“I remember him questioning us about drivers and when you were in a different country what happened. If you came to a red light would people obey the red light, just stop, if there was no traffic coming along? And I think the French would go right through the light. This was about your attitudes toward authority.

The number of those substantive moments in class that you remember is, after all these years, quite small. But let’s say we were reading a book about what was happening in the inner cities–it was just the start of sensitivity to development of an American underclass—and students would be frustrated because there was something they didn’t like about the book and they would sort of argue with it. What Gaudino would do, he would say “But Mr. Smith, what does [the author] say about X, Y, and Z?” So you would have to respond from the text. The students couldn’t understand why they were frustrated by what they had read about the helpless underclass in the cities and what Gaudino would do was always make you go back to the text, and the students would grope. In this case, for some strange reason, he actually put us out of our misery at the end of the class. He actually told us why we were angry at that book: the author may have had his facts right, but seemed to deny the humanity of those desperate people in the underclass. And that was it, exactly.

But you had to have read every word and you were put on notice real quickly: do not enter this room because you will be exposed if you haven’t done it. The text is to be respected. The people who thought his teaching was about students and to use the phrases of that era, “where you’re at” or “where you’re coming from” — it was about where you’re coming from in the long run, but that’s not what the teaching was grounded on. The teaching was grounded on what you read and these were classes unlike others where you could lose respect very quickly for a professor. You knew right away: Do the work, son, I’m telling you, or you will be twisting in the wind. It was a tough, tough classroom environment.

–Paul Lieberman '71