Imagine, attempting to build a Williams-in-India program at a time when experiential education was neither vogue nor fad, when some said that it was just another liberal experience for bleeding hearts who wanted to go to India, experience just a little bit of the pain, and then retire to the Sheraton or to the Holiday Inn.

This is precisely what Bob Gaudino spoke against. He was not interested in simply taking people on a tour or a trip. His desire was to get liberal art students, during their four years of respite, opportunity to grow, even ache in pain and in brokenness, in order to find in the “Other” as he called it. I call it the “sacred Other” or, as Buber speaks about it, the “I/thou relationship” — to find in the Other an opportunity to find ourselves. And, of all places, why would Bob Gaudino take very upper class young people from Scarsdale and from Daytona Beach and from Beverly Hills to the streets of Calcutta to live with the poorest people on this planet? Why would Bob Gaudino take the children of McDonalds and Burger King to a nation where there are a million plus cows and yet people die in the streets starving because the cow is mother? Why would Bob Gaudino dare take students into the villages with cholera and with malaria and with emphysema? It was because Bob Gaudino understood from his own experience of being in India that the only way Americans would be able to break through the barriers that restrict their consciousness is to be exposed to the reality not from the Marriott Hotel’s balcony but right there in the trenches, in the burials, in the gutters of Calcutta and in the gutters of New Delhi.

Preston Washington Convocation Speech