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David Booth

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He claimed to have made a mistake near the end of the Second World War–the plane he was in dropped bombs on an island that was occupied by the British. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but that was a kind of an apocryphal story that came out of it. You know, […]
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He started in the Committee on Social Thought, which is a big amorphous interdisciplinary program where some famous people have come out of it, but it tends to take forever because it’s interdisciplinary. Bob, who had come somewhat late to it because he had been in the military in the Second World War, wanted to […]
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One of the things I did with Bob we had a so-called honors section in the beginning class and we would go over student lists of those who signed up in selecting them. That’s how I realized how un-elitist Bob really was. There was a strong emphasis on diversity, a term used much more now […]
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There’s a footnote that I think needs to get in here. At the time, virtually all of the faculty were male and the married ones had spouses, somebody who tended not to work and stayed home with children, or if they did work they were a secretary, they had a non-professional job. So there was […]
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I met Bob Gaudino in the late summer of 1962, just after he had returned from his second year as a Fulbright Scholar in India. There was some concern about Bob’s future at the college at the time, whether or not he would get tenure and so on.
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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 […]
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My guess is that if he hadn’t gotten The Indian University published he might not have gotten tenure. I think it was very close. And also I think he made some enemies. Straussians were widely regarded as arrogant, opinionated, difficult people throughout the entire profession. Not only did they have a point of view which […]
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Well he had this kind of mantra. A lot of people say it, but most faculty don’t deliver on it: The liberal arts begins with the student, with the individual student. And the implication of that is that you have to get to know your students, you have to know who they are, what they […]
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He was very anxious to get contemporary works on his syllabus. So we’d go down to the bookstore and he’d buy a bunch of recently published books in our field and he would find a way to incorporate these in the syllabus, and making some kind of a coherent syllabus that had a beginning, a […]
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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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CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note
credits