Memory Lane

Harriet Lane arrived at Boston University in 1953 as a freshman English major who was captivated by literature. Today she’s still at BU, still captivated by literature, and still in the English department.

That’s consistency.

Last month, Lane (DGE’55, CAS’57, GRS’61) celebrated her 50th anniversary as a BU employee. After all those years as the administrator for the English department, all those years in the same office, she says she can’t think of a better way to have passed her working life than surrounded by writers, scholars, and best of all, fellow readers who share her passion.

She’s known Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Saul Bellow, and Robert Pinsky. She’s outlasted 10 department chairs. She’s got a nightstand full of books written by people she’s honored to call friends and colleagues. As she puts it, “I’m a happy camper.”

As is so often the case, Lane’s title conveys very little of what she actually does for the department and the University. Capturing that takes bigger, broader words: facilitator, connector, helper, friend, ambassador. Officially, she takes care of the graduate program and its students, helping them structure their course work and exams, guiding their progress through to their degrees, arranging their teaching fellowships, and helping them connect with faculty.

Her working career at BU began in 1958, when she was pursuing a master’s degree in the English department on a full scholarship that involved “a little work in the office,” she says. The department’s sole staff person was resigning, and when the chairman asked Lane if she’d be willing to take on the job, “I thought, well, while I finish up my master’s, why not? And I did finish up my master’s, but by then I was hooked.”

The department’s brownstone at 236 Bay State Road then housed at least three other departments. “It took us 20 years to gradually inherit the entire building,” she says, “and of course, when the other departments moved out, we also inherited the old furniture, which is why we’re a bit shabby. On the other hand, this is the right size for us, and if they put us anywhere else, we might have to split up. We’re happily putting up with the vagaries of a 90-year-old building for the sake of the community it gives us.”

BU was “mostly a commuting school” early in Lane’s career, she says. “UMass-Boston didn’t exist, and Boston University was the city school. People keep thinking BU was an awful lot smaller back then. We’ve never been small. What has changed is the fact that we went from being a city and regional institution to being a national and international institution.”

And as that transformation took place, Lane was a steady presence, welcoming generations of students and professors. Why did she stay? “I always wanted very much to work in the field of English,” she says. “It’s my love; it’s my avocation. I came from a family of teachers, but for whatever reason I never had a great urge to teach. But I wanted to be involved in the study and teaching of literature.” And it helped that she met her husband here, too, when they were both graduate students. “My husband and I had five BU degrees between us. I have a B.A. and an M.A., and he had a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D.” George Lane died a year ago; he had taught in the English department at Lasell College in Newton for 30 years.

She’s never regretted her decision to plant roots in the English department. “This is just an awfully nice place to work,” says Lane. “Obviously these are enormously intelligent people; they’re also charming and collegial, and they talk awfully well, which is a joy. So I’ve never had a feeling of, ‘I want to go someplace else and find something different to do.’ Far from it.”

Bari Walsh can be reached at bawalsh@bu.edu.