The ultimate mensch

We lost a good one last week. Jim Freedman. Cancer.

He was, to the world, James O. Freedman, former president of Dartmouth, former president of the University of Iowa, former dean of Penn Law School, former president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former influential member of the American Jewish community, former influential defender of liberal arts education.

All true, but what he really was was the ultimate mensch.

People die of cancer every day. Each has a powerful story that has nothing to do with station in life. A janitor can leave a bigger hole than a CEO. Jim left one the size of Fenway defined not by achievement but a generosity of spirit I've never encountered before. Don't take my word for it. Ask anyone who knew the guy.

Some suffer more than Jim did since his struggle began twelve years ago but I don't know any. He would spend ten, twelve days a month in the hospital receiving chemotherapy, month after month. Like others, he did his best to deny the specter of his demise moving inexorably toward him. Like others, he ran smack dab into fear and sadness on his road to release.

I first him met over a decade ago, when I covered education for a newsmagazine and he ran Dartmouth. It was in Hanover, ultima Thule of Ivy League campuses, and I was reporting a story on the scandalously small amount of time tenured professors at research universities in this country spent in the classroom.

These poobahs were routinely AWOL from inquiring young minds to write books and attend conferences in places like Berlin and Bellagio. They drove the cost of education through the roof and left the teaching to assistants for whom English was often a second language.

Why shouldn't they work as hard as the rest of us, I would ask, nostrils flaring. I'd get ludicrous answers from university spokesfolks who, straight-faced, maintained these mandarins were actually engaged in deep thinking while engaging in activities like shaving. (I too ponder big questions while shaving: khaki or corduroy?)

Anyway, I confronted this gentle man with an owlish presence and threw the bomb at him. He immediately replied, ''Of course they don't work as hard as the rest of us." I was floored.

Jim then went on to make a cogent case that it is reasonable for our best thinkers -- at the time he was guessing maybe 8,000 people out of a population of 250 million -- to be paid to do what they do best: think. What a refreshing answer. You could embrace it, carp about it, or flat-out disagree, but what he presented was a serious argument that did not insult your intelligence. I've adored Jim Freedman ever since.

That he was a bibliophile is well known. That he was also a hopeless news junkie less so. Jim began as a five-minute phone call and ended as an hour joyride through the rich pastures of Anna Nicole Smith and the Transcendentalists, Bill O'Reilly and Amos Oz. When I'd visit him in the hospital he'd always need a fix of Maureen Dowd and Tom DeLay.

He loved newspapers and would bleed over cutbacks. He devoured foreign news and mourned the death of any overseas bureau. He prized local stories too and gave me dandy column ideas I used, like how the Boston Public Library gets its books.

I told him about Jim Romenesko's addictive media blog that journalists check upwards of nine times a day. (Any reporter who denies this is a plant from Dick Cheney's office.) It was like alerting Elizabeth Taylor to the existence of chocolate.

Like all wise people, he was a brilliant listener -- ''perhaps the best listener," says his good friend of more than three decades, Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian. Like all sophisticated people, his hallmark was restraint.

After listening once to an impassioned defense of absolute conviction, I heard him cite, every so lightly, the hall-of-fame line of the great jurist Learned Hand: ''The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right."

His Supreme Court hero was Thurgood Marshall, for whom he clerked. This tells you all you need to know about his sense of the underdog. He grew up a Jew in gentile New Hampshire, and his years at Dartmouth were roiled by confrontations with the right-wing undergraduate paper, The Dartmouth Review, that once portrayed him in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache. Jim defended its right to do so and then came out swinging.

His humor was ironic -- grounded, says Gregorian ''when the illogical happens to logical people." He loved to puncture pomposity and noted with amusement that Thomas Jefferson banned all honorary degrees when he founded the University of Virginia, only to cop three himself from Harvard, Yale, and Brown.

Jim died last Tuesday. He took with him a brand of kindness alien to most of us. At the end, trapped in a hospital bed, one eye gone and his speech slurred, he would deflect your question about him with one about you and your loved ones. He cared deeply about the answer. How odd.

Sam Allis's e-mail address is: allis@globe.com.