I think a lot of his colleagues completely misunderstood him. When they say “charismatic” they immediately thought that Bob was turning his students into acolytes. Because typically, that’s what charismatic people do, right? They’re so overpowering that you become acolytes. Now I just talked recently with John Chandler and both of us observed the same […]

Any faculty member who had a wonderful reputation here, who was considered to be one of the greats by the students, would be envied by some other faculty member. I just think that’s part of the world. It could well be that Bob might’ve gotten more–probably not any less envied, but more suspicion because people […]

He had a very, in my view, salutary and positive effect on the Political Science Department because we were a very, very disparate group of people with very different political ideologies, different pedagogical approaches, different uses of political science, and Bob had this way of sort of juxtaposing all of this. Everybody’s at the table, […]

Another aspect of Bob – he was a very close evaluator of what he did, and this is what led to these experiential programs, which were completely different from the classic political philosophy classroom approach that he came to Williams with. To make a real shift in your pedagogy in mid career, why did he […]

One of the reasons this was so powerful is that Bob, in this program, was less of a teacher as we understand that, and more like a coach, an athletic coach. He was there every day with them constantly preparing them over a long period of time, the way you do if you’re on the […]

So here’s a guy who was an extraordinarily successful classroom teacher, you know, Socratic method, going off and doing this experiential education thing, very, very different, but still interested in these core ideas. Well, he was extremely interested in what he called “Public Authority,” this sort of the way public authority gets established, the way […]

He started to get sick before he knew it. It started with a slight tremor I think in the left hand, as I remember, as early as 1968. This was a very slow developing neurological disease. It’s still very rare. And it has all the nasty characteristics of MS and Parkinson’s combined. It tends to […]

Since he had always been having students in his home, he was very used to that, you know, “Well, you go get the drinks,” and so on. I mean he wouldn’t just wait on them hand and foot. They all participated. So when it came time where he couldn’t really get to the classroom, it […]

Personally I did not handle his illness well. I found it very difficult to accept. And I would get depressed when I was seeing the impact of it on him. I remember one specific thing, that he asked me would I help him kill himself when the time came. And I said, “No,” I would […]

One of the things that I had to do after his death was destroy his cyanide capsules. When I went through all his effects, as I would as executor, I found them. Still had them, yes. He did not use them. He was bound and determined to continue to try to work. I mean in […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
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Final Note