Posted by Susan Jansen on May 11, 2001 at 18:49:50 from 152.163.197.43 :
He was his own masterpiece. Academics live by and, too often, for words. Some of us even like to delude ourselves into believing that there are right words; and that it is our duty to find them. Yet, in times like this, when they are most needed, they are most difficult to locate. I know that at some point in the near future I will need to write much more fully about my memories of Ed, and his influences on my own life, scholarship, and pedagogy. But for now, let add my voice to the chorus of those who have said that knowing him changed their lives. When I took my first class with him over forty years ago, college was a vast stretch for any working class kid, let alone a female. No matter! He expected the best of all of his students, instructing us to produce “masterpieces.” Terrorized and inspired by impossible expectations, but also buoyed by his contagious intellectual enthusiasm, I did my best. He encouraged me to consider graduate school. I wasn’t even sure what that was. No matter! He arranged a graduate assistantship. Without those long ago classes and clashes with Ed, I would be a different person today; and I would have lived a very different life. Thanks Ed!
Contest defined our pedagogical relationship; the ancient Greeks would have called Ed’s approach to teaching, at least in the early years, “agonistic.” It involved fierce struggles, intellectual contests that can be best described as athletic, sometimes humiliation and even agony: he is the only professor who ever brought me close to tears. Nonetheless his scholarship and pedagogy left an indelible mark on my own: sometimes as example, sometimes as counter-example. I cannot count the times I’ve heard myself say to my students, “I once had a professor who…” I use those stories about Ed, or should I say, “early Ed,” as a foil to raise the bar for my students: to encourage them to reach beyond themselves, to strive for their own masterpieces.