Oh Captain, My Captain!
Bill teaches like John Keating (Robin Williams character in the brilliant Dead Poets Society) on sedatives. Bill correctly senses that the lively engagement with scholarship and the embrace of new ways of thinking that once animated the youth in college settings has been replaced with a stale desire to partake in a quid pro quo, in which students pay money to get credit and expect professors to entertain them in the four year lay over. Instead of standing on his desk and reading Shakespeare in a John Wayne accent, Bill crosses his arms and strokes a haughty goatee in a singular motion and declares, “Students aren’t alive anymore. They don’t even know how to read.” Unlike some of my peers, I find great pleasure in these interactions, although I do think that opening a seminar by declaring students to be dead and illiterate is tragically counterproductive to the resuscitation effort.
Bill’s wry sense of humor blends seamlessly into his frank and pointed criticism, which I often found surprising and hilarious. He never gives feed back in seminar. It feels bewildering after sixteen years in school that I often spent seeking the positive feedback that would signal that I was thinking the same as the teacher. Bill did not do that, ever. As a result, I was forced to assess my own engagement with the material and decide for myself whether my role as a student was leading to me living a better life.
Bill’s commitment to scholarship and his attestation that studying history and sociology frees people is infectious. I walk out of this Bill’s classroom with a willingness to take responsible for how I think and the freedom that comes with the ability to think differently.