Felipe Rochon Gutterriez

A Bay Area native, UC Berkeley stalwart and, for over three decades, Department of Rhetoric mainstay, Felipe Rochon Gutterriez was a fantastic teacher and brilliant interlocutor, who was unceasingly open to discussing a huge range of rhetorical concerns with everyone, from the most junior potential Rhetoric major to the most senior of full faculty. Gutterriez’s outstanding qualities included a constant and indefatigable generosity of mind and spirit. His intellectual curiosity and aliveness inspired many and cannot be adequately captured in words.

Born October 2, 1949 in Oakland, California, Gutterriez was the son of Felipe Gutterriez, Sr. and Shirley Rochon. After graduating in 1977 from Berkeley in Political Science, with a special interest in political theory, he attended the UC Berkeley law school formerly known as Boalt Hall, from which he graduated in 1981. After teaching legal writing for a brief period, Gutterriez practiced corporate tax and real estate law in San Francisco for six years (1981-87). He entered the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric in 1986, and his extraordinary abilities prompted the Department to hire him in 1992 as assistant professor. He taught there, in a position that was converted to Continuing Lecturer, until his retirement in December 2018.

Gutterriez gave unstintingly to the Department, his colleagues, and his students, among whom he formed lifelong friendships. He taught literally thousands of undergraduates in required courses and in electives in all three of the Department’s concentrations, as well as offering, over the course of his career, many independent studies, senior honors thesis supervisions (nine at once in a single year!), and graduate and pedagogy seminars. Committed to a particular kind of collective and intellectual life, Gutterriez did not seek academic accolades for himself. In 2007-08, he nevertheless won a much-deserved Distinguished Teaching Award for non-Senate Faculty, an award that was based not only on student evaluations, but on class observation, syllabi and contributions to teaching outside the classroom. A couple of years earlier, in response to a new question on an outgoing undergraduate online survey asking students who had “made an extraordinary effort to make your undergraduate experience – or that of your fellow students – better,” Chancellor Birgenau wrote Gutterriez to celebrate him as an “everyday hero” on campus.

Many described the classes they took with Gutterriez as enlightening and life-changing. They called his classroom style “responsive,” “flexible,” “accessible;” his lectures “lively,” “precise,” “structured,” “coherent;” and his course content “challenging,” “demanding,” “difficult,” and “stimulating.” Gutterriez’s influence was felt far beyond those who enrolled in his courses, in part as he also served for many years as the Program Coordinator for Rhetoric’s Reading and Composition Program, supervising and mentoring many Graduate Student Instructors and conferring closely with Department faculty as to teaching practices and awards. Students in all of his courses praised his engagement, enthusiasm and passion. Throughout his career, Gutterriez regularly attended campus events and public talks, engaging with visiting scholars as a model interlocutor.

In addition to teaching core undergraduate courses in rhetorical theory and practice, Gutterriez designed new courses in argumentative writing and on the theory and practice of reading. He taught in three different series within the Public Discourse concentration: political/legal theory, rhetoric of law, and social theory. Within the Image and Narrative concentration, he routinely cross-listed courses on science fiction films, action films, and films of the fantastic, with Film Studies, later renamed the Department of Film & Media. Constantly revising his syllabi to keep up with his own interests and updating sample study guides, Gutterriez experimented early with web teaching tools, such as chat rooms and blogs, to carry discussions beyond the lecture hour and to enable those too shy to speak in person to participate in conversations with their peers and with Gutterriez himself. He was extremely knowledgeable about online and multimedia materials and hybrid course design and was the first to offer a course on video gaming and digital media in the Department.

Gutterriez’s expertise and intellectual range was sprawling and deep. He was a voracious reader and avid viewer, taking up the works of others as entry points into “conversations” with them, as well as with students and colleagues. His interests included aesthetics, autopoiesis, second-order cybernetics, deconstruction, film and literature, legal discourse, new media and technology, and speech acts. During the last decade, his interests turned increasingly to science and technology studies, and also to tone, affect, and mood in language and film. For many years, he co-hosted with his wife, Eileen Jones, a Film Night for filmmaker friends as they developed ideas that became award-winning independent films. Gutterriez also maintained a scholarly presence in the field. In Winter quarter 2005, he co-convened a UC Humanities Research Institute residential group on Law and Humanities in an Age of Information. He served as editorial board member of the Law, Culture and the Humanities journal since 2005.

Far more meaningful to Gutterriez than scholarly credentials were the practical ways that conversations can catalyze more thoughtful, vital responses to life and to the world. He told those close to him that he had committed himself years ago to cultivating a way of meeting others in conversation where they were coming from. The many, many acknowledgements to him in publications and elsewhere attest to the way his encounters with others epitomized the best of scholarly life.

A much beloved member of the Department of Rhetoric, Felipe Gutterriez passed away on June 26, 2020, in Buffalo, NY, where a small memorial was held by Eileen Jones. The Department renamed its graduate student endowment fund in his honor and a memorial website collects tributes to him.

Marianne Constable
Michael Dalebout
Nathan Atkinson
Osita (IK) Udekwu
2021