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Teaching

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Many people look back upon the mid-‘50s as being a period that was relatively shallow, a period in which people were so relieved that World War II was over, that we were still cleaning up the rubble and people were ready to have a good time. And in a way that’s true, although I think […]
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Bob’s field was — he was in political science. I taught in the Religion Department. My special fields were philosophy of religion and ethics. This [1955] was at the tail end of the McCarthy period and we had a sense on the faculty that McCarthyism was on the run. Fred Schuman, who was a distinguished […]
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I knew him from Jan. 1 or Jan. 4, 1960 as a colleague. My special field was political theory and comparative politics. Of course, Fred Schuman was there teaching international relations and as you well know he was known as “Red Fred,” then there was a “Green Fred,” [Fred Greene] and much to Green Fred’s […]
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He was a leader, definitely a leader of the two of us. He was three years older than I was. We would have some great discussions and we’d argue. We talked political theory together and Aristotle when he got into the Stoics and the Epicureans. Then we got into Lucretius. I remember Bob calling one […]
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In the late 1950s he was still comfortable with the traditional format of the college course. All of his students from that era will remember Mr. Gaudino’s rigor on matters of substance by the page-by-page and sometimes line-by-line reading of important texts. Fewer, perhaps, will recall his insistence, true to Williams’ tradition, on felicity of […]
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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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At Williams I was always on the lookout for father figures. I was taken under the wing of two people in the political science department. One was Frederic Schuman who wrote a book on international relations and whose nickname was “Red Fred.” I found his left wing politics very satisfying. I took attendance at his […]
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Well, spouses at Williams were only second class citizens and Bob just seemed to accept us as human beings worthy of taking part in discussions. I thought that was really very nice. Sometimes he would follow me out to the kitchen and say, “What do you think of such and such?” I was not a […]
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I sort of remember everybody as kind of lounging around, sitting back in their chairs and talking and usually listening to Bob. I don’t know how soon I realized what a kind, thoughtful, stern man he was. I don’t know what I felt at first. I was kind of hostess to everybody with food and […]
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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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CHAPTERS

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