FORMER FACULTY PROFILE

Rob Leith,

Retired in Name Only

by Al Rossiter, Faculty Emeritus

In crafting a piece about my friend and former colleague Rob Leith, it seemed prudent to begin with what mattered most to him, his students. In Rob’s case, having taught English and art history for 40 years at BB&N before retiring in 2019, there was quite a pool to choose from.

Thomas Hislop ’13, on being both a student and an advisee of Rob Leith: “Mr. Leith was someone who really, really believed in us, something that is so important when you are a teenager trying to figure out whether you even believe in yourself.”

Isabel Ruehl ’16: “Mr. Leith really cared in a way that inspired us to be curious and to work as hard as he does. He had high expectations—hefty reading assignments and infamous weekend papers…”

Ali Trustman ’03: “Rob Leith taught me how to think critically. He taught me how to analyze a text, whether it be a piece of literature, a film, or a painting. In my writing, he pushed me to think more deeply about my observations.”

During our interview, I asked Rob about the qualities of a good teacher. Without a moment’s hesitation: “Good teachers love what they teach and love whom they teach,” The students above capture what made this tall, soft-spoken, gentle, and intellectually curious man memorable, one of those teachers you carry with you long after you have graduated. Compassion and scholarship. IQ and EQ. To be a “Leith student” was to be nourished emotionally and intellectually, to be inspired to do better work, to write lots of papers, and to have them promptly returned with his astute comments, neatly penned in that distinguishable Leith handwriting.

He loved and still loves books, and loved sharing that passion, whether guiding seniors through Middlemarch or All the King’s Men, or helping 9th graders appreciate Odysseus’ long journey home. He created popular senior electives: Pilgrim Souls, The Victorians, Portraits of a Lady, Things Are Seldom What They Seem. He designed and taught a film course. Elleree Erdos ’08 wrote that his AP Art History course “rivalled several of my graduate level art history classes both in rigor and depth.”

Rob has been the recipient of ten teaching awards, both from BB&N and from colleges attended by former students. While at Harvard, he wrote an honors thesis on the metaphysical poet, George Herbert. In his art classes at BB&N, he was able to rattle off relevant information about a painter or a painting from memory. Smart, yes. Intellectually curious, yes. But through it all was his ongoing concern for both the academic and emotional well-being of his students.,

So, what would one expect from a man like this in his retirement?

First would be his interest in the humanities—books, art, music. “I would not have been too happy in the STEM world,” he says, with that tenor chuckle. He became an accomplished art history scholar by researching, writing, and lecturing. His list of publications in art magazines is impressive. While he was teaching at BB&N, he wrote a definitive work on the American Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Roderick Newman, gave a lecture at the Harvard Art Museum on Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, and presented art history lectures both in Florence and in London. Since retirement, he has co-authored a book on John Leslie Breck, American Impressionist, and is in the process of putting together a publication on the early photographs of Giverny. Bringing previously not well-known artists to the public has been one of his goals. He is one of six members, and the only non-museum professional, of the Harvard Art Museum’s Art of the America’s Think Tank.

As a Harvard graduate, he is able to audit courses. So far, this is the list: Reading War and Peace (a course where, as he says, he “joins with 20-year-olds discussing Tolstoy”—what fun, both for him and for them!); The Roman Empire in Transition; Japanese Cinema from 1950-1979; Northern European Art of the Renaissance; and The Art of Goya.

In retirement he keeps his body as well as his mind in tip-top shape. Once or twice a week he’s up at 5:00 a.m. walking to Harvard Stadium and then running up and down all those steps. He’ s reading a work on the composers of the 19th century. He has lunch with former advisees—he said he enjoyed being an advisor because he could be with a group of students for three years and watch them grow. He is still, these many years later, enjoying their company. Three of the 9th grade members of his very last class at BB&N asked him to lead them in a book group, which met during the pandemic.

Another comment from Ali Trustman ’03: “I remember having advisor meetings with him, and telling him my dreams of getting to Los Angeles and working on set and in movies. I remember thinking that while Boston felt so small to me, talking with Mr. Leith about the possibilities of my life felt so big.”

He applied for a teaching position at BB&N right after the blizzard of 1978 so his wife could commute from Cambridge to Stonehill College, where she taught, rather than from Ipswich, where they previously lived. That memorable storm gave us a born teacher, a scholar, a kind man who had chosen teaching as his vocation and avocation, and who has shared his gifts with hundreds of students.