Well, I don’t think age was a relevant variable. He could’ve been 20, he could’ve been 80. Yes, I mean he was very controversial even then and that was before he was controversial in a political sense. But I think his teaching style, his methodology was threatening to his professional colleagues. The more, I’d say […]

Oh, yes, disciples, yeah. What was the source of that? Partly his need maybe as well for establishing more intimate relations with people. So they were drawn to his personality and I know, for example, sitting in the office next to his, he would talk on and on with his students who would come in. […]

It was clear that he was cultivating a group of bright and eager students and giving them a sense of being special and being smarter than the rest, whereas my own inclination was to try to pull up the below average and not treat them with special kindness. Only students who were ready to work […]

There were a group of us who really enjoyed him, really respected him. I don’t think it was quite a cult. He was a very charismatic personality. He was relatively short, had a glint in his eye—I wouldn’t say handsome but very expressive face and very nice winning smile. And he’d sort of smile and […]

In the late 1950s he was still comfortable with the traditional format of the college course. All of his students from that era will remember Mr. Gaudino’s rigor on matters of substance by the page-by-page and sometimes line-by-line reading of important texts. Fewer, perhaps, will recall his insistence, true to Williams’ tradition, on felicity of […]

First term my sophomore year, PoliSci 1A or 2A, American politics. Fall of ’57, he had a freshman from my high school outside of Buffalo, N.Y., who was literally hanging on by his fingernails academically. And one of things that really struck me about Bob, since there was some sense, particularly among other faculty, that […]

One of the things I did with Bob we had a so-called honors section in the beginning class and we would go over student lists of those who signed up in selecting them. That’s how I realized how un-elitist Bob really was. There was a strong emphasis on diversity, a term used much more now […]

At Williams I was always on the lookout for father figures. I was taken under the wing of two people in the political science department. One was Frederic Schuman who wrote a book on international relations and whose nickname was “Red Fred.” I found his left wing politics very satisfying. I took attendance at his […]

By the way he lived with Fred Schuman. Fred Schuman rented him an apartment downstairs. Schuman owned the house, he and Libby owned the house. It’s on Main Street, a small brick house, a nice brick house, which now has an insurance company. And it’s surrounded by steep slopes. The house has only one floor […]

It was not as if he said, “Be my absent siblings.” It just evolved totally naturally. We shared interests. We’d go out for pizza and go bowling afterward. And when we had children, he became their uncle. He just engaged them immediately. He had lots of wonderful nephews and nieces but they were in California, […]