10 | College of Arts and Sciences Newsletter Obituaries September 25, 1934 - November 2, 2025 On Nov. 2, longtime English faculty member David L. Newquist passed away at the age of 91. His funeral was a private family affair, so there was probably little opportunity for the department to say its farewells in any public way. But let me take a moment to say a short farewell of my own: Dr. Newquist taught at NSU for 20 years, from 1979 to 1999 and he was one of the first people in the department that I met when I arrived on campus as a fresh-faced assistant professor in the fall semester of 1985. I found him a little aloof at that first meeting as he and Dennis Scott showed me around and took me to lunch, but I later decided he was something of an introvert—though he was never shy about letting you know what he thought of something, especially if it was something political. He was a staunch Democrat in the old sense of labor-friendly in his politics and he was President of the Faculty Union at the local level and later the state level. Perhaps as a consequence, he wasn’t always on the most cordial terms with administrators. I remember a department meeting in my early days that very nearly ended in fisticuffs. Which explains why I became Department Chair as an untenured Assistant Professor after just three years at NSU—I was the only person in the department that nobody hated. Or so I thought. Returning from a summer NEH Institute in fall of 1988 to spend my first day in the chair’s office, I checked my campus mailbox to find a three-page letter from Dr. Newquist listing a number of significant sins I had committed in my new role as administrator. And this before I had even set foot in my office my first day. WALTER JOSEPH KING, PH.D. DR. DAVID L. NEWQUIST I didn’t go to my office at that point. I went to his. I sat down and talked to him and he opened up to me about his concerns. When I left his office, we understood each other. From that point on, I never had a problem with Dave and I don’t think he had any with me. I was his department chair for six years, his dean his last four years before retirement and he was one of the most reliable and collegial of my English department colleagues. One of my most vivid memories of him was listening to a presentation he made at a sponsored activity of Sigma Tau Delta (the English Honor Society) demonstrating how the lyrics of the familiar spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” could be seen as code for the Underground Railroad. It may be that the pinnacle of his time at NSU was his co-directing a seminar for high school teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1994, focused on “The Literature of the Plains Indians,” in which our traveling classroom went to the Black Hills, the Little Bighorn battlefield and selected reservations and brought in several big-name scholars in the field and poets as well. Participants appreciated David’s knowledge and encouragement in what was probably his favorite field. My wife, Stacey, was a student of Dave’s, taking four or five classes from him over her five years earning a double major in English and Elementary Education at Northern in the late ’80s and early ’90s. She speaks quite highly of him to this day. She loved to listen to his thoughts on the reading of the day and appreciated so much his sincere and energetic response to her papers as she explored the ideas that lit up her mind in the class. As a teacher herself, she’s come to value most that one semester when she needed another English class, he agreed to oversee an independent study for her on “Folklore in Literature.” When other English majors heard about it, they asked to join, until there were five students in the “independent study.” He didn’t get paid for all the extra work he did in this impromptu seminar and he still approached it with his typical enthusiasm and academic generosity. She still recalls it as one of her favorite classes of her undergraduate years. So farewell David, my friend. It’s been some time since your retirement, but you’re not forgotten and you live on in our memories. Here’s hoping that chariot came to carry you home. January 10, 1943 — January 16, 2026 Walter Joseph King, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at Northern State University, died on January 16, 2026, at his home in Des Moines, Iowa. He was 83. Born in Leominster, Massachusetts and raised in Shirley, Massachusetts, Dr. King pursued a life shaped by sustained intellectual commitment and a deep respect for learning. He completed his undergraduate and graduate education in history at the University of Michigan, earning his BA, MA and PhD and went on to a long career devoted to teaching, scholarship and academic service.
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