Performer with a Passion

The fierce old professor who received the new English instructor at Amherst College that day in 1903 obviously wanted to be cordial, but instead he only growled. "I wish you luck in your teaching," he said, "but you probably won't have any. You will tell your students to study certain pages, and when you meet them you'll ask questions to see whether they obeyed you. If they really have, you'll congratulate them and give them a good mark. Bosh!" But as it turned out, that was not the sort of teaching the new man was to do at all.

His name was John Erskine and he was no page-assignment teacher. After a few years at Amherst, he moved on to Columbia University to become one of the most noted and notable men on the faculty. He was a spiky-haired scholar, with a hulking figure, a florid face, and a cold contempt for the dull and dimwitted. His lectures on literature were polished performances, in which Erskine paused only to chuckle before dropping one of his epigrams, or to stare icily at some latecomer making his way to a seat. Students flocked to hear him, and in the evenings, if he happened to be monologuing at some club or commons room, crowded about his chair.

Flashing Arguments. But John Erskine was a good deal more than a performer. He had a passion for great books and great ideas ("Every gentleman owns books," he once snorted at a student) and that was what he wanted to pass on to his students. And so, one day in 1917, at an "otherwise dull faculty meeting," he proposed a revolutionary plan. He wanted to start a special course on the greatest books of Western civilization. It was not to be a course of lectures with knowledge served up predigested by the professor. It was to be a series of discussions which would give students of every aptitude a common understanding of their culture and of how its ideas came to be.

Though some professors howled against the scheme, the course on important books was begun. In class, John Erskine was his old self, drawing students into flashing arguments (he once reduced Mortimer Adler, now an eminent University of Chicago professor and an important-books man himself, to tears). He urged them on to "nobler loves and nobler cares." As the course grew, younger teachers--Poet Mark Van Doren, Philosopher Irwin Edman, Historian Jacques Barzun, Critic Lionel Trilling and Philosopher Mortimer Adler --came to help him.

Speeding Scandal. This week, many of John Erskine's devoted associates gathered at Columbia to celebrate the 30th anniversary of what had come to be known, somewhat long-windedly, as Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books. The course had grown since Erskine left it to devote himself to writing after his novel, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, became a bestseller. It had been extended, via Columbia's humanities course, to all Columbia College students. The idea had traveled to the University of Chicago (with Adler), to St. Johns College in Annapolis, Md. and to scores of other colleges. It had spread to thousands of classes for adults in The Great Books. It was a plan of study that had helped lift U.S. higher education up from the patchwork of specialties and superficials it had become.

This week, however, one man was missing from the anniversary dinner. Seventy-year-old John Erskine, who suffered a stroke last fall, was gravely ill at home. "A good teacher is so rare," he once wrote, "that the rumor of him spreads with the speed of scandal." After 30 years, with or without him, John Erskine's scandal was still going strong.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.