One Last 'Dean's List'

By Sean Smith | Chronicle Editor

The notes would appear regularly on Mary Lou Connelly’s desk during the course of a year, each one containing the name of a book and its author, and a request to put the note “in the files for the Dean’s List Committee.” Gradually, the notes would accumulate over weeks and months in the folder where Connelly put them, until finally, their author – Connelly’s boss – decided it was time to make use of them. 

Over three decades, the product of those notes became a much-loved Boston College annual tradition: The Dean’s List of Recommended Reading, compiled by William B. Neenan, SJ, who served the University for 32 years in major administrative positions, including as academic vice president, before his death last summer.

Like its creator, the Dean’s List had a straightforwardly humble ethos: “These aren’t the Great Books,” he said in a 2000 interview, “but an answer to the question, ‘Neenan, have you read any good books lately?’”

Fr. Neenan’s passing saddened the BC community, but Dean’s List aficionados – especially Connelly, who served as Fr. Neenan’s secretary for 30 years before retiring in 2011 – can take some solace in the fact that he managed to complete his 2014 entry.

“One important thing about the Dean’s List is that so many of the books on it are grounded in the choice of morals,” says Connelly. “There is a secret lesson in most all of them – nothing that will hit you over the head, but once you get it, you are left very satisfied. And that was Fr. Neenan’s style, after all.”

The 27 titles on each year’s list included fiction and non-fiction works, some of them well-known historical, literary or popular titles (The Great Gatsby; Mary, Queen of Scots; Lord of the Flies; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; The Greatest Generation), others somewhat more obscure. Boston College-affiliated authors also made regular appearances on the list, which was first published in Boston College Biweekly (the Chronicle’s predecessor) in September of 1983. 

“I loved the Dean’s List,” says Professor of English Elizabeth Graver. “We shared many favorite authors, among them James Agee, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stegner, Anne Fadiman, Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson. Bill quietly included my own novels [Unravelling, The Honey Thief and The End of the Point] a number of times, never telling me ahead of time.  What company to be in!  The books he was drawn to were often at once poetic and probing, interested in inner life and the human condition, alert to pain but also beauty.   

“Bill and I were casual friends, but the list was something else: a glimpse into what mattered most to him. A gift.”

Like many readers of the Dean’s List, College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean Clare Dunsford – who was “surprised, delighted and honored” when her memoir Spelling Love with an X appeared on the list – found Fr. Neenan’s recommendations an outstanding resource.  

“One book I would never have known of or read without seeing it on the list was Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Several years ago I got the flu, a really bad case that put me out of work for 10 days or so. As I began to recover but was still weak, I started to read that book and was enchanted. It took me from my sickbed to medieval Norway in an almost physical way. I went on to read the whole trilogy. I can’t remember if I ever told him, but I think I did.”

Going on anecdotal evidence alone, Kristin Lavransdatter may have made the biggest impression on Dean’s List followers; Connelly, for one, says it was among her favorite selections from the list. O’Neill Library Course Reserves Manager Cindy Jones had purchased the trilogy before she knew Fr. Neenan, but decided to give the books away after he told her that he preferred the more recent translation.

“Since Fr. Neenan’s death, I have printed out the cumulative Dean’s List, and in his honor I plan to read everything that’s on it,” says Jones. “When I read Kristin Lavransdatter – the better translation – I will be thinking of him all the way through.” 

As with most any long-enduring institution, the Dean’s List has its own folklore and legends. First, there is the unchanging number of exactly 27 books each year – “the mystical three-cubed,” he explained in a 2000 Chronicle interview. Also, Fr. Neenan would note only new arrivals to the Dean’s List, never the books that had been removed: “I once asked him whom he had dropped this year,” recalls Professor of Economics Joseph Quinn, “and he said, ‘I can’t say. Reputations would be ruined and lawsuits might follow.’”

And then there is the matter of the aforementioned “Dean’s List Committee.” It was hardly a secret that the committee had a membership of one. Yet Fr. Neenan delighted in perpetuating the myth of its existence; he would typically receive suggestions for additions by promising that he would “pass it on to the Committee.”

“If he knew I had a new book coming out, he’d tell me – with that Neenan twinkle in his eye – that the ‘Committee’ intended to take it under very serious consideration for inclusion on the list,” says Professor of English Suzanne Matson, whose novels The Hunger Moon, The Tree-Sitter and A Trick of Nature made the list. “Afterward, when I thanked him, he’d smile broadly and assure me that he ‘nothing to do with it; it was all the Committee.’”

Lacking in this year’s Dean’s List, unfortunately, is the preamble Fr. Neenan penned to introduce new titles and, as was often his wont, to offer insights on reading, writing and the state of human affairs – all delivered with quintessentially Neenanesque touches of humor and concern – as well as ironic, self-deprecating references to his creation.  

“The Dean’s List is not copyrighted,” he wrote in the 1998 edition. “Please feel free to refer to it without attribution, post it on the refrigerator or simply employ it for some more pedestrian purpose.”

A cumulative list of Dean’s List selections is available at http://bit.ly/YdzV3F. Some individual Dean’s List editions, with introductions, may be found by searching http://www.bc.edu/googlesearch.html.