Rest In Peace Andrew Goodwin, Music and Media Scholar and Professor

           This week’s passing of University of San Francisco’s media studies scholar Andrew Goodwin is a tragic loss to both the field he worked in and the USF community. Goodwin was a tenured professor at USF, and had been one of the founders of its Media Studies department. He was a brilliant and respected scholar who had written an influential book on music videos and popular culture (Dancing in the Distraction Factory) and co-edited a popular academic anthology of music essays (On Record). An enthusiastic follower of art and culture, Goodwin’s scholarly interests and personal hobbies were wide-ranging and included film, literature, soccer, philosophy, and psychology. His great passion and academic focus was on music, and he vocally asserted that it was time that canonical record albums be accorded the same degree of respect and intellectual scrutiny as books, plays, and fine art.

            In addition to being a brilliant scholar of the popular arts, Goodwin was also a caring, supportive, and sincere human being who fought hard not to compromise his integrity. In one of the courses I had with him, one of the students was developmentally disabled and Goodwin showed the student patience and respect without being condescending. Goodwin was always more concerned about his students than winning scholarly awards or playing the petty politics of academia. He once engaged in an epic verbal argument with one of the school’s deans for allowing loud, distracting construction work to take place outside of his students’ classes. Professor Goodwin felt that the students at USF were paying enormous sums of tuition and at the very least deserved to not have to struggle to hear their lectures. While many professors in the academic elite reward students for becoming yes men and sycophants, Goodwin always warned his students to never compromise their own personal opinions just to please a boss or professor. For him, honesty was essential for people to work together and do great things. He was very open about his life, including difficulties he had with insomnia and depression.

            While I was fortunate to have a few great professors when I attended USF, Andrew was very much a mentor to me and we kept in touch after I graduated. What I realize now is that Andrew always walked the walk of a generous and earnest person without ever needing to talk the talk and call attention to his integrity. Out of the many things I learned from him this might stay with me the longest: that our actions speak louder than our words.