In Review

Paul Burgett ’68E, ’76E (PhD) arrived in Rochester in 1964, a first-year violinist at the Eastman School of Music. It was a “watershed moment” in his life, he told Rochester Review in 2015. “I couldn’t think of anything I would rather do than be in this environment.”

When Burgett died in August, after a brief illness, at age 72, his loss reverberated through the Rochester community. For more than 50 years, he dedicated himself to “this environment”—first Eastman, then the University, and always, the city that enveloped them. “No person in the worldwide University of Rochester community is more beloved than Paul Burgett,” President Richard Feldman wrote in tribute.

Whatever titles Burgett accrued—and there were many, from Eastman student body president to faculty member in the Department of Music, dean of students at Eastman, University dean of students, and vice president, general secretary, and senior advisor to the president—the roles dearest to him were musician and teacher. Known fondly to thousands of students and alumni as “Dean B,” Burgett could inspire crowds—most famously, with his “Fiery Furnace” speech to incoming students—and listen, with an almost magical attentiveness and warmth, to the students he advised and to anyone, whether colleague, alumnus, or chance acquaintance, whose path he crossed.

“He was a larger-than-life figure with a gregarious and outgoing personality who simultaneously was among the most thoughtful and sensitive individuals in any group when thinking about the needs of others,” Jamal Rossi ’87E (DMA), the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music, said in remembrance.

To all that he did, Burgett brought a sensibility shaped by the racism he experienced as a child in segregated St. Louis, Missouri, and by the love with which his family—his parents, his siblings, and later, his beloved life partner, Catherine Valentine, a professor emerita at Nazareth College—held him aloft. In response to his early encounters with prejudice, Burgett developed what he described as a “social and cultural fluency”—an empathetic ability to connect with other people and a keen awareness of the socially constructed boundaries that often hold people apart. He devoted his career to cultivating such fluency in others, and he brought to his work indefatigable energy and infectious delight. More privately, says Valentine, he also struggled to be hopeful in the face of the world’s capacity for injustice.

He poured his optimism into his work with students. “Students are my most favorite people in the world,” Burgett told Rochester Review in the 2015 profile. “My idea of the closest thing to great potential and to efforts at human perfection, for me that’s to be found in students.” As dean, first at Eastman and then on the River Campus, he bettered programs and facilities designed to support them—planning Eastman’s Student Living Center and improving programs at Wilson Commons, University Health Service, the University Counseling Center, Residential Life, and other areas under his guidance. All the while, he reminded those who worked with him that their most essential task was gaining admittance to the “backstage” of students’ lives, where undergraduates revealed their true anxieties, fears, and hopes.

In the “Fiery Furnace” speech that Burgett gave every year—and had been scheduled to give to the Class of 2022 this fall—he led students in a chorus: “Passion and ability drive ambition.” With those words, he urged them to find what mattered most to them and make it their life’s work. He always showed them the way. Burgett created and joyously taught two of Rochester’s most popular classes—History of Jazz and Music of Black Americans, courses he developed out of his own doctoral research. He threw himself into community service, working with such groups as the Urban League, the Rochester Arts and Cultural Council, and the United Way of Rochester. With Feldman, he cochaired the President’s Commission on Race and Diversity in 2015, recommending ways to increase diversity among students, faculty, and staff and to create a campus community that values diversity in all its forms. And for more than 20 years, Burgett championed the Gateways Music Festival, a celebration of professional classical musicians of African descent. In 2017, he coordinated a formal partnership between the rapidly growing festival and Eastman, and at the time of his death, chaired the board of directors that he had made national in scope.

In 2014, the University announced that its new intercultural center would be known as the Paul J. Burgett Intercultural Center, named in honor of Burgett’s 50th year at the University. The center promotes cultural awareness and engagement, educates on issues of identity, culture, and diversity, and provides a place and opportunities for people to come together. At the dedication ceremony, Burgett observed, with emotion, that the center’s home on the third floor of the Frederick Douglass Building is the place his sister, physician Lettie Burgett ’71, once occupied as a member of the Black Students Union, when in 1969 students staged a protest for improved opportunities for black students, staff, and community members. “The creation of the University of Rochester’s intercultural center is a dream of my heart’s desire,” Burgett told those assembled.

“His warmth, his light, and his laughter made all who were graced with his presence feel like they were part of something better,” center director Jessica Guzmán-Rea wrote at the time of his death.

During Meliora Weekend, when Burgett would have marked his 50th reunion, the University posthumously awarded him the Frederick Douglass Medal, a recognition of scholarship and public engagement that honors Douglass’s legacy.

“Where some lectured to crowds, he spoke to individuals; where some saw disagreement, he looked for common ground; and where many heard cacophony, he listened for music and harmony,” Feldman said in presenting the award.

“Taking his place in the tradition of pioneering leaders Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, he challenged us to hold ourselves to a standard that will make Rochester a better place and each of us a better person.”