In Memory of Russell Taylor (SIAT Colleague, Recently Passed)
The thing about work in a university is that you can have a colleague for seventeen years or so and still not have gotten to know him very well. We all come and go, show up for our classes or meetings at different times of the weekly schedule, usually for short segments of time — a lecture here, a committee there — and then of course we each have our respective domain areas.
Even though Russell and I were both teaching faculty, he taught in design and I taught in media, so our paths didn’t cross much. Thus my memories of Russell are rather episodic, so my memoriam to Russell will also have to be episodic, and not necessarily in chronological order but I will try to keep the sequence as intact as memory allows.
I think the first time I heard about Russell was via Jim’s praise of him, as hands-down the best teacher in SIAT. I think my reaction was along the lines of, “Who?”
Once, Jim, Russell and I were sitting in the campus pub and Jim was talking about his wife and Russell was talking about his girlfriend. Then, the beer arrived and someone commented about the beer’s “head” and then there was a moment of confusion because the meaning of the word “head” somehow got transferred over to someone else’s lady partner.
Once I was sitting on the TPC and we were reviewing Russell’s submitted CV. It was some handwritten chicken scratch on loose leaf I think which I took to be some kind of general middle finger to the TPC. I thought that was totally awesome, I mean, who doesn’t want to give a middle finger to the TPC sometimes?
I sometimes thought of myself as the anti-Russell, or Russell as the anti-Michael, because I’m pretty sure he had the best course evaluations and I had the worst. During a period of my absolute worst teaching evaluations, I had to pass Russell in the hallway and he looked totally pissed off at me, like if he could, he’d shoot laser beams out of his eyes and fry my face off. I gathered from that moment that he was currently on the TPC.
I did sometimes get peaks at Russell’s teaching style, like if his classroom door was open and I could look in for a bit to see what he was doing that captivated students so much. My reaction was essentially, “Oh well, I can’t do that.”
I did sit next to him at the pub once, only this time with some of his students, and in that element he seemed about as happy as anyone can possibly ever be.
When I came to SIAT, I think Media Arts had most of the students, then Russell stole most of them because he was a student magnet who also stole students’ time from everyone else’s courses because his coursework was #1 priority and all other SIAT faculty came in last when it came to assignment due dates.
I was also sometimes jealous that he got paid to go to Europe a lot and I didn’t. My understanding about these trips of his is that he really enjoyed Italian food.
In quantum physics, or maybe it’s cybernetics — I get these confused a lot — it is theorized that information can never be truly destroyed. That is how I know that Russell will live on forever.
