“He had not published and I think he definitely felt the need to go off and do something stimulating, something that he could write about. For some reason he got fascinated with Eastern cultures. His Fulbright dealt with the Indian University, and he wanted to compare the university system in India with the university systems here.
I really hadn’t taught that much before Bob came back and immediately I was thrown in with him because at that time we taught sections of the beginning course in political science. The publishing aspect is something that’s extremely interesting about this man because very often the great teachers, the people who are considered in the elite of teaching, were also publishing major things. Bob Gaudino does not belong to that group. His writing, his publication, was not anywhere close to being on a par with his teaching, and his two works that got published, the books, both had to be published in India because no publisher in the United States wanted to publish them. We’d laugh about this all the time. I found his writing very difficult myself, kind of off-putting. I like to have things go along on a clear track and Bob was more elliptical in what he wrote and tended to write in sort of complicated sentences with a lot of appositions hung on them. But he published these two books, one called The Indian University and one on his Peace Corps–I think it was the summer of ’63 he got the contract to do a Peace Corps training program at Williams College for students who were not Williams students at all.
I was one of his tutors even though I knew very little about India. These people were supposed to be trained by others, not us, to do work in introducing poultry. Apparently that didn’t work out very well in a number of places and, as one would expect, a lot of these volunteers had a terrible time really dealing with the reality of India, you know of all of the poverty and the filth and all the rest. Those were the early years of the Peace Corps when it was thought that what we really want here are liberal arts graduates to go. We don’t want specialists. So a lot of people were sent over there to do things where they didn’t know much more than the farmers. Bob then, after that program, went to India and visited all these Peace Corps volunteers that he had trained and wrote a book called The Uncomfortable Learning about the Peace Corps experience of this group in India. Both of those were published by, we used to laugh about this, that’s why I remember it – Popular Prakashan press in New Delhi, which is not at all a prestigious press even in India. And those were I think the only two publications that Bob had.
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