 

he had a special fondness for the dignity and 

humility of John Wayne in The Shootist. Jim’s

ashes will be buried in Cherry Creek, NY, where 

he grew up, and scattered in the wild Maine 

woods he loved.