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Professor of English
Forty-three years in one place is a long time for someone captivated by the American spirit of wanderlust. But according to Robert J. Butler, PhD, professor of English, “I’ve always been able to reinvent myself at Canisius and that’s kept me alive as a teacher.”
Butler’s roots are in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, the venerable birthplace of American literature and home to W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name a few.
He also came of age during an intense time in American culture. It was the 1960s and the country was caught up in the anti-war, women’s and civil rights movements. Butler was a young, idealistic graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, who yearned to be part of “the meaningful change” underway. That desire drew him to Selma, AL in summer 1965, shortly after the historic march.
Inspired by the opportunity to help the displaced and disenfranchised, Butler dropped out of graduate school to teach “at a small Jesuit school in Buffalo.” He planned to stay one year to save money and then volunteer in the black belts of Alabama and Mississippi the next summer. He would return to graduate school the following fall.
Things proved serendipitous.
“Canisius was a real turning point in my life. Right from the start there were just so many things I liked about the college,” he says.
Butler liked that Canisius placed a high premium on undergraduate teaching. The college’s commitment to students also appealed to Butler. But most of all, Butler admired Canisius’ gifted English faculty, particularly Charles A. Brady ’33, PhD, Richard J. Thompson ’53, PhD, and Les C. Warren, PhD, “the masters who taught me how and what it meant to be a teacher.”
Butler spent the next eight years mastering the art of teaching at Canisius. And every summer he faithfully shared his art form as a volunteer English instructor for a government-sponsored Upward Bound Program in Tougaloo, MS and Tuscaloosa, AL. Through these experiences, Butler learned that his literary passion lies in African American literature. In the early 1970s, he took a sabbatical from Canisius and returned to Notre Dame to complete his dissertation on the subject and developed an expertise in a field that was “a relatively neglected area of study.”
While Canisius provides Butler the flexibility to pursue challenges outside the classroom, it is the independence afforded him in the classroom that truly satisfies his restlessness within.
The lessons Butler learned in the South are the inspiration behind many of the 30-plus courses he conceived during his tenure at Canisius, including the interdisciplinary honors courses he developed during his 21-year tenure as director of the All-College Honors Program.
Butler retired as director in 2006 but he will go down in the Canisius annals as having “rescued a near-defunct program,” explains History Professor Bruce J. Dierenfield, PhD, director of the All-College Honors Program. He notes that Butler increased the size of the student body for the All-College Honors Program, raised its admissions standards and expanded the program’s opportunities for cultural enrichment.
Today, nearly 300 highly-qualified and highly-motivated students are enrolled in the All-College Honors Program. Hundreds more honors alumni represent Butler’s efforts with the program.
“For Dr. Butler, teaching is a vocation,” says Brian Kantz ’95, an All-College Honors graduate. “He takes a genuine interest in his students and imparts on them an awareness of social responsibility and higher ideals that lasts a lifetime.”
And much like classic American literature, which Walt Whitman said “presents life as a perpetual journey and a never-ending quest for personal development,” Butler’s own story portrays a hero in endless motion and most fittingly concludes - open-ended.