The first time I met him was in his office when he was interviewing me before he decided whether and who he was accepting. I jokingly mentioned that my grandmother had doubts about my missing a semester of school. He immediately pounced on my remark, and peppered me with numerous questions – who was my […]

In my freshman year, it was the fall of 1969. I remember the freshman entryway there was a poster for SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] saying come join us in Chicago for Days of Rage. People went into Chicago and started beating up policemen and the policemen beat up the protesters. Those things were […]

I grew up in a small town outside New Haven. My dad was a claims adjustor for the railroad. When I was a freshman, as it came toward Winter Study, my JAs said, “Oh, you’ve got to take this thing with Gaudino.” I was just the one month deal talking about experience in education and […]

Ah, he was often upset with me or frustrated with me because he didn’t think I was serious enough. I was pretty open with him about the fact I used to smoke a lot of pot back then and thought that Williams was pretty irrelevant to my life and, “Why was I here and what […]

When the whole Cambodia thing happened, the shutting down of the school in 1970, for about 10 days I was with the [student strike.] Then I said, “Nope.” This is not what we should be doing, it’s not what Williams should be doing and the people doing it are acting out of some other motive […]

I grew up in Northern New Jersey. I did not feel like I fit in the Williams culture because neither of my parents completed college. My dad cleaned furnaces so I could go to Williams. A friend of mine one day comes over to my dorm room and says, “Hey, you’ve got to go to […]

I didn’t really have an idea about Gaudino. I had no idea it was controversial with the faculty. It just seemed like, “Oh, here is this program and we’re going to apply some of the knowledge from the classroom outside the campus. What a great idea.” So I applied. I do then recall when we […]

There’s nobody in the world who could have gotten me to read Hannah Arendt. It’s still probably the most dense material I have ever read, On Revolution. He assigned us all those books to read the summer before, “Small Town in Candor?” something like that. [Small Town in Mass Society.] Books on education. Robert Coles. […]

I remember my father being concerned with my safety saying, “You’re going to Appalachia as a white, upper-middleclass kid and you’re going to live in their house?” So he was concerned I was going to get ripped off. Or, yeah, “You’re going to live in inner-city Detroit?” or “Are you going to live down in […]

My parents, there were some questions like sort of “Why?” And the interesting thing was that Gaudino made a real effort to include the parents, to educate them a little bit. We had a couple of sessions where parents were invited on campus, to his house and he really wooed the parents and was writing […]