It is with heavy hearts that the Glynn Family Honors community announces the passing of its former Arts and Letters Director, Neil Delaney. He passed away in his sleep on Saturday, the 18th of October at the age of 87.
For twenty-five years, Neil was the north star of the Glynn Family Honors Program. Together, Neil and his co-director, Alex Hahn, a professor of mathematics, served as stewards of the honors program, overseeing the program’s transformation after generous gifts from the Glynn family. The Glynn family’s incredible generosity allowed them to recruit the brightest students and faculty as well as encourage rigorous student-led research. “He had a clear view,” Paul Weithman, professor of philosophy and Neil’s successor as director, recounts, “of what the program could accomplish and did much to set it on its present course.” Through their remarkable partnership and deep commitment to undergraduate education, Neil and Alex made Glynn what it is today.
Born to Irish immigrant parents, Neil grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1967, he earned a PhD in Philosophy from St. Louis University and then joined the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame. His research focused on political philosophy, legal philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy. He published more than fifty academic articles in various journals, as well as writing and editing several scholarly books. He would make South Bend and Notre Dame his home for the next half century.
Neil was deeply devoted to the University of Notre Dame. As Chris Kolda, a professor of physics and former director of the Glynn Honors Program, recalls, he believed that Notre Dame was “capable of living up to her grandest ambitions, and he spent much of his career working to push the University in that direction.” Neil worked tirelessly, encouraging and fundraising for undergraduate research and meaningful student-faculty mentorship. He brought that energy and dynamism to the Department of Philosophy where he served as chair for over a decade, expanding it and recruiting top talent.
Above all Neil was brilliant in the classroom. “Neil was a beloved teacher and mentor to countless students,” Paul Weithman remembers. “He had a wit that was once genial and incisive, and that only he could wield with such affection.” His vision of education was broad, much more than just a commitment to philosophy or even just the humanities. Chris Kolda notes that Neil “earnestly believed that an educated person should know and understand Augustine and Einstein, and that studying one at the exclusion of the other was a recipe for parochialism.” That balance has always been and remains at the very heart of the Glynn community.
Neil’s work in and out of the classroom was recognized by the University time and time again. In 1974 he received the Madden Award for Teaching. In 1983, he received the Emily Schossberger Award and then the President’s Award a year later. He received the Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching and Kaneb Teaching Award in 1987 and 2001, respectively. But far more than awards, the success of Neil’s commitment to teaching can be seen in the many alumni whose lives he impacted and who remember him fondly to this day.
Many of those Glynn alumni will remember meeting Neil for the first time at their first year orientation. Each year, Neil would address the incoming Glynn students, introducing them to the program in this way:
“When you considered your choice of college or university, you had a basic decision to make. Will I go to a wonderful liberal arts college like Williams, Smith, Amherst, Swarthmore, or Bowdoin, with the small classes it has for its students and the personal attention that it gives them, or a major university with its advanced research centers and its powerful scientific laboratories. Congratulations, you have decided wisely! When you chose the Glynn Family Honors Program, you have chosen the very best of both worlds.”
He had a keen eye for talent, Kolda remembers, both the students and faculty he recruited to join the program. “He sold them all on a vision of Notre Dame as a true nexus of intellectual engagement, a place to discover and inhabit the life of the mind while keeping one foot firmly planted in the world.”
The Glynn Family Honors Program and the entire Notre Dame community mourn the loss of Professor Neil Delaney. He is preceded in death by his wife, Helen, and his son, Neil Jr. He is survived by his grandson, Prescott Spenser Delaney. He will be buried in a private ceremony at Notre Dame’s Cedar Grove Cemetery. A memorial Mass, open to the public, will be held at 3:30p.m. Thursday, the 6th of November at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.