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Gadfly

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Shortly after I came in the students invited Bill Buckley, who had written “God and Man at Yale,” had just become editor of the National Review, was one of the brightest conservative voices around. And so Buckley came and everybody, the students who knew nothing about classical conservative theory, thought this was going to be […]
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He became very controversial and I was sort of responsible for that. I was president of Phi Beta Kappa my senior year, it was probably 1959, maybe 1960, and we decided to do something for the campus and do some symposia, maybe influenced somewhat by the Platonic idea, but to have some debates on campus. […]
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…So when it comes his turn on this panel, he says, “Well now, this is what my profession says how we search for truth in Political Science,” and he went through kind of a ‘50s graduate school kind of how do you use evidence and how do you use quantitative reasoning and blah, blah, blah, […]
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…Prof. Gaudino launched into an attack on the new Center for Development Economics as having Williams move from being an intellectual center to sort of a trade school, you know, that we were not in the business of training minds to look for enlightenment but we were now in the business of training bureaucrats in […]
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And out of that came a huge brouhaha he got himself involved in with the Economics Department. I said earlier how intellectually ruthless he could get. He really moved to the crux of the matter and he deliberately gave a very powerful critique of the whole project, which was the darling of Williams College, the […]
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At faculty meetings, where seniority was very much evident, Bob would always sit upstairs. Laszlo Versenyi did the same thing, sat upstairs around the gallery where a lot of the new assistant professors would also sit and look down on the eagles there at center table. Griffin Hall, yes. I don’t think they were making […]
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He was one of those on the faculty who felt that that was a bad thing for the college to do; that this was semi-professionalism or professionalism, a training school. But it wasn’t. He was wrong about that, of course. That’s one of the best things the college has done. A very successful program–students from […]
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I suspect there was some reservations about promoting Bob because of his individuality and his reluctance to march to the drum beat of the department seniors at the time. Maybe Jim Burns might’ve had reservations, but I never heard them expressed. And Vince Barnett may have found Bob let’s say headstrong, not easily harnessed to […]
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What came through was he wanted to help people discover who they were and to help them fight their own battles. This is the marvelous gift he had. But he transgressed against it from time to time. Not with students. I never saw him do that with students. But sometimes he would poke fun at […]
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The India experience really mellowed him out. I think he was impressed by the characteristic way that Indians accept things, acknowledge the being, the multiplicity of being. And I think that experience really changed him. That’s just my opinion. [He became] absolutely tolerant of how people were, in how they may appear and their views […]
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CHAPTERS

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