It says something that I learned of the death of Nick Xenos, a recently retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, not from an official announcement or an article in the newspaper but from the dozens of phone calls and texts I received, within just a few hours of his death, from his former students and current colleagues. Nick died, in other words, the way he lived, amid a beloved community of the most steadfast friends. That’s rarer in academia than we might think.

I can’t exactly remember when I first met Nick or came into contact with him, though it was more than 20 years ago. I had known his name forever, and always associated it with some sort of elegant and exotic reader of texts. As it turns out, I got the elegant right: Nick was elegant. But I was wrong about the exotic. You could hardly find someone more down to earth. We connected instantly.

Nick had just the right combination of cynicism and belief. He was cynical about academia, he was cynical about politics, but, God, did he love the world. Especially his students. I’ve seldom met someone so utterly committed to and passionate about their students. Over the years, I’ve come to know several of Nick’s students. One became my own student, in fact. Another became my wife. Seldom have I met students so utterly committed to and passionate about their teacher. As a teacher, it’s hard to convey the wonder and awe I feel when I hear men and women, grownups in their 40s and 50s, still rehearsing and rehashing arguments they heard first as undergraduates or graduate students in one of Nick’s classes. That’s a kind of life that lives on, long after death.

Some teachers connect with students because they enjoy the authority and aura of their position in the classroom. Not Nick. He was egalitarian to the core. He had standards. He was fussy. He had high expectations of people, and, as is so often true of people with high expectations, his share of disappointments. But he never lost his sense of shared position, shared humanity, with other people. He connected with peers as easily as he connected with students, with people outside academia as easily with people inside it. And he was especially good at bringing people from the outside to the inside.

He taught for decades at U. Mass., and in that regard, he reminds me of another generation of academics, the generation that taught me. Many of these teachers had gotten their start in the public university system of California, when it was still affordable. This was the postwar generation of teachers, whose greatest achievement was to make the most elite forms of education accessible to the middle class and the working class. These were teachers who cared about diversity and equity and inclusion of a sort that once made the culture proud rather than pissed off. This was the teaching and tradition that Nick inherited and passed on to his students.

It’s hard for me, especially right now, not to see in Nick and his death something much more than the beginning and end of one person who happened to be my friend. It feels like the passing of an entire culture and moment in America. Historicist that he was, Nick might not object to my seeing in his life the larger currents of a society. Lovely cynic that he was, he’d probably scoff at the grandiosity of it all. So that’s what I’ll stay with: the lovely cynic and the serious historicist, the teacher and the friend, my teacher and my friend.