The A. H. Scouten Memorial Fund was established in 1998 to provide books and other materials in the fields of study to which A. H. "Joe" Scouten devoted his professional life--theater history, the eighteenth century, and Jonathan Swift.

Arthur Hawley Scouten, Penn Professor of English, was a scholar, a teacher, and a faithful friend of the Penn Library, helping the Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquire the Teerink Swift Collection--some 1,800 volumes by Jonathan Swift.

But it is as a teacher that he is remembered by this fund, established by his students and friends. In 1995, in Swift Studies, vol. 10, Ann Cline Kelly wrote in an essay honoring him:
At the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for almost forty years...Scouten taught scores of undergraduates and graduate students. He was known for his dramatic lecturing style and his intense concern for his students' intellectual development. Never using a teaching assitant even in large classes of over a hundred students, he always graded the papers himself and prided himself on having them ready at the next class. Unlike many professors who cursorily assigned a grade, Scouten gave a running critique in margins. In one graduate seminar, all of the students' term papers were good enough to be accepted for publication in learned journals. Over the years, he supervised an astonishing number of PhD dissertations--fifty-five in all--on a wide range of subjects, but most often on theatre history.

His enormous energy, generosity of spirit, and a joie de vivre made him larger than life itself and forever memorable.