Fears was the David Ross Boyd Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma, where he held the G.T.
Among his numerous honors and awards for teaching, Fears was selected three times by OU students as Professor of the Year and was named by the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence as recipient of the Medal for Excellence in College and University Teaching.
Professor Fears had a reputation for drawing large numbers of students, and his lectures were over-attended; it was often said that no lecture hall on campus was large enough to accommodate the thousands of students who wished to sign up for his classes in History, Political Science, Classics and Letters.
Fears composed monographs and authored books such as “The Cult of Jupiter and Roman Imperial Ideology” and "The Theology of Victory at Rome.” He edited a three-volume edition of “Selected Writings of Lord Acton,” and had released more than a dozen titles for The Great Courses lecture series.
At the time of his death, he was writing a book entitled "Dangerous Delusions: Why We Ignore the Lessons of History at Our Risk."