I began looking over his shoulder, rather than looking at what Fred Greene is doing or Fred Schuman is doing or even Jim Burns. You know, every new person wants to have some kind of guidelines. What does a syllabus look like around here? How many pages do you assign to your students? How often do you meet them? You know, how does this department work? And the person that I latched on to and who became very important to me was Bob Gaudino. I really became convinced that he was certainly the most rigorous. Well now, when it came to rigor, he was certainly the most demanding. I remember classes met three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday in those days. He assigned 150-175 pages per slot. So that three times 175 pages. These students read something like 500 pages a week. So I said, “Well this is a serious college.” My students back in Buffalo hardly read half of those pages a semester. And so my early syllabi looked very Gaudinoesque. I assigned enormous quantities. The students were hopping all over the place, staying up no doubt all hours. I stayed up all hours since I’m a slow reader. I pulled a lot of all-nighters in order to keep up with my own syllabus.

Kurt Tauber,
Former Political Science Professor