La Salle University Honors a Great Teacher for His Research: James Butler Receives the School’s Distinguished Scholar Award

When La Salle University English professor James Butler was a graduate student, he worried that he would run out of ideas for research. “I asked a professor, ‘How do you think of things to write about?’” he said. “The professor put back his head and laughed. ‘You’re not going to have to worry about that much.’”

For the past 30 years, Butler has been researching, writing and editing prolifically, most notably on English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. That’s just a few years less than he’s been teaching at La Salle. Butler’s Wordsworth scholarship, his research on local history and other accomplishments led La Salle to honor him with its Distinguished Scholar Award this year.

After earning his graduate degrees at Cornell University, Butler returned to his alma mater in 1971 because he wanted to teach, and, like its namesake, La Salle emphasizes teaching over research.

He noted the seeming contradiction in his award acceptance speech: “What in the name of St. John Baptist de La Salle could the university be thinking in giving an award for research, that legendary antithesis of teaching?” he said.

His own career provides the answer.

“Teaching and research intersect in learning,” he said. “They are not separate activities.”

For instance, he noted, “one of the texts I developed for the Cornell Wordsworth Series is now in The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” Butler has been one of the series’ supervisory editors since 1980; the 21st and final volume in the series is due out this spring.

Butler, who is director of Undergraduate Student Research, also puts his observation into action by encouraging his students to get involved in research - either his or their own.

“Some of the students who have worked with me in my research on Philadelphia writer Owen Wister and local history have had their papers published,” he said. “And besides all these good educational reasons, it’s fun.”

He conveys that sense of fun in the local history course he teaches at La Salle. “A lot of students aren’t interested in history, but if I say to them, ‘The dorm you live in is on the site where General Howe quartered his troops in the Battle of Germantown,’ they get excited and say, ‘My dorm room?’ It’s how people get excited and start researching history,” he said.

History is Butler’s passion. Besides teaching it, the Glenside resident is a member of the Old York Road Historical Society and maintains a Web site devoted to the history of the La Salle campus area. But literature is his profession, and now that the Wordsworth project is winding down, he is turning his attention to Owen Wister.

Wister, a Philadelphia patrician is best known for The Virginian, the first Western novel ever written. Butler added to the knowledge of Wister when he found the manuscript of Romney, his unfinished novel about late-19th-century Philadelphia society, in the Library of Congress. The manuscript, which Butler edited, was published in 2001 as Romney and Other New Works About Philadelphia.

What Butler found fascinating about Wister’s novel was that it foreshadowed later critiques of Philadelphia society. “He traces Philadelphia’s inferiority complex,” he said. “Long before Digby Baltzell”—the author of Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia—“he had the same thesis about Philadelphia’s elite. Wister’s Philadelphia is also the ‘corrupt and contented’ Philadelphia of Lincoln Steffens.”

Butler is currently at work on an edition of Wister’s poetry, and as with past projects, La Salle students will be doing the research along with him. “In too many institutions, research has become like the imperious conductor of the orchestra,” he said in his award acceptance speech. “At La Salle, research is increasingly a faculty-student ensemble.”