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ROLE ON CAMPUS
Gadfly Who Served Donuts

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I got one of these fellowships to work in Washington the summer between junior and senior year because I’d done some work at the Roper Public Opinion Center which was at Williams at the time. Phil Hastings, who ran that, who was on the political science faculty, got me a job–not an internship–a job at […]
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He was a great one for getting new people involved in the countryside and going on hikes and using the hike as the conversation. Pine Cobble, Northwest Hill, Mount Greylock. We’d just take one of the trails. One of the early hikes I remember was the loop where you go up Broad Brook and then […]
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It was extremely interesting watching him deal with the Indians from Andhra Pradesh. [He was training] Peace Corps volunteers going to Andhra Pradesh, and of course by that time Bob had been to India. When I was dealing with them it was clearly an American talking to people from Andhra Pradesh, without any doubt. But […]
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He would take the Indians walking in the woods. He’d take them bowling. He’d take them over to Friendly’s for an ice cream sandwich — really tried to show them the culture and the place. I was on some of those hikes in the later years. Same thing, your family would go along, he would […]
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Even the best gadflies are probably only productive half the time. You don’t know when you stir the pot. The only thing you can do is be clear about your purpose. If you’re stirring the pot for your own personal aggrandizement then you’re going to screw it up and you’re going to make lots of […]
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It was just stimulating to him to engage in conversation with some other person. The first step is to discover where they were coming from, you know, what their underlying attitudes and state of mind actually were. Then as the conversation developed it was doubly interesting to find out how permeable at the fringes this […]
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I’m not sure he was particularly humble. I think he knew very well how brilliant he was. I remember the Vietnam War talks he gave, in what was the old student center, Baxter Hall, there was a huge crowd, and there was this podium Gaudino with this wisped frame and people were screaming “Speak up! […]
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Well, there was the start of the debates about the Vietnam War. And I remember going to one meeting and it was just the start of the split between Old Left and New Left. Old Left being heavily intellectualized, where people would sit around and debate and you sort of make the case. And the […]
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Were you wealthy and therefore could afford a different perspective? Were you poor and became cannon fodder? All those were difficult questions. We at Williams College in those days who were enjoying student deferments didn’t want to hear anything of the sort. But he was subversive. He was very much prepared to take on all […]
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My first encounter with him was not kind of what I expected. I had a dreadful although in some respects typical first semester freshman year and I was not a very good student. And I’d been in all these advanced classes from my high school. So I did very poorly in each of them, including […]
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