The Man, the Myth,

By Katherine Pyles

The thing about legends is that they’re seldom true. An embellishment here, an exaggeration there, and the facts, over time, become fiction. But when it comes to the legend of the late Dr. Simon Perry, professor emeritus of the Department of Political Science at Marshall and the university’s longestserving faculty member, you can believe every word: “Loved.” “Feared.” “Tough, but fair.” “An institution.” “A treasure.” “Legendary.”

“When Dr. Perry died on Jan. 27 at the age of 92, it was a profound loss for the Marshall community,” said Patricia Proctor, founding director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, in an interview for The Parthenon. “He was a brilliant professor with a hunger for knowledge and an intellectual curiosity that never waned. His students — and I was one — were the beneficiaries of this. He was deeply thoughtful and pushed students to challenge their preconceptions, open their minds and grow as critical thinkers and as human beings.”

As a professor, Perry was known for his stories. Heartfelt anecdotes about his childhood on Gilbert Creek in Mingo County and his wife, Frances, whom he playfully (and relentlessly) teased, provided well-timed relief during rigorous lectures. Perry would scan the room with a familiar twinkle in his eye, and you’d know: “This is going to be a good one.”

“I think students probably remember my stories, perhaps more than they remember the content of my classes,” said Perry in a 2011 Huntington Quarterly magazine interview.

“Simon Perry was the epitome of what a college professor should be,” said former student Paul Hughart in the Huntington Quarterly. He said Perry inspired students to pursue careers not only in political science but also in public service, academia, the law, journalism and social work. They crowded into classes like “Power in American Society” and “Public Opinion and Propaganda,” knowing a passing grade would be a hard-fought battle.

It was no secret that Perry’s classes were among the most difficult at Marshall, yet students flocked to them anyway — in Perry’s 48 years at the university, he taught more than 20,000 students. As Perry once said, “To be perceived as challenging is the greatest compliment.”

In his distinctive deep voice, Perry encouraged students to engage in civil discourse and political activism — areas in which he had firsthand experience. As an undergraduate at Berea College in the 1950s, Perry organized boycotts of local businesses that refused to serve his Black classmates. He drove the point home in his valedictory address: “It is unjust and plain conceit for one person to discriminate against another on the basis of race, color or creed,” he said during the speech. “It is time that you should recognize that segregation is bad, and it would be good of you, if you could become concerned enough, to lend a hand in putting it to its deathbed.”

After graduating from Berea, Perry returned to Gilbert Creek and accepted a high school teaching job, a role he held briefly before continuing his education at the University of Tennessee, where he earned his master’s degree, and Michigan State University, where he earned his Ph.D. It was during his three-month stint at Williamson High School that he met Frances Hickman, a young chemistry teacher there. The pair would marry a year later and go on to have four children, ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. They considered Razia Bennoui, an Afghan immigrant whose family was killed by the

Taliban, their “adopted daughter” and her children their adopted grandchildren. When Perry passed away — at his home, in Frances’s arms — the couple had been married 66 years.

Perry completed his doctoral dissertation in 1961 and joined Marshall’s political science department the following year. The rest is history — U.S. political history, to be exact.

During Perry’s tenure at Marshall, he received the Marshall Distinguished Service Award, was the university’s first Drinko Fellow and was named Distinguished West Virginian twice, first by Gov. Arch Moore and later by Gov. Joe Manchin. Perry served as chair of Marshall’s political science department from 1975 to 1994. On April 30, 2010, when he entered the classroom for his final lecture, Perry found a room overflowing with colleagues, friends and former students. Moved by their presence, Perry paused — but only for a moment — and then carried on with his lecture.

Nationally, Perry was a known expert on constitutional democracy. He was invited to the White House during President Carter’s administration to participate in a conference for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), a series of conferences with corresponding treaties regarding the use of nuclear weapons in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The SALT II treaty was a precursor to the New START treaty currently making headlines for its role in the U.S.-Russia tensions.

The legacy of Perry’s prolific career lives on at the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, established in 2011. The center offers pre-law advising, an academic minor in constitutional democracy and the Amicus Curiae Lecture Series on Constitutional Democracy. At the center, students take courses that Perry himself created, under the tutelage of professors willing to embrace what Perry once called “a professor’s greatest pressure — bringing to life rather than putting to sleep the mind of the student.”

For Proctor, her former professor’s influence goes beyond the name of the center she directs.

“He influenced my life. He provided the intellectual challenges that prepared me for law school and a legal career,” she said in The Parthenon . “He also was kind-hearted, an advocate for what was right, not afraid to call out prejudice in all forms and to stand up for people marginalized by society. I and so many others are better for having him as part of our lives.”

Robert Ingersoll, a 19th-century orator and lawyer who famously delivered the funeral eulogy for Walt Whitman in 1892, gave a eulogy at his brother Ebon Ingersoll’s graveside in 1879 which Perry had always found touching. Quoted near the end of Perry’s obituary, it might as well have been written about Perry himself: “This brave and tender man in every storm of life was oak and rock; but in the sunshine he was vine and flower. … He added to the sum of human joy; and were every one to whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave, he would sleep [tonight] beneath a wilderness of flowers.”

To read Perry’s obituary in full, visit www.hensonandkitchen.com/obituaries/Simon-Perry-2/. Donations in Perry’s memory may be made to the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy at www.marshall.edu/spc.