Any faculty member who becomes anything of a cult leader arouses the suspicion and probably the envy of faculty colleagues. I don’t think I ever envied Bob because he had a following. But it did puzzle a lot of people because students who become cult followers, in my observation over a number of decades, often are the shallow students, the more gullible types. But Bob’s students, his most devoted students, were among the best students on the campus and that puzzled a lot of people. The kids who were winning the big prizes–the Rhodes and so forth—were the ones he attracted most strongly. That’s when more of us, I think, began to dig into what the appeal of this man was. I think many faculty never did catch on. I got a glimpse into Bob’s pedagogical method and the way he dealt with students only after I became president.

In 1973, when I became president of Williams, I went through the usual rituals and gave an inaugural address and after I was through with that, I figured, “Well, nobody is attacking me for it, I can get back to work.” And I was surprised when Bob called me and said, “My students and I would like for you to come in and discuss with us your inaugural address.” Well, I was very surprised but I was also flattered — my goodness, it’s worth discussing! Bob by that time was meeting classes at his home. I think there were a few chairs and maybe I had one of them. But the students were sitting on the floor and almost immediately I saw this is the way it was in the forum down the hill from the Acropolis in Athens with Socrates talking with whatever crowd wanted to gather around him. And here was Bob with a nice smile on his face, which was perpetually there, as he, and particularly his students, began — all of whom had copies of the inaugural address—asking, “Now what did you mean by this?” “OK, how do you translate that into a program?” And I found myself a bit on the spot, you know. It was a darn good workout but it was a wonderful revelatory moment for me. At last, almost two decades later, I understood how this man worked in a classroom.

John Chandler,
former Williams College president