Stalin vs. Otis Redding
BEST LECTURER Winning Ryerson professor shows students how to use their hearts to navigate history’s horrors, writes Patrick Evans
e teaches “ death and
destruction” — and
does it with such flair
that his students remain enthralled for all two hours of his class.
He’s 40- year- old Arne Kislenko, Ryerson University hotshot historian and winner of TVOntario’s Best Lecturer competition. The contest was an academic slugfest that began a year ago, when students from colleges and universities across the province sent TVOntario the names of more than 300 of their most adored teachers. The list was chopped down by the network’s panel to 10 finalists, whose pre- taped lectures ran, two at a time, for five weeks on the show Big Ideas. ( Think Canadian Idol
with tweed jackets
Hand elbow patches.) Viewers graded the lecturers by phone or Internet, and yesterday’s show declared a winner: Kislenko and his lecture on Russia during World War II.
Here’s the kicker. Kislenko, 40, is a Ryerson professor.
Ryerson, the Toronto school famously slagged as “ Rye High,” toppled all the renowned Ontario ivory towers.
Ryerson students decided the school wasn’t doing enough to promote their professor in the competition, so they launched a campaign to drum up support on campus. They hung posters done in the style of Soviet propaganda with Kislenko’s face on them. One poster read: “ Join the Kislenko revolution.” On the ratemyprofessors.ca website, Kislenko garnered a red- pepper “ hottness” rating.
For the contest, he addressed Russia’s Cold War mentality as shaped by World War II. His talk aired against a York University musicology professor’s rockin’ analysis of an Otis Redding song. By rights, Kislenko should have been massacred.
“ Stalin vs. Otis Redding,” laughs one of Ryerson student, Anna Bridges. “It seems like Otis should win hands down.”
In his lecture, York musicologist Rob Bowman worked the room in a patterned hippie shirt that had big, billowy sleeves. His joy in his subject matter had him blasting like a furnace in the face of his students, running out from behind an improvised DJ booth to tell them how to feel Otis Redding in their intellects as well as in their guts. By comparison, Kislenko was like a stone. A man of solid build, he wore head- to- toe black, he says, “ because it was slimming.”
That black- clad shape in front of a giant lecture hall whiteboard made him look like a depressed existentialist floating in a white void. But then, in just a few beats, Kislenko owned the room — owned the living rooms, too, where Ontarians watched him on TV.
“ There’s a very human appeal to him,” says Ron Stagg, chair of Ryerson’s history department. “ It’s his delivery, his way of taking ( students) into the material and making it very humanscale. How can you comprehend 30 million dead (Russians)? He’s able to bring it down.”
In his TVOntario lecture, Kislenko said: “ I know it’s almost unimaginable. The size of Canada disappears in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944.”
His lecture was dangerously depressing. A grandmother shot dead defending her home with a pitchfork. Starving Russians eating wallpaper paste before succumbing to cannibalism. But Kislenko’s decency seemed to rule his words, showing his students how to use their hearts to navigate the carnage. Even when Russian soldiers raped and murdered their way to Berlin, they were rarely just “ soldiers” in Kislenko’s vocabulary. They were “ boys, 17 or 18 years old,” dying in droves on the front lines as their family homes burned to the ground far behind them.
Kislenko says that when the heart in the horror isn’t enough to bring his students back from the brink, it’s time for a joke.
At one point, with giddy frivolity, he asks: “ Can you imagine dating Stalin?”
Kislenko says the gag had his colleagues rolling their eyes when they watched the show. But he insists the levity is essential. “ I teach death and destruction.”
In his office is a clipping from a tabloid newspaper with a doctored photo of Hitler looking sulky in a dress and high heels. Kislenko plans to use it as a teaching aid.
“ You’ve got to show them this picture,” Kislenko laughs, “ because it’s Hitler in a dress. Come on, it’s self- evident.”
History student Bridges says TVOntario gave viewers only a taste of the man’s style.
“ The challenge in a one- hour spot is to capture the enthusiasm and energy he builds up in a two- hour lecture.” Kislenko’s win means he brings $10,000 back to Ryerson’s history department, but Bridges says his celebrity there is already well established.
“ When you go to his office during office hours, there’s always a line- up of 10 people.”