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EARLY WILLIAMS YEARS
“Intellectual Man of Mystery”

Dark Moods – And a Moderating Fellowship

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What came through was he wanted to help people discover who they were and to help them fight their own battles. This is the marvelous gift he had. But he transgressed against it from time to time. Not with students. I never saw him do that with students. But sometimes he would poke fun at […]
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When Bob was going to India he came to me because he thought I was an expert, which I really wasn’t. And I said, “Well, Bob, let me tell you about Shiva, who is one of the great Indian gods. And Shiva was really the person who was the destroyer.” And Bob said, “Destroyer! And […]
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I graduated in ’60 I had a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. To show you the influence, he went off to India during that period, ‘61 or so he was in India. And I with three Oxford friends we drove from Oxford to India and back by Land Rover and came to New Delhi and spent […]
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The facts of work in India are ambiguity, reversals of meaning, cultural obstacles, value confusions, subtle resentments on both sides….The question, “What am I to do here?” transfers itself into “What can I do?” and finally takes on the most unsettling form of “Who am I?”
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The India experience really mellowed him out. I think he was impressed by the characteristic way that Indians accept things, acknowledge the being, the multiplicity of being. And I think that experience really changed him. That’s just my opinion. [He became] absolutely tolerant of how people were, in how they may appear and their views […]
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I think all of us were rather skeptical of cult figures on the faculty, particularly the older more senior faculty members who had seen cult figures come and go. And most of them seemed not to get tenure. There may have been some envy. But I do think primarily his colleagues, particularly the more senior […]
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I met Bob Gaudino in the late summer of 1962, just after he had returned from his second year as a Fulbright Scholar in India. There was some concern about Bob’s future at the college at the time, whether or not he would get tenure and so on.
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