You are here: Home » Chapter 2

EARLY WILLIAMS YEARS
“Intellectual Man of Mystery”

“

You remember, I think it just had been refurbished when I was there, something called Mather House, which was sort of a very quaint New Englandy restored house on campus? And our little seminar, I think there weren’t more than four or five of us, was there with Gaudino. And I remember, because it was […]
“

Many people look back upon the mid-‘50s as being a period that was relatively shallow, a period in which people were so relieved that World War II was over, that we were still cleaning up the rubble and people were ready to have a good time. And in a way that’s true, although I think […]
“

Bob’s field was — he was in political science. I taught in the Religion Department. My special fields were philosophy of religion and ethics. This [1955] was at the tail end of the McCarthy period and we had a sense on the faculty that McCarthyism was on the run. Fred Schuman, who was a distinguished […]
“

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 […]
“

I came in as an instructor [in 1956] and I had some correspondence with Vince Barnett seeking to have a higher rank for what was my third year of college teaching. I hoped to get an assistant professor rank here on joining the Williams faculty but that was delayed for a year. He must’ve been […]
“

I knew him from Jan. 1 or Jan. 4, 1960 as a colleague. My special field was political theory and comparative politics. Of course, Fred Schuman was there teaching international relations and as you well know he was known as “Red Fred,” then there was a “Green Fred,” [Fred Greene] and much to Green Fred’s […]
“

He was a leader, definitely a leader of the two of us. He was three years older than I was. We would have some great discussions and we’d argue. We talked political theory together and Aristotle when he got into the Stoics and the Epicureans. Then we got into Lucretius. I remember Bob calling one […]
“

Shortly after I came in the students invited Bill Buckley, who had written “God and Man at Yale,” had just become editor of the National Review, was one of the brightest conservative voices around. And so Buckley came and everybody, the students who knew nothing about classical conservative theory, thought this was going to be […]
“

The department has four basic categories: American politics, which has a lot of subdivisions; international relations; comparative government; and political theory and philosophy. And Bob was one of two or three people in political theory and philosophy. They weren’t outriders, but we didn’t have as much interchanging of slots as we do with say comparative […]
“

I suspect I was in a kind of minority in that I knew where Bob was coming from philosophically. He was annoying to many faculty members because he was kind of an upstart. I think it was in the same year that Bob came that another young political scientist joined the department, John Rensenbrink. They […]
Next »
credits