Devine in 2000, the year he was appointed associate vice president for facilities management. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

I don’t know that Tom Devine ever read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, but if he did he’d have found himself in that famous first paragraph, where Augie says: “[I] go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.”

Boston College’s vice president for facilities management from 2002 until his death in June, and a senior buildings and grounds administrator since 1994, Tom roamed this campus in a gray tweed sportscoat that seemed always to be engaged in an argument with his broad shoulders. He knocked on anything in the way, with a stubborn need to make the place whole, easy on the eye, and of service. And in gaining that last and most important goal, he and his people were almost unfailing, whether the job was to drain three inches of rainwater from a basement, rebuild a science building while the scientists worked (uncomplainingly, of course) within, or turn Linden Lane into a Commencement Day Disneyland of eternal blooms.

Tom directed much of this in a resonant baritone and at high speed, running on a high-octane blend of bluster and affability. Carole Hughes, a student affairs administrator, recalls concluding a speech to freshmen and parents during the summer Tom arrived and seeing a broad-shouldered man emerge from the audience and head toward her. He introduced himself, “I’m Tom Devine, the new director of buildings and grounds, and I know we’re going to get along just fine because my wife’s name is Carol Hughes.”

Tom was smart, sharp-tongued, and frank in addition to being stubborn, a blend of traits that serve well in a person charged with defending a corporation’s interests against nature, entropy, illegal hot plates, and general contractors, but qualities that don’t always produce what academe thinks of as middle-of-the-bell-curve behavior.

Yet as is sometimes—if not often—the case with guys who are conspicuously tough as well as actually tough, Tom’s set jaw served, as a practical matter, to draw attention away from his heart. Some of his staff suspected or even knew this all along, but all saw it clearly in the months of his slow dying, when he was—one of his colleagues told me—“fearless” in his response to his predicament and in his determination to let his diminished self be seen. I saw this heart on September 11, 2001, when I found myself standing at the back of the O’Neill Plaza at a crowded noon prayer service, exampling grim self-control for the sake of my weeping daughter—then a sophomore—and other devastated students nearby, and I spied Tom standing alone, tears rolling on his cheeks.

As I think about it now, it wasn’t Tom’s competence or his guy-banter or his toughness or heart that made me a fan, but his robust affection for the world and his related irritation with certain of its imperfections. The capital projects director Mary Nardone, one of Tom’s lieutenants, tells of walking with him past a swimming pool that was under construction on another university’s campus, and Tom stopping in his tracks and calling out to a worker below: “That tile is [set] wrong.” And it was set wrong. “This is a real curse I have,” he said to Nardone as they fled the scene.

It wasn’t, of course, because an eye for what is wrong is also a passion for what is right, as is publicly manifest across this campus today and as was manifest privately to members of the president’s cabinet each time Tom gifted us with one of his interminable semiannual capital project reports. His reading glasses low on his nose, Tom turned page after page of notes as he filled us in on improvements to the thermostatic controls in St. Mary’s, the provenance of the turf that was being installed on Shea Field, and the latest innovations in brick painting.

Around the table, executive eyes went blank and executive minds turned to memo drafting, budget planning, and pints of milk or Jim Beam to be picked up on the way home. And Tom went on, telling of water-efficient toilets, impregnable security systems, and trees that were going to carry leaves even in summers of drought.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum