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The growth that Becht brought to Cabrini was not only in factual data of numbers, reports, programs and admissions, but also in the people touched by him daily.

"What he most loved about life was people,"· Iadarola said. He helped coworkers find confidence in themselves and helped them to question life and not just to sit back and watch and wonder.

Becht had a "phenomenal" sense of humor. He was someone that m~y people waited to see every morning.

"If there was laughter he heightened it," Dr. Martin Sharp said, of the graduate and professional studies department. "He was always willing to reach out to others. He was a renaissance man. The. Jesuit-Georgetown background showed. He believed God's work could be done during this time," Sharp said. "He was an exceptional individual."

Becht brought over 20 years of experience in higher education to Cabrini. Prior to Cabrini, he served as the vice president for academic affairs and academic dean at Loras College in Dubuque Iowa. Before his work at Loras, he was vice president at Marian College of Fond du Lac in Fond

"Whathe loved mostabout life was people"

-Antoinette Iadarola President

du Lac, Wisconsin. He also served as an academic dean at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, the assistant to the chairman of the department of English and the assistant dean of the graduate school at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Becht • had direct responsibility in supervising graduate and non-traditional programs at each institution.

Prior to his administrative work, Becht taught for many years at Marquette University, the

University of Connecticut and Carnegie Mellon University. Becht was born in San Angelo, Texas. He received a bachelor of arts degree in English and classical studies from Georgetown University, a master's degree in English language and literature from the University of Chicago and a doctorate degree in English from the University of Connecticut. Becht was an expert on nineteenth-century British literature. He was a scholar with a passion for literature and it was a p_assion that lived with him the length of his life.

Becht is survived by his wife, Sherry Becht, and his three children, Matthew R. Becht of Arlington, VA; Penelope Becht O'Connell and son-in-law Michael of Newark, DE; and Joseph R. Becht of Emmitsburg, MD.

Joseph Becht, the youngest of the three children, remembered his father's death like his life. "He was a man who died in the same manner that he lived in a quiet, gentle grace."