From: President Philip J. Hanlon '77 <president'[email protected]>

Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2020 5:09 PM

Subject: Tragic loss of a Dartmouth community member

To the Dartmouth community,

It is with a heavy heart that I write to inform you of the death of Terry Osborne, a senior lecturer in the Environmental Studies Program and the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Terry leaves behind his wife, Mary Kay "MK" Beach '76; his sons, Carry and Jacob Osborne; and stepchildren Max and Hillary Beach '09.

Terry died on Sept. 7 at the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative & Hospice Care in Lebanon after a bravely-fought year-long illness.

A member of the Dartmouth community since 1986, Terry was a writer as well as a teacher. His work connected literature, composition, the natural world, and American constructions of identity. He developed what he called an ecological memoir, a story that uses place or the environment as an active part of memoir writing.

In 2017, when Terry received the Dean of the Faculty Teaching Award, he mused on his inspirations--his students, colleagues, and the beauty of the Upper Valley. "I've come to believe that the way humans are taught to perceive the environment determines how we treat it," he said at the time. "I've marveled at the way the Upper Valley community and environment have affected the students--complicating their thinking and writing, their video compositions, their sense of themselves."

Terry had long been engaged in community-driven experiential learning. This provided a dimension to his classes that would not have been part of in a traditional lecture course. In his class "COVER Stories," students studied three complex, overlapping ideas--the nonhuman environment, the human community, and story telling--and then applied them to a local nonprofit organization, COVER Home Repair. His "Ecopsychology" course examined both the role our psyches play in affecting the health of the planet, and the effect the degradation of the natural world has on our psyches.

Terry received his undergraduate degree, cum laude, from Princeton and earned a master's degree with honors in English and American literature from the University of Chicago. He wrote articles, essays, and book reviews and edited the late Dartmouth professor Noel Perrin's 2006 book, "Best Person Rural." He was the author of "Sightlines: A View of a Valley Through the Voice of Depression," published in 2001.

Terry served Dartmouth well and was very active outside the classroom as well as inside, volunteering for committees and boards, including the Dartmouth Organic Farm, co-founding a Wednesday morning Mindfulness Group for members of the Dartmouth community, and serving as adviser to the Student Mindfulness Group. He was a founder of and adviser to the Amarna Undergraduate Society and had worked on the drafting team that created a sustainability minor in the Environmental Studies Program. Terry received the 2012 Lorax Dartmouth Sustainability Award for "Enriching the Dialogue," and was presented with the game ball at a Dartmouth football halftime awards ceremony for his contribution to community-based learning.

He was a popular teacher who had been chosen by the Class of 2017 as one of three speakers at the "Last Lecture" series gathering in Collis, a farewell talk to graduating seniors. Terry achieved a bucket list wish to walk on the Greenland ice sheet when he and MK traveled on the Dartmouth Alumni trip to Greenland and the Arctic in 2018.

Our thoughts are with Terry's family, friends, and colleagues at this very sad time. He will be greatly missed.

Sincerely,Philip J. Hanlon '77

President