Good afternoon, and welcome to this celebration of Russ Campbell’s life
– on behalf of the International Institute, the College of Letters
and Science, and UCLA. I am extremely pleased to be here today and to
be able to share some of my thoughts with you. I am sure that, somewhere,
Russ is pleased and smiling too.
I did not know Russ well, and I did not know him for long – I only
came to UCLA in the summer of 2001. My naïveté led to important
misconceptions on my part. For example, I did not know that Russ had “retired”
in 1991. But could you blame me? Russ had more energy and was involved
in more projects in more places than I could ever contemplate.
I have read a lot about Russ’s truly pathbreaking activities: teaching
English in Egypt in the early 1970s and in China soon after the death
of Mao; creating an immersion program in Spanish for the Culver City schools;
pioneering the concept of heritage languages and heritage language acquistion;
and building UCLA’s LMP/LRC into one of the world’s most highly
respected centers of innovation in language instruction.
But my most intense dealings with Russ concerned the English language
education program – and other educations programs - he helped create
for the emergent American University of Armenia. I think this must have
been completely a “retirement” avocation. But it involved
complex 3 way interactions among AUA, UCLA and UCOP over an annual budget
running in the hundreds of thousands, and with continual struggles to
get the money, and then to hire the people, to do the teaching. A little
different from working on your golf game and other similarly lofty objectives
I envisage for my retirement years.
From the outset I could tell that Russ’s imprint on things international
at UCLA was wide, deep and enduring, not only with respect to programs,
but also ultimately and more importantly with respect to people –
many of whom are in this room. Russ was a fiercely dedicated and passionate
person. He was dedicated to and passionate about the tag line we have
adopted for the International institute: “educating global citizens”.
And he understood decades before September 11 that this must be a two
way street. Helping Americans acquire foreign languages is the precondition
to reducing the country’s collective innocence and ignorance about
the rest of the world, so Russ worked to do it, both at UCLA and in k-12
classrooms. Helping people in other countries understand the English language
will help them understand America and Americans as well, and Russ did
that all around the globe.
Russ had a vision, an important vision, but being a visionary is not
enough. You also need the wherewithal to carry it out, and Russ had this
too. To be effective in the manifold ways Russ was required intelligence
and administrative competence. But it was Russ’s character and indomitable
spirit that were the keys to his professional success. Max Weber had a
pretty instrumental understanding of “charisma”: getting people
to do what you want them to do without having to threaten them; charismatic
leaders are followed because of the leaders’s moral authority, the
strength of their will, and the compelling nature of their vision. Russ
Campbell had charisma in spades.
Russ had a rich and wonderful personal life; but his person pervaded
his professional life too. It is one of the real joys for all of us involved
in academic endeavors that we can do things because we care about them,
rather than because we are told to do them or simply because they put
food on the table. Russ was the embodiment of the university, in teaching,
research and service. He lived a wonderful life to the fullest. He is
sorely missed, but we will long remember him.
Geoffrey
Garrett
Vice Provost, UCLA International Institute