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Vince Barnett

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I came to Williams in the fall of 1939 with my bride from Harvard. I left in 1942 right after Pearl Harbor and worked in two or three war agencies in Washington until 1945, and I came back to Williams after the war. I was teaching courses in constitutional law, civil liberties, criminal justice, courses […]
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He was one of those on the faculty who felt that that was a bad thing for the college to do; that this was semi-professionalism or professionalism, a training school. But it wasn’t. He was wrong about that, of course. That’s one of the best things the college has done. A very successful program–students from […]
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It was controversial in the sense that he wasn’t making brownie points toward tenure the way most professors did. He wasn’t bound to publish many scholarly papers. He wasn’t bound to give courses in a certain way. He was a free spirit in many ways and this was something which upset some members of the […]
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“His boys.” I know what is being said here and I recognize the basis for it. I never really felt that that was pushed to the point of anything damaging or dangerous. His students, the group of students, the cult, if it is a cult, they loved him. They loved what he was doing. Whether […]
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I don’t think he would’ve taken students to Oxford. He would’ve taken students to India and to Mogadishu, to Appalachia, to some place to give them a jolt. Not to give them something that they would relate easily to, but to give them something that would shake them up, make them change their perceptions. The […]
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The students who came back from those trips, insofar as I was able to tell, learned a very great deal through the pores, so to speak. Not necessarily in the way that you would learn something about India if you were reading Gary Jacobsohn’s very good book or some other academically sound and well-based approach. […]
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I would’ve said of him, perhaps, what Shakespeare said in better words about somebody, “Nothing so became his activities in this life as the manner of his leaving it.” I remember an afternoon on the patio at his house, down there by Greylock Quad, an afternoon when he was very ill. He sat on that […]
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The honor in which his name is held by his students is something that most professors would give a lot for. But they’ve over-institutionalized the Gaudino thing. I don’t think he would’ve been comfortable with that. That wasn’t what he was about. I think he would’ve been probably embarrassed to see the Gaudino seminars, the […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
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Final Note
credits