His portrait gave me chills every time I walked past it—happy chills, the kind of goosebumps that signal the presence of greatness. Particularly his transparent blue eyes captivated me, animated with a luminosity lacking in the other portraits along that corridor. From a distance, those eyes seemed like mini-flashlights beckoning the way to his delightful image.

More than once when feeling discouraged, tired, or puzzled, I would go to the hallway in the front corridor of the Meadows School of the Arts where the line of former deans’ portraits hung. Moving backwards through the decanal heritage of the school, I would come to the luminous image of Paul van Katwijk seated at a piano. There I would stop and begin a most pleasant mental conversation with a man I never met.

I did meet some of his students who, when I arrived at Southern Methodist University in 1985 as a music history professor, were still active and influential in the Dallas music scene. These senior ladies oversaw a music club in van Katwijk’s name and delighted in dispensing scholarships to young pianists.

Born in Rotterdam, and trained in The Hague, Berlin, and Vienna, Paul van Katwijk (1885-1974) was one of thousands of artists and intellectuals who left Europe for America in the early 20th century, often for reasons too drastic to contemplate. Sometimes, though, these people simply wanted to plant their talents in a new world and see what might happen. Either way, without the influx of such talent and expertise, substantial numbers of our most meritorious educational, artistic, social, research, and corporate institutions would not exist today.

The career of Paul van Katwijk in Dallas reads as a blueprint for so many who pursued this kind of destiny. Arriving in America in 1912, he taught and conducted in Missouri and Chicago. Then he came to Texas in 1918 where he served as dean of the Meadows School from 1919 to 1949 (an unimaginable stretch in today’s contentious academic climate). After he retired in 1955, he continued to teach piano privately. Along the way, he continued to compose, perform, and also served for three years as director of the Dallas Municipal Opera (forerunner of today’s stellar company The Dallas Opera). He also spent eleven years as the unsalaried (!) conductor of the fledgling Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The only descriptor for this profile of accomplishment is “legacy.”

But ah, legacy is a dirty word these days. At the very least, it is discountable by those who think that everything valuable in the world is approximately 75 minutes old and got here by itself. If you don’t have your head stuffed in a sandbox, you know exactly what I mean.

But back to this lovely portrait (I am not able to show you a photo of it, so please use your imagination). How I enjoyed my musings before van Katwijk’s cheerful face. What was it like to be a Dutchman schooled in the most cultured cities of Europe, only to find himself in the wild lands of Texas when Texas was still pioneer country? The freshness of his smile gave me the answer.

After the Meadows School of the Arts received the spectacular gift of a Shakespearean thrust stage from the inimitable actress Greer Garson, the upper floor of the theater addition was made into handsome, new administrative offices. I admit they were probably needed, although removing deans, registrars, and operational staff from the daily view of students is a bad decision, I think.

The sad thing was this: the decanal portraits, previously part of every visitor’s experience upon entering the cavernous building, moved upstairs into these sleek new offices. They no longer silently witnessed the students’ daily lives.

Back then, none of these portraits had a tinge of “political incorrectness,” but rather they were part of the university stage set—wordless testaments of the school’s heritage. I cannot but wonder whether they still are hanging on those third-floor walls. Until the 1990s, all of those deans were men—Caucasian men. That fact alone, blared from the trumpet of today’s unhinged culture, signals these men need to be eliminated.

If only those recklessly slashing  our cultural history would stop for five minutes to consider the obstacles, prejudices, and discrimination (ever heard of Polish jokes?) so many of these “objectionable figures” had to overcome to receive their training, emigrate from troubled lands, survive dangerous journeys and hardships! Are those behind the slash-and-burn ideology able to appreciate what a man like van Katwijk did to recruit faculty and students to this new Dallas university, luring them away from established East-Coast schools? Could they match the serious money he cajoled to build concert halls, museum space, art and dance studios, and practice rooms? Such fundraising in a land where cattle outnumbered people was not an easy bet.

Yet facts have rarely mattered to those bent on cultural destruction. I read recently a hideous, almost funny, quote from an angered collegiate woman who said that all of these “white men” in history were boring and looked alike. If only I could snap my fingers and dare her to match a single day of Paul van Katwjck’s life, from his childhood shaped by demanding master teachers to his early career in Europe where he taught at the National Conservatory in Helsinki, sharing faculty status with Jean Sibelius (who called him “a most remarkable pianist”). Let this whining woman cross the ocean with him in 1912 (plenty of historic photos show what that harrowing voyage was like). Shadow him through his never-ceasing days of practice for performances, his appointment as a piano professor first in Columbia, Missouri (even that was a bit of wild terrain then), followed by professorships in Chicago, in Iowa (conducting also the Des Moines Symphony), and finally his arrival to the cowboy world of Dallas and the demanding life as dean of the visionary Meadows School of the Arts. Van Katwijk could probably count on one hand the number of “boring” days in his life. She, on the other hand, would likely be left in the dust.

Facts are inconvenient, are they not, especially when anger directs so many people’s responses today. Probably for me, it’s best to close my eyes and hope that those crystal blue eyes of Paul van Katwijk still emanate from the frame of that portrait. I hope, too, that at least a few students are able to visit with the portrait on a regular basis and receive its message. For if they do, they will be strengthened as they prepare to follow their own destinies.