I remember reading The Levittowners [Herbert J. Gans’ account of an early Long Island cookie-cutter suburb] and wondering “Why are we reading this in political science?” I came in many ways very naïve, things like class, I just really wasn’t sensitive to, and of course The Levittowners is all about class, at least the way […]

In the fall of my freshman year, the fall of ’67, the Vietnam War was really kicking into high gear. I guess in high school I’d been a conservative and I don’t know when I particularly began to change, but I remember one very influential piece was in that building Van Rensselaer, that old fraternity […]

I was thinking maybe doing junior year abroad or something. I wasn’t quite sure. And then this was posted and I said “perfect.” Go to a completely foreign country with a person that I found very provocative. On the other hand, I think in part it was designed in order to get academic approval as […]

I valued the academic more than a lot of people. I thought we were supposed to be learning substantively things about India and developing an in-depth knowledge of the culture and the politics and the economics. I valued that while others in Williams-in-India were far more experientially oriented. They were more sort of interested in […]

In my village the first few days there were severe language limitations, so there was just a lot of observation. And then you’d meet people in the village that spoke some English. I remember there was a fellow in the telegraph office that spoke English and a doctor. And so to the extent that they […]

Sometimes we’d get into very heated exchanges. There’d be arguments and someone would storm out, people were just on totally different pages. Well, I mean they would’ve set up an interview with some political figure in Delhi and some of us would go and hope that it would somehow be a fruitful meeting that would […]

It was interesting how the group at certain times really turned against Indians and there was a time when a few of us got frustrated with Indians and there were real racist tendencies that came out, in me and others. People would start making derogatory jokes when we were by ourselves. It was amazing how […]

Right at the end we went up to Kashmir for about a week or so. Actually we had cottages around a golf course. We really enjoyed it except there were various animals grazing on the golf course. And we had a series of seminars talking about our experiences and it was interesting, the group really […]

I remember a lot of people thinking after a few days in the village, what am I going to do here for four weeks or three weeks or whatever it was? And well, gee, Gaudino will be coming in a few days and we’ll talk about it and he will come up with an answer […]

I believe that his fundamental skill was helping students, including me, listen to others. The cliché of course is seeing the world through the eyes of others, but the problem is really doing that rather than projecting one’s own views on others. Gaudino was able to use texts, films, discussions to test whether a student […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note