GREAT BOOKS AND
SOME GREAT PROFS
Paul Ilie, a Great Books professor at Michigan called his students “Mr.” and “Ms.” For example, “Mr. Stratton.” Eighteen-year-old me — Mr. Stratton? Ilie taught The Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Sophocles. Glad I read those books.
Paul Ilie
I begged my Inorganic Chem prof for a B. I needed the B for my pre-med transcript. I did C work throughout the semester but got an A on the final. Paul Rasmussen wouldn’t deal; the numbers didn’t add up. Attention, Bert, adulthood ahead.
I asked my Calculus professor, “What is the meaning of all this?” Wilfred Kaplan didn’t blanch. He said he wasn’t sure.
I got a D in Organic Chemistry and switched to English.
Benjamin Franklin V taught Hawthorne, Melville and Twain. I visited Franklin’s house a couple times to listen to jazz records. He had a thing for Babs Gonzales, a hipster vocalese bopper. Franklin was an Ohio State grad from Gallipolis and was related to Ben Franklin. Franklin-the-prof was 11 years older than me and had caught some of the beatnik era.
Another young prof was Bernard Q. Nietschmann. He taught a gut course — Human Geography. He gave me four credit hours for writing a novel. Nietschmann’s main focus was the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua. He once tore up a $20 bill in class to show his disdain for materialistic mainstream culture. The class went nuts, several students screaming at the prof to hand over the money. (Twenty dollars in 1970 equals $160 now.)
Donald Hall held a poetry-writing workshop at his house on South University Avenue. (Workshops weren’t common at Michigan. Lectures were, like 200 kids in a room.) At the workshop we critiqued each other’s work. Hall owned one LP record: Sgt. Pepper’s. Never a music guy – Hall.
Ted Berrigan, an East Village poet, was at Michigan one semester as a visiting professor. Hall got Berrigan the job. Berrigan had interviewed Jack Kerouac for the Paris Review. Berrigan had fans. I was a super-fan.
English 231, Fall 1969
Robert Hayden, another English professor, wound up on a U.S. postage stamp. At his office, I showed him my latest poems but he didn’t cotton to jokey, light fare. He was polite, though. He dressed properly, just like my Great Books prof. Profs dressed either like profs or hippies. There was no in-between.
3 comments
I went to Franklin’s house with you, no? Never took his class, though. My experiences with the lit profs at U of M were not the best. I studied Shakespeare with the guy who had taught playwriting to Arthur Miller, but by the time I got him he was an academic Joe Biden, stammering and mumbling through the same yellowed lecture notes for the umpteenth time. By midsemester you could count students in class on one hand. I escaped with a B, but his grad student assistant graded everything. A course on Mark Twain and Henry James was taught by a prof who rather despised the former, adored the latter and had us read (actually skim) one opus by HJ per week. “The Golden Bowl” nearly killed me. I ended up majoring in history.
To Mark Schilling:I had a Shakespeare prof who was boffing his students (female ones) w/ some regularity. Even walking around campus holding hands w/ one of them. Never did read Henry James. I thought about History. Thought about it. Never took a single course in history.Figured I could just read books. Did the profs know more than what was in the books?
Funny, I came to think the same about lit — just read the books. I think I took one lit class after my sophomore year: Black American Literature, I was one of maybe three or four white guys in the class. Another B in that one. I liked history because it gave me a pathway to an easy A. Also, I was a history buff from an early age, writing a history of rhe Civil War in 4th grade (still have it) and scoring 794 on my US history advanced placement SAT (I agonized over which question I’d gotten wrong). As for teachers who boffed students I knew several, and briefly dated one girl, Dorothy Reaven, who told me she was planning to seduce a sexy young prof for fun and grades. The guy took her to the track and impressed her by winnng big on the ponies. I could never compete with that. Bye, bye Dorothy. You may have known her — she was a roomer at Minne’s.
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