John McCain died on Saturday, August 25. The world rightly took notice. That same night Harry Clor died. So? Who was he that the Standard should take notice? Like the senator, Clor was suffering from terminal cancer. He was older than McCain, 89, and had been retired from Kenyon College since 1999, where he had taught for 34 years. He was not a war hero or an actor in the world of politics. True, he was a veteran who served in Korea, but as a healer, in a psychiatric MASH unit. He lived and died in a small town, happily married with two children. And in the smaller but still reasonably extensive world of intellectual discourse, he was well known as a constitutional lawyer and defender of the position that society needs moral regulation and should, even if just minimally, legislate to that end. In our day it was a losing cause, as the late Walter Berns granted in his review of Clor’s book on public morality, but Clor made his case with care, generosity, and moderation. The book Harry wrote in retirement, in defense of the virtue of moderation, also made a mark, though, as usual, one smaller than it deserved.

But none of that explains why Harry Clor needs to be remembered by those who did not know him and love him as we at Kenyon did. Simply, he was one of the greatest of teachers in the tradition of real liberal education, a tradition that is so beleaguered that it can reasonably be said to be dying in American universities and even in what are still called liberal arts colleges. That is, Harry Clor is an emblem for the tradition his life exemplified and expressed, for what it offered and what it required of its followers. His death reminds us of why the loss of that tradition would be an enormous tragedy for our whole society, including those parts that have never had the slightest brush with it.