“He got involved with the Peace Corps, which was organized after the Kennedy period. Do you remember [President] Kennedy’s brother-in-law? Sergeant Shriver became the head of that and then [Harris] Wolford took over, and he was a classmate of Bob Gaudino’s and Bob Gaudino got himself involved in the Peace Corps, and in the course of this began to spend time in India. He was a West Coast kid and here he was suddenly involved in a radically different environment in a new civilization and his writing began to revolve around India. He was enormously involved in his texts and extraordinarily bright and written all kinds of things for his students, but not much for publication. So he came up for tenure. The department had to fight for him because he did not have the usual kind of CV. A CV of an extraordinary brilliant teacher, brilliant mind, who hasn’t done much publishing. But here he was writing a book, having come back from India, on higher education in India and he submitted it. We, his friends in the department pushing for his tenure, were delighted he was sending it out to important publishers, Harvard University Press or something of that sort. Word came back saying this is a very interesting essay but it is a sort of a very personal essay, “Where are the footnotes?” He said, “There are no footnotes. I’m not copying somebody else. This is my thing.” We said, “For God sakes Bob, let’s look up some footnotes, put them in and get it over and you’ll have a book published.” He refused. He said, “This is my book and I don’t give a damn about what the consequences are.” To him it was a matter of principle, the academic life and the life of the mind is not a commercial enterprise and if the publisher depends upon footnotes to publish the damned thing, then to hell with it.
He had it published in India, on dreadful paper. It was a Third World publishing company, a Third World production. And so the book looks really quite miserable by sleek American standards. But at any rate, it’s out.
Former Political Science Professor