There’s a footnote that I think needs to get in here. At the time, virtually all of the faculty were male and the married ones had spouses, somebody who tended not to work and stayed home with children, or if they did work they were a secretary, they had a non-professional job. So there was this enormous difference between the faculty member who was male, and his spouse who was female. Bob Gaudino ignored that and would go to parties and encounter these spouses and would take them seriously and want to know about them and what their views were and so on. And some of them got highly offended by this because they thought he was trying to show them up. You can see how that could happen, right? Given that you’re a spouse and nobody else talks to me this way. I mean, why on earth? Part of his charisma also, I think, might’ve been his curiosity. I mean, he was just curious about people and he always felt that everybody has a point of view, everybody has a background and everybody has values and views and why should spouses be any different?

David Booth,
Former Political Science Professor