A Tribute to Andrew W. McThenia, Jr.

A Tribute to Andrew W. McThenia, Jr. This Tribute gives special thanks for the heart and mind of Andrew Wolfe McThenia, Jr., better known as Uncas, who after almost thirty-four years at Washington and Lee taught his last class on December 5, 2000. That morning, the rest of us on the faculty donned the loudest, most outlandish neckties we could find (although few could actually rival Uncas's own) and converged on Classroom E for the final ten minutes of Contracts. We wanted to surprise him, laugh with him, even serenade him, but more than anything show some true if imperfect sign of love for this remarkable, original friend, this man of many colors. Like the figure celebrated in the First Psalm, Uncas is "a tree/ planted by streams of water,/that yields its fruit in its season,land its leaf does not wither."1 Few who spent time in Tucker or Lewis Halls have left untouched by the humor and canniness of his understanding, the attentive tilt of his head, his fidelity to conversation when words seem necessary or to silence when keeping still can meet a different need. I think especially of his willingness to be a colleague - to leave manuscripts stuffed in the mailboxes of junior professors with scrawled requests for comments, or to pass along newly discovered books and talk about them at the end ofa day on a walk across the footbridge. And I think of his capacity to transform a classroom with the revelation of sheer fact. His seminar, "Lawyering for Social Change," a study of the search for justice in the coalfields, profoundly engaged the students, some of whom became the nucleus of the school's related clinical program. Most importantly, as the following essays so eloquently testify, this is a man who has challenged his time and place. To the minimalism and "pragmatism" of an age, he has posed large, unapologetic questions that ask lawyers and judges to re-examine the story they think they are living.2 Seeing a legal structure bent on nothing so much as separating winners from losers, he has responded with the language of "reconciliation" and "resurrection."3 Participating in civil resistance, he has kept a steady eye on the fact "that in the context of salvation we are exactly like our neighbors, lost and in need."4 Read any of his work and you will be forced to reassess the honesty of your own. As he wrote, "The most radical form of social criticism of the world as we know it is reality."5 Yet somehow his honesty about the world has not precluded hope, a flinty, hard-won "second sight, "that comes with discovery and practice of "vocation."6 Recall his account of William Stringfellow 's chosen role: to be "a companion with others along the way, to carry the message that you are not alone, ' and to give them courage to live humanly amid the fallen powers."7 Stringfellow, perhaps; McThenia, definitely. Uncas has been the surest of companions, has shouldered the same message, and has helped many around him tofind the meaning of their own beliefs and the nature of their own vocations, as well as unsuspected reserves of resolve and joy. As he completes his time at W&L, we ponder the poetry and belief of this singular man. "And its leaf does not wither." - Brian C. Murchison Professor of Law Thomas L. Shaffer* Uncas picked up a five-letter name when he was a boarding school student in Orange, Virginia. By now, it is the way his friends and colleagues, his students and his clients, his wife and his children and his neighbors, identify him. It works throughout the United States and in Canada. I would not be surprised to see it work in, say, the offices of the European Union in Salzburg or in the former Soviet Union. (It occurs to me that this universal name for Andrew W. McThenia, Jr., a name his boarding-school classmates borrowed from James Fenimore Cooper, shares brevity with such two-syllable, five-letter names as Moses and Jesus. The comparison has some promise, but I desist in order not to embarrass my retiring friend. …