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Teaching

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I can’t remember if we ever talked about the expenditure of time, energy, resources, whether it was better to spend all your waking life thinking about your teaching and whether you ought to forget about that for a while and write books. I don’t think we ever had that conversation. [Another department member] and I […]
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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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I suspect there were some elder types who were involved in the decision who raised questions about his judgment. It would be within Political Science, but it would be within a wider circle. I can remember these things because they were the people who were deciding the verdict on me, as well–and of course President […]
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It was controversial in the sense that he wasn’t making brownie points toward tenure the way most professors did. He wasn’t bound to publish many scholarly papers. He wasn’t bound to give courses in a certain way. He was a free spirit in many ways and this was something which upset some members of the […]
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We didn’t communicate that much. My parents just said that Bob likes it back there and what he’s doing. And then when he got some kind of a degree, which is tenure or something? He told his mother about that. He just said, “Well, I’ve been granted tenure” and so on. I don’t think she […]
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The first page of the syllabus had rules about how we were going to behave, rules about the classroom. In order to learn we had to build spaces. They were artificial, man-made, they were not natural. Learning is an unnatural act, difficult, not easily done, so we had to be very careful about the space […]
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I had Mr. Gaudino freshman year and I’ll always remember him sitting at the end of the table and asking me, “What does that mean substantively, Mr. Himowitz?” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I didn’t know what “substantively” meant.
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I think I spent the whole time just writing down everything he said.
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I can see him, you know, sort of elfin and short. I know we were reading Plato and Aristotle. We may have gone up to Augustine and Machiavelli. It was kind of a fairly standard set of political theory texts. I can’t remember Gaudino’s particular interpretation much as I remember his method. I think the […]
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Freshman year took Political Science 101, engaged with the text, bell rang, the class was over. But Mr. Gaudino’s classes were never over. When I walked out of the class that fall day, with a classmate of mine, Jim Boynton, the two of us couldn’t stop talking. We just became lifelong friends and the triggering […]
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CHAPTERS

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