Fond memories of the great teachers I have known

It’s not easy to choose the most ignorant comment of the month during these dog days of August, but surely a remark by the Hon. Paul LePage, governor of the Great State of Maine, must rank up or rather down there. He dismissed teachers as “a dime a dozen” employees as he opened a new vocational school in his state. If only that were so, but it isn’t — especially in his state, which is facing a shortage of teachers, not a surplus. Quality never comes cheap, especially in education, and good teachers are as scarce as ever in this country.

The best teacher I ever encountered, or rather the one who encountered an unpromising me, had to be Mary Warters at Centenary College of Louisiana in my hometown of Shreveport.

Warters was largely responsible for filling the seats of every entering class of Louisiana State University’s medical school because of her diligence and devotion. I opted to head across the (state) border to Missouri, as in University of, where the history faculty seemed to consist entirely of professors who were either on their way to teach at places like Stanford or the Sorbonne or on their way back from Oxford and Cambridge.

The remarkable thing about those teachers was not their scholarship, though theirs was indeed remarkable, but the immense care and patience they took with us students. To cite just one example of many: There was the professor who taught a freshman survey course in American history, James L. Bugg, who hailed from Virginia. I was fortunate enough to have had a reading course with him.

Being a Virginian, Bugg was a devotee of Jefferson, but he told me to read, among other works, Henry Adams’ “History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson.” That would be Henry Adams, the great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy, son of Charles Francis Adams, and naturally enough a thoroughgoing critic of everything that Jefferson, his great-grandfather’s nemesis, ever thought, said or did.

Henry Adams’ beautifully crafted words reached across time and turned me into an Adams/Hamilton Federalist, which in due turn led to my becoming successively a Henry Clay Whig and then a Lincoln Republican, right through the successive conservative chain of ideas in American history to the present day.

Bugg questioned me closely about the Federalist positions I defended. He didn’t just tolerate but encouraged opinions different from his own. He even took me on as a graduate assistant. I wonder if such a thing would be possible now, in our ideologically driven day.

Now I realize how blessed I was to have encountered such teachers. At the time I took it as a matter of course. Talk about spoiled; I thought all graduate schools were like that. I found out they weren’t when I went on to an Ivy League school. Columbia University in the early 1960s was quite a step from the University of Missouri in the late 1950s. Quite a step down. At Columbia, ideology was already all. For even then, education was rapidly giving way to indoctrination. Fail to toe the party line and you’d pay the price.

However devoted my teachers at Missouri were to their own carefully considered and deeply held ideas, their devotion to their students was greater. I pictured my old teachers again when I came across an article not long ago by a professor named Alan Kors. Its title: “On the Sadness of Higher Education.”

Why sad? Because the professor was remembering the breadth, the openness and the tolerance in general shown by his own professors many years ago and contrasting it with the social agendas, political correctness and dumbing-down of the academy today. The kind of professor Alan Kors so fondly remembers from his days at Princeton, and I remember so gratefully from mine at Mizzou. That kind of college professor is now an endangered if not extinct species on American campuses.

Besides the educational times I spent at the Green Door, where the beer was cheap and the jukebox featured Fats Domino, my fondest memories center around the remarkable history faculty that somehow coalesced at Columbia, Mo., during my student years. I’d gone there to attend journalism school but stayed to study under one of those rare constellations of great teachers that their students always remember. As you, Gentle Reader, would recall bright meteors racing across the night sky.