Memorializing Professor Rick Freeman
April 19, 2024
Memorializing Professor Rick Freeman
By Carey Christie
Last month we lost an important member of our community to Parkinson’s. Since his health began to decline during our recent pandemic, it’s unlikely that any current students will remember Rick Freeman. To those of us who worked with him and learned from him, this is my attempt to sum up a bit of what we’ve lost.
About ten years ago, I was hired by the University of Washington to learn about the widely varied group of humans known as “Honors Program alumni.” One of my earliest opportunities was presented by an alum who was eager to catch up with the Honors community. He and his wife graciously offered to host a regional happy hour for Honors alumni from all majors/decades, etc. who happened to live or work in the Bay Area.
The happy hour was a lovely event, but getting there wasn’t easy for anyone. The Bay Area is a sprawling metropolis where geographic proximity is mocked by bodies of water, spotty public transit, and incessant gridlock. UW alumnus Richard Reiling Freeman (aka “Rick”), who earned his B.S. in physics w/College Honors in 1967, made the arduous journey because, as he explained upon arrival: “There is no part of my educational journey more pivotal than the Honors Program in terms of my later success in life.”
Rick approached that meeting with such candor and enthusiasm that I felt like I must be doing something right. Here was a prime example of someone who was still a died-in-the wool “Honors Husky” more than five decades after graduating. As a former Dean of Physics from Ohio State University, Rick’s enthusiasm for expanding the impact of Honors was informed by his leadership experience at a flagship public university. Rick soon helped galvanize our volunteer advisory board, where he was most active between 2016-2021. During those years, he helped establish an endowed fund for Honors Equity Scholarships and generated lasting program support through the Honors Leadership Fund. He also invited parents to “behind the scenes” conversations with Honors faculty and inspired hundreds of students through his innovative teaching of interdisciplinary seminars on a wide variety of topics.
Team Freeman is also an Honors love story
There were many aspects of Rick’s life and work that were barely mentioned in our conversations over the past ten years. This memorialization is woefully incomplete. One thing that came through clearly at all times was how deeply he loved his family. Over the years, I met regularly with Rick and, when I was extra lucky, with Lynne—his wife of more than 60 years. My favorite memory of them together is at their summer home on the Hood Canal: a place that has been in Rick’s family for multiple generations and which was, on that day, a joyful cacophony of grandkids, siblings, cousins and neighborhood kids. That’s where I took this photo:
Lynne and Rick entered the University of Washington already in love. They were both Honors students at the UW in the mid-1960s and lived in what was then the Honors dorm. They described how a gate would crash down between the men’s and women’s sections of the dorm at 6pm each day, and how they learned to work around it. They graduated and joined the Peace Corps together just after college. Learning about their lives was a treat for me, and there is no doubt that everything they did, they did as a team. I loved hearing Lynne describe what it was like to be a dean’s wife in Columbus, Ohio (where I grew up). Loved their stories about raising kids, and why they moved to California: “Because winters in Washington and Ohio are the worst.”
That’s accurate.
Professor of Existential Threats
I realize now that Rick barely spoke of his illustrious career in high-energy-density physics. I got the impression that I shouldn’t ask more about the stuff he was working on. As it happens, he was a frontiersman in his field who was still contracting well into retirement with several universities and other important clients whose names I’m probably not allowed to mention. Maybe he was only being modest. But I prefer to believe that he was sworn to secrecy.
What I saw most was Rick’s impact on Honors students. In addition to a single-term seminar on Fermi’s Paradox (diving into arguments and evidence for and against the existence of life on other planets), Professor Freeman offered two interdisciplinary seminars that packed with Honors students year after year: The Science, History and Politics of Nuclear Weapons: How they work, how they came into existence and why they remain an existential threat, and Artificial Intelligence: It’s Your Future, Ready or Not.
I sat in on several of Rick’s classes over the years, and I’ll never forget his “pep talk” on the first day of his AI course.
“You are an Honors student at one of the top universities in the world,” he said, while unpacking their focus for the quarter. “Whatever changes are coming, you’re set up better than anyone to be okay in just about any situation. So, nothing wrong with wondering about your own future. But expand your horizons to consider the likely impacts on society as a whole—on other groups of people, here and across the world, whose lives might be improved, saved even, by things like leaps in affordable healthcare. They may also, and perhaps more likely, be erased, or ‘devalued’ by widespread adoption of new technologies. Let’s start by taking a look at what’s already happened with modernization on a global scale…”
Graduating Honors students often mention Rick’s courses in their capstone portfolio presentations as having “changed the way I think about my own responsibilities and agency,” and “made me realize how much I don’t know about our technological history— how unlikely it is that I can predict my future, let alone the future of humanity.”
“I took Professor Freeman’s class on AI Ethics and it was pretty amazing,” one student explained. “He led us through incredible class discussions and I ended up talking to my friends about that class all the time, even though none of us was a C.S. [computer science] major.”
In his “nuclear weapons” course, I once overheard a student refer to Rick as a “Professor of Existential Threats.” Rick was ambivalent about the nickname. Which is probably why it stuck. He delighted in challenging students to dig into complicated sources of fear and to find their own opinions and voices. To practice critical thinking in the face of uncertainty.
Ending the story
When Lynne told me that Rick had died, ending his painful struggle with Parkinson’s, I heard that same tone of voice she and Rick seem to have in common. The tone of someone whip smart and wonderful who doesn’t shy away from truth for the sake of comfort. Hopefully, Richard Reiling Freeman will be widely remembered for his scientific advances and contributions to the discipline of physics (he holds 6 patents and authored multiple textbooks plus more than 300 articles and papers). That’s as it should be. Still, I’ll remember Professor Rick Freeman most for that straightforward, amused, yet slightly exasperated tone. For his wry humor, and intense scrutiny, and endless curiosity.
If you’d like to share your condolences, you can forward them to uwhonors@uw.edu or Honors Alumni Relations, 211 Mary Gates Hall, Box 352800, Seattle, WA 98195.
As for a memorial service, the current plan is something small and private. One day this summer, when most of his loved ones will be together for a wedding celebration, they may scatter Rick’s ashes near their family home on the Hood Canal.
I can’t imagine a better ending.
