I was not a student of Mike Leff's, and I know his many students from years past are mourning his passing with a particular and familial intensity. But in a way everyone who studies rhetorical criticism, history, and especially Cicero can't help but have been one of his students.
Leff attended one of my very first conference papers, something I presented on Augustine at the Penn State Conference, and he pointedly told me what I did and didn't need to do. I was ecstatic and a little intimidated to have a chance to talk with him about the work at an evening cookout over at Stone Valley. I remember riding to the picnic in a car with him, getting amazingly lost, and Mike thought it was the funniest thing ever that a car full of rhetoricians couldn't navigate themselves. I've known him since, about sixteen years, a pittance compared to his peer colleagues who knew him for what had to seem like lifetimes.
A few years ago, Mike agreed to be on a panel with me, JM and our Illinois colleague Dale Bauer to talk about our experiences teaching in the Odyssey project. This was a different side of Leff. I knew Leff the professional mentor, but here was Leff the devoted teacher, who believed that everyone should read a little Cicero, not just his Northwestern grad students. He lit up when he talked about his underprivileged students in Chicago, and he told about how this work at least partly inspired his move from Evanston to Memphis.
In the past 5 years, too, I have gotten to know Leff as a colleague and administrator on the board of the Rhetoric Society of America, as well as in business meetings for the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. I learned a lot from him about how to make things happen in meetings. He always managed to strike a balance between serious, thoughtful arguments about the direction of these organizations and gut-splitting jokes: gravitas plus levity. The man liked to laugh as much as he liked to bear down on Latin passages. In fact, one of my best memories of him was at a dinner at an RSA board retreat a couple years back, when he asked me for a gin recommendation, and I recommended Hendricks. After putting away a couple Hendricks martinis, he started telling stories about colleagues at Northwestern that rendered many of us--especially his dear friend David Zarefsky--breathless, speechless, and weeping with laughter.
And now we are all weeping for his recent (and very sudden) passing. He and all of his amazing students have made the field of rhetorical studies the rigorous and lively field it is. Leff's lifetime of scholarly work, combined with the astonishing proliferation of work from those he trained makes each of us, at some remove, his student, and we are as devastated by his death as we are grateful for his life and work. He was a giant in many ways and will long be remembered as such.
