Bill Debbins, professor of philosophy at Cornell for 31 years until his retirement in 1994, died Feb. 24, 2001, of pneumonia at age 73. He spent his retirement years in Mount Vernon and Tokyo, Japan, with his wife, Junko Fujimori.
Debbins was born in Flint, Michigan on March 28, 1927. He did degree work at Central Michigan and at Syracuse, where he earned his PhD. He began teaching at Cornell in 1962. He wrote or edited several books, including Constructive Ethics (1961), Collingwood’s Essays in Philosophy of History (1965), and Aphorisms by Oswald Spengler (1967). Debbins was a faculty leader, introducing the BSS (bachelor of special studies) and BPH (bachelor of philosophy) degrees.
“He looked like an actor wonderfully cast to play a philosophy professor at MGM: Very handsome, with sleepy eyes, wavy hair (first brown, then white), the hint of a smile almost always in evidence,” Dean of the College Dennis Moore said a service for Debbins on March 4. “He smoked a pipe, affected tweed sport coats, carried a Harvard book bag over his shoulder, spoke in a gentle, pea-gravelly voice. He was not much of a joiner, but I was not surprised to see that one of his memberships was in The Association of Mind, for behind those sleepy eyes his mind was always working.
“At once quiet and outspoken, he was idiosyncratic, independent, self-contained, radical, a gadfly dedicated to higher education in every sense of the term.”
Debbins’ colleague, philosophy professor Paul Gray, recalls that “in the 60’s and 70’s, Bill was in his prime. He was a major ‘mover and shaker’ at the college. Indeed, during my first 10 years, he was one of the two or three most active and most powerful members of the faculty.” Gray noted that Debbins was the sole creator of the Bachelor of Special Studies and Bachelor of Philosophy degrees. He was instrumental in creating Cornell’s P.P.E. major combining philosophy, politics, and economics. He was co-creator of and a leader in the Humanities Program and created the Philosophy Department Tutorial Program.
Debbins served in World War II and had a longtime personal and professional interest in Japan. His course in Asian philosophy was an important contribution to the diversity of curriculum and his last official act as a faculty member was to secure funding to launch the teaching of the Japanese language on the Hilltop.
Among tributes sent from alumni, those from three 1980s philosophy majors-Mary Ann Maynard ’82, Ed Munn ’84, and Tamra Toussaint ’86-painted the picture of a man who went out of his way to help students.
“Bill was my teacher in the best sense of the word. As a philosophy professor, he taught me how to think critically. Having taught me to think critically, I believe he was always a little shocked that I disagreed with him on basic philosophical points,” wrote Toussaint. “Bill’s certainty that I was philosophically salvageable led to numerous well-fought, thoroughly enjoyable debates between us, many of which lasted well after Bill’s office hours were over.”
Debbins, always one of the best-dressed Cornell faculty members, was adamant that Toussaint had to have the right clothes to achieve her goal of becoming a corporate lawyer.
“He drove me to Cedar Rapids to help me select a proper suit and pair of shoes. I do not know for sure, but I do not think Bill liked to shop. I cannot say that shopping with Bill was fun, either, but it certainly was targeted,” she recalled. “Bill, as in many other areas of his life, had categorical imperatives even for clothing and no sales assistant was going to talk him out of them. I remember the poor sales assistant trying to find a shoe that Bill envisioned as the moral equivalent of men’s wingtips … Bill would not admit to defeat. We did not leave Cedar Rapids until I had purchased the perfect business suit and the perfect pair of shoes.”
Today, Toussaint says, her colleagues at Kimberly-Clark Corporation are stunned “when they find out that their cosmopolitan counsel grew up in the corn fields of Illinois.”
He did a remarkable thing for Mary Ann Maynard ’82, as well. “He loaned me money, once, years ago. A thousand dollars. I didn’t ask for it. He just wrote me a check,” recalls Maynard. “I was going off to Asia, for the second time. I paid him back, a hundred or two hundred dollars at a time. I deliberately overpaid him between two and three hundred dollars, but he didn’t know this. He didn’t know this because he never kept track. How do you thank someone for that?”
When Maynard returned to Iowa and needed a place to stay, “it just so happened that Bill needed someone to housesit. I’m sure this was partly coincidence, but these coincidences seemed to come easily, even after years of silence, even with our increasingly pronounced personality differences,” she says.
Ed Munn ’84 also remembers professor Debbins as a friend who helped him and his wife, Sue Carstensen ’84, “in all sorts of practical says.”
“While I was teaching at Cornell I lived in Bill’s house, which was a great favor he did me while telling me it was a favor I was doing him,” Munn recalls. “He would spend the morning up in his bedroom reading or preparing a class, wander down, often make some comment comparing himself to the characters in Remembrances of Things Past, have something to eat, and we would start talking.”
More importantly, Debbins inspired Munn’s career choice.
“I am a philosopher today because of Bill,” remembers Munn, who teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina. “Bill was first my teacher, then a mentor, a colleague, friend, and roommate but what I will miss is simply talking to him, something that I had not done lately.”
Debbins had varied hobbies and interests. He was a bicyclist. He was an amateur expert on bears. He loved to think. As his wife said, “He was very good at solving problems: that is, he enjoyed the procedure of solving a problem much more than he cared about solving it.”
Perhaps the characteristic that most defined Debbins was his love of books and reading. “If there was any one constant in Bill’s life, this was it,” notes Gray. “I once asked him, after he retired, if he was ever bored. He said, ‘Paul, you and I will never be bored. We love books. We love reading.’ ”
Toussaint recalled Debbins once telling her that “even in poorer times, his one rule was that there was always enough money to buy books.”
At the end of the service, Debbins’ widow announced that she would open his library to anyone who cared to stop by the house.
Debbins is survived by his wife, Junko Fujimori, son Paul of Iowa City, daughter Katherine of Mount Vernon, grandchildren Kenny and Michael, and sister Ruth Ann of Bay City, Mich. Also present among the circle of people whose lives Debbins touched are Junko’s children, Yasuhito and Sumie, Junko’s nephew, Paul and Katherine’s mother Solvita, and her mother, Mrs. Kay. His ashes will be buried in both Mount Vernon Memorial Cemetery and at Junko’s family cemetery in Japan.
Condolences may be sent to Bill’s widow, Junko Fujimori, 110 Fourth Avenue S., Mount Vernon, Iowa, 52314.