Great teachers we’ve known

LITTLE ROCK — Dear Close Reader,

It was wholly a pleasure to be told that a line in one of our editorials got you to thinking about a great teacher you once had. The line was: “We can still remember the piercing, unblinking blue eyes of a professor of biology who could look right through you, and see every vacuum of knowledge you were so desperately trying to cover up in class.” That memory of ours got you to thinking about your own days in law school:

“Students were called on to recite the assigned cases and explain what point of law should be applied. The professor was a genius at selecting students who hadn’t read the case. Slump in your chair? He noticed it. Sit behind the biggest guy in the class? He would come right back to your desk and ask. Bluff your way through by sitting upright and looking eager? It was almost a 100 percent certainty he would call on you. Law class soon became one I was always ready for, thanks to the professor with the piercing eyes.”

My own imposing professor-of biology-was named Mary Warters, who taught and inspired for almost half a century, 1927-71, at Centenary College just south of the (state) border in Louisiana.

Dr. Warters must have turned out a good part of every entering class at the LSU and Tulane medical schools during those years. She was the finest teacher I’ve ever had, bar none, regardless of subject. Clear, direct, she made the complex simple and the involved as plain as the unforgettable drawings she’d dash off in colored chalk every class.

She taught even me a little biology and genetics, which have stood me in good stead of late in the debate over the use of human embryos for stem cell research.

Dr. Warters had no politics you could tell, thank goodness, but she did have an iron Presbyterian will that would accept no excuses, evasions, or equivocations. You knew or you didn’t know. She could tell. And you’d better know. Behind that soft Georgia accent there lay an absolute intolerance for the slurred answer, the shoddy evasion, and laziness in anything.

A widely recognized researcher in genetics, Dr. Warters spent her summers at national laboratories like those at Oak Ridge and Bar Harbor experimenting with drosophila melanogaster-that’s fruit flies to you and me-in the days before DNA, the double helix, and the human genome project were all over the papers. What a heyday she would have had in our time! There’s now an endowed chair named for her at Centenary, and to this day her old students pronounce her name with a silent aura around it. Mucha mujer! What a woman!

More than the knowledge and skills she imparted with such unsparing clarity, it was the inner change Mary Warters sought to make in her students that they would come to value in the years to come-a respect, indeed awe, before the mysteries of Nature and Nature’s God. She didn’t just pass on information, but tried to plant the seeds of wisdom-if her students would but cultivate it in their lives.

Kingsley Amis, the delightful English author, has a character in a novel about academic life note that the one word that summed up everything that had gone wrong with the world in his time was “workshop.” In our time, the most depressing phrase in what’s now laughingly called higher education has to be “skill sets.”

Even now the University of Arkansas is trying to vivisect its once impressive liberal-arts curriculum, reducing it to a series of required courses for specialized vocations. The university seems more concerned, indeed obsessed, with the sheer number of certified, degreed graduates it can churn out than whether they’re educated.

The university’s administrators would do better to study its great teachers, and try to understand why even those students who aren’t planning to major in their favorite professor’s specialty may be enriched, broadened and inspired by his-or her-intellect and spirit.

How blessed we both have been, Dear Close Reader, in our teachers.

Thanks for the memories,

Dear Spammer,

It was wholly a pleasure, and provocation, to be offered reprint rights to the articles you’re circulating on behalf of the Center for a Stateless Society.

Thanks but no thanks. Statelessness, far from a goal that society should strive for, is a condition no one I’ve known who’s actually been stateless would ever envy. Just ask the Palestinians. Or any surviving Jewish refugee from the days before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Sincerely, and ever grateful for the United States of America, Inky Wretch -

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.