“He was a little kooky but it was within the realm of operationally OK. I had to run a department. Bob was a fine member. Bob was teaching things within political theory I considered semi-fringy at that time.
A lot of students who took his courses and became like devotees of it would somehow look askance at the rest of the stuff we were teaching, which was a little bothersome but no big deal, you know, you just go ahead and do it. But people who had nuts and bolts to teach or grinding things to kind of confront every day would tend to get exasperated every once in a while.
I understand his appeal, in the sense that he had – for a person who wanted to teach uncertainty he had a secure totally enveloping environment in which students could learn. And many of them ended up quite enamored of him intellectually and devoted to his orientation. Some of those people in later years said they realized it was — not a hoax but an invalid world way of looking at the world. It gave you too much of a sense of certainty in an uncertainty that didn’t really belong. One of them even said the whole thing really threw him off for years until he realized that this was not going anywhere. This is their reaction after college. So I had that feeling Bob was convincing people of an orientation that was not going to do that a lot of good later on, but a lot of them loved it and they continued in philosophy and went on to develop careers in disorientation or they went into regular career patterns with this in their head, which is no bad thing. It’s good to have several different things clicking around in your brain as you try to tackle problems. Oh yes, they were very good students and they did very well. A lot of them really loved it. Basically I didn’t see any harm in it, certainly nothing malevolent about it.
I mean, he wasn’t a renegade teacher. He didn’t not go to class. He didn’t not ask students for assignments. In effect he was an intellectual disciplinarian. He was very demanding. He ran a tight ship. So it’s a funny combination. So yeah, he was kooky but his job operations were not kooky.
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