John Dolan: RIP

By Dave Andrusko

These remarks were first written September 17 and updated a few days before I flew back to Minneapolis to attend a memorial mass for Prof. John Dolan. It will be a sad time made bearable by the knowledge that John was a loving husband, father, and friend, a giant of a man who made enormous contributions and who knew with utter assurance with whom he would spend eternity.

Over the years it's been my privilege to be in the presence of men and women whose brilliance shone so brightly it was-or could have been-positively intimidating. John was one of those luminaries whose mind shone most brightly.

John died September 14 after a battle with cancer that he fought with enormous courage for almost 10 years. To pro-lifers, John is best known as the co-founder (along with the late Dr. Hymie Gordon, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic) of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine at the University of Minnesota.

If you go to www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/September05/nv091605.html, you can read a large portion of the tribute written by Sandra Peterson, the John M. Dolan Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. John taught there for many years, a school which happens to be my alma mater.

John was one of those rare people so smart you almost wonder if you are of the same species. Once when we were in his tiny office at the University of Minnesota he gave me a copy of one of his books as a token of our friendship. As deep, deep explications of analytical philosophy go, it was the model of clarity. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

John was a spellbinding storyteller, the kind of guy who effortlessly wove together current controversies, jokes from late night talk shows, remembrances from his three years as a member of the International Longshoreman's Union working on the Brooklyn waterfront, and allusions to just about anyone/everyone prominent in philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and computer science. His Ph.D. thesis from Stanford no doubt made for light bedtime reading: "Translation and Meaning: An Examination of Quine's Translational Indeterminacy Hypothesis."

Over the years we had many, many conversations. Most of the time my contribution would be to nod my head affirmatively. Occasionally, when I did have enough courage to offer some ideas and opinions, John treated them with far more deference and respect than they warranted. He was, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, a real gentleman.

I first met John years and years ago at a conference convened by the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent and Disabled. It was there that I first witnessed his passion to defend the defenseless. He delivered his talk with fiery eloquence and sharp wit.

Perhaps it was because of his close association with Dr. Gordon and the medical school at the University of Minnesota, but John keenly understood how the anti-life ethos was corrupting the noble practice of medicine. I believe it may have been at this conference that, in the context of physician-assisted suicide, I first heard John offer an incredibly shrewd insight that he dubbed "contrafactum interruptus."

As described by a mutual friend, this is a logical fallacy in which "a fact and its opposite are both assumed in the course of the reasoning to create a false conclusion. It came from one of the Lewis Carroll stories, where Alice says it's a good thing she hates asparagus, because if she liked it she'd eat a lot of it and she can't stand the stuff. He said this is just like saying that if we have euthanasia we can reliably entrust it to doctors, because most people have faith in doctors (forgetting that the reason we have learned to have faith in doctors is that they are generally known to heal and not kill people!)."

But for every conversation about such weighty matters we'd have three about our families. John was enormously proud of his children, whose staggering list of accomplishments you'd almost expect since they are the offspring of John and his beloved wife, Rosemarie.

Listened to John for about five minutes it was easy to understand why he was a hugely admired teacher. Besides the University of Minnesota, he taught in a number of prestigious academic settings, including MIT, Brooklyn College, the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, and Swarthmore College.

Yet, as John told me and countless others, the academic appointment in which he took most pride was as headmaster of "Kenwood Academy," the home school he and Rosemarie conducted for their children from 1975 until 1993.

Without fail, in every conversation we had, John asked me how my children were doing, even in the later years when he was in agonizing, almost unrelieved pain. He spoke glowingly of the contributions of my wife and praised National Right to Life in such glowing terms that all I could do was to resolve to work even harder to try to merit his praise.

Most of all, he told me that he prayed every day for me and my family. Along with others beyond number, I will greatly miss John.  I'd to end with two brief excerpts from the tribute John wrote for National Right to Life News when Dr. Gordon passed away. (John is here referring a series of lectures Dr. Gordon had given all over the planet.) Everything he says about Dr. Gordon applies to John in equal measure.

"It was a dazzling experience to witness, the orderly and rapid-fire marshaling of arguments... .  Bold, original, deeply learned, always fresh and stimulating, his presentations were marked by a play of wit that intrigued and startled and brought before his rapt listener the glory and vision of real learning."

Then John's concluding sentence, which I have never forgotten:

"And, if he is already provoking laughter and stimulating the wits of the mighty scholars who preceded him in paradise, it will be a long time before those of us who worked with him, depended on him, and loved him will laugh easily again."

Dave Andrusko can be reached at dandrusko@nrlc.org