by Guy Stern
Drawing on my acquaintance with Ms. Beasley, then the executive secretary of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, I acquired affordable tickets annually for performances of Don Carlo as a supplement to our reading of the Schiller play, which was the inspiration for the Verdi opera. One student, seeking perhaps a greater recognition for Jewish achievements, pointed out that the two protagonists of the opera, Don Carlo and Rodrigo, were routinely played by Richard Tucker and Robert Merrill, two Jewish opera singers. Perhaps he, like I, felt the last vestiges of Columbia’s biases. Our bookstore, for example, displayed advertising brochures supplied by hotels and travel agencies with the telltale epilogue. “Churches nearby,” a euphemism for “Jews, please go elsewhere.” I took one of the brochures and showed it to the clerk who had waited on me and told him about my concern. He wasn’t authorized to remove any display, he told me. I asked to see the manager, who first explored my standing in the Columbia hierarchy, probably found it wanting, and talked down to me. He dismissed me by saying he found “nothing offensive” in those brochures. As to other vestiges of anti-Semitism, I’d heard of the Fascist predilections of some of the former, and not yet inactive, faculty. I should emphasize once more, however, that our students seemed virtually untouched by the virus of prejudice, at least when it came to Jews. One year I placed third in the annual student popularity contest, which for mysterious reasons—unknown to me then and now—was dubbed the “Ugly Man Contest.”
On the other hand, the student body at the time contained only a sprinkling of African American students, and that meant an even more minute number in our German classes. In fact, I can recall only two. One was an older student, who had performed in German cabarets and spoke German almost without an accent. The other one stuttered, but as he became more fluent in German through conversation classes and steady attendance at our Kaffeestunde, another department activity, this speech defect disappeared completely when he spoke German instead of his native English.
I was lucky landing my first professorship, even then jobs did not grow on trees—or in the foliage of ivy-covered walls. There were only two such positions open in 1956, and the competitors, as I found out later, included the young teacher-poet Richard Exner and the subsequently preeminent scholar Walter Sokel. I got the job at Denison University in Ohio aleatorily, or vulgo, as a fluke. The interviewing Denison department head, Walter Secor, also a Columbia Ph.D., consulted a Columbia French professor, Otis Fellows, one of his former teachers. The latter knew and endorsed me because he had been on my dissertation committee.
Early on during my nine years at Denison, I discovered a model that became a lifetime inspiration. Paul Tillich (a Protestant this time rather than a Catholic theologian like Father Reeve) came to Denison and held an entire campus in thrall. I have told this story previously in the Millennium Issue of PLMA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, but I think it bears repeating. In 1957, Tillich, theologian, philosopher, historian, art critic, and humanist, burst upon that small liberal arts college like an intellectual pyrotechnist. He held forth on religion, art history, philosophy, music, and history, before steadily growing crowds of students and faculty. Finally, only the auditorium could hold the retinue of this benign Pied Piper.
Our German students, the last group to meet with him, came to sit at his feet in one of the sorority houses. He began with a short, jargon-free discussion in German about the need for a greater emphasis on ethics in the curriculum, and then encouraged questions. He listened intently to each question, no matter how naïve or linguistically imperfect. He rephrased and polished it till it glowed. Then he answered it at length, turned to the student with a thoughtful mien, and added by way of a compliment: “Thank you for that question; it truly gave me a good deal to think about.” The thirty to forty students, as I observed in the weeks ahead, changed during that encounter with a great personality and teacher. They had been uplifted by his respect and his responsiveness. In short, if Jack Stein had taught me never to put down a student, Paul Tillich taught the even greater lesson that good teaching consists in uplifting students and thus inspiring them. I have, in all the years afterward, at least strived for that goal.
Denison, of which I think fondly, inculcated me with yet another fragment of pedagogical know-how on which I, needless to say, have no monopoly. Variety, I learned, is the spice of teaching. Of course with the technological aides we have now, that aim is attained with far less physical effort. I still see myself lugging a record player to my classrooms to present to my students the musical numbers mentioned in a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann about a protagonist who might be the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, returning to earth as a spirit. My 78-rpm recording made it happen! Another valuable adjunct to teaching was a custom called the Weekly Language Table. Each language area reserved a room at the campus cafeteria one night a week and gathered its students for a joined meal where only the target language was spoken. I introduced a cultural program each week, ranging from an operetta recital by our music professor Dale Moore to films. Or I disc-jockeyed the records of Marlene Dietrich, who induced wild enthusiasm among our students and, conversely, indignation at her risqué repertoire from a stiff-collared professor from Germany and now a member of the Denison faculty.
The most singular extracurricular learning experience for the Denison students and me would be hard but not impossible to replicate today. I learned that the renowned Gustav Gründgens Theater Troupe, starring Gründgens himself in his famous role as Mephistofeles, was coming over from Germany in guest performances of Faust at Carnegie Hall in New York. I corralled the college’s transportation officer and asked him how I could get my students to New York. “We could charter a bus,” he replied, in the unbureaucratic manner of yesteryear. Not a seat remained unsold. Faculty from other departments joined us and we witnessed one of the most memorable Faust performances, I exaggerate not, of the century. We’d arranged in advance to meet with the cast after the performance. Finally, we topped off our New York adventure with a reception at the Goethe House, where the poet Hans Egon Holthusen gave us a private poetry reading. A busload of Denisonians, heady with excitement, returned to small town Granville, Ohio, the following day.
Frankly, I was the initiator of that teaching experience but did little teaching myself. I had planned to give forth with a post-performance commentary on the bus’s intercom system during the return trip, but my students were either asleep or had, on the spur of the moment, discovered or rediscovered a romantic interest in one of their fellow students. But on another occasion, skills hitherto slumbering inside me were demanded. On the last day before the Christmas break, I decided that we would treat the campus to German Christmas carols. I ordered multiple copies of a brochure of seasonal German songs. The day before the holiday break, we went from building to building, with me conducting the carols in the happy-go-lucky style of a cheerleader. Our lively event became a campus tradition for a while, but with more skilled conductors leading the chorus.
I truly liked the campus atmosphere and experience at Denison in picturesque Granville, despite the fact that during my first year there I taught eighteen credit hours, and when I left, I still was only down to twelve each semester. When I started, I was teaching at every level from beginning German to senior level literature courses. Finally, our department head realized that the teaching of such an avalanche and variety of courses would make me look for greener pastures, and on my recommendation hired a German-born Yale graduate to ease my load, which included a course for which there were, at the time, few precedents or guidelines. It was called German Area Studies, the precursor to German Cultural History. I must confess here that I drew heavily on some of the materials about Germany that had been distributed to intelligence personnel during my years in the service. They had been developed, as I found out later, by those highbrow intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School, while its members were working as civilians for the US Office of War Information. Whole sections of their writings could be adapted for c
lassroom lectures. For example, they had brilliantly analyzed the propagandistic means that had undergirded the Nazis’ rise to power and that proliferated during the years of Hitler’s dictatorship. Their demagoguery gave me a chance to show how critical thinking could have exposed the deceptive methods of Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda. I also confess that I obtruded my own army experiences upon my classes. I felt at times that we, the Ritchie Boys, had entered history.
This course on Cultural History became part of my repertoire until the day I retired. Toward the end of my career, at Wayne State, I was able to add a new feature to my teaching of German culture. During visits to Munich, I had made the acquaintance of a member of the Cabinet of the State of Bavaria. Dr. Otto Wiesheu was then the Minister for the Interior. I noticed during our friendship that he and his wife, Roswitha nee Sprenzinger, were masters of communication. A thought struck me. Wouldn’t they be a wonderful team of visitors to my classes on German Cultural History? Of course, that was easier thought than done. They weren’t about to visit America. Fortunately, a presentation I attended on the latest advances in teaching technologies informed me that you could now have a two-way conversation with people in a faraway country. Today, of course, such communications are commonplace, but back then it seemed a stunning development.
I phoned the Wiesheus home to ask if they would be willing to come to Wayne State’s Munich Office, which housed our junior year in Germany program, and from there speak to my students. They agreed, and my students greeted the possibility to ask direct questions of a German government official. The former director of our Language Lab, Farouk Alameddine, and Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan, director of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology, made it all happen. The reception was perfect; the students had well-thought-out questions at their fingertips, and our Bavarian friends told me later that they felt challenged and rewarded by being quizzed by our Wayne State students. It was a hit!
But I have raced the clock. Still to be told is the story of my change of universities, from Denison to the University of Cincinnati, and from there to Wayne State. After nine years in Granville, and after a taste of invigorating contact with graduate students during guest lectures at the University of Munich (where I had spent a year and a half as a Fulbright Research Professor), I felt the need to teach in a German or Comparative Literature graduate department. I applied for and secured the position of professor and department head at the University of Cincinnati, a quick promotion even in those halcyon days for a teacher.
The experience I had assembled at Denison stood me in good stead at the ten times larger municipal University of Cincinnati. I only had to apply the microstructures of a small liberal arts college to the macro infrastructure of a huge university. The socializing of the German table became an activity of the German Honorary Society Delta Phi Alpha. The informal collegiate conversations in the Student Union took on the formal structure of scheduled programs: one for undergraduates, one for graduate students and faculty, both on a once-a-month basis. Would you believe that we had Kathleen Battle, later an opera diva but then a music student at the University of Cincinnati, give a recital of lieder for our German club? Or that we were able to corral Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson, Germany’s most eminent authors, for a reading on the same evening? Or that Lotte Lenya consented to head a cast of our Theater Department for an unforgettable performance of “Brecht on Brecht”? Or that a German theater group would twice give guest performances in our theater building? Those then were the new dimensions of learning and teaching beyond the classroom.
But again classroom teaching was paramount, and I introduced and participated in some experiments. Knowing that beginning teachers, including graduate assistants, have a penchant for using extended grammar explanations as a security blanket, I banished grammar lessons from four-out-of five days of our multiple-section beginning and intermediate courses and had them congeal on Fridays into two to three master sessions with an experienced professor, including me, purveying all the grammar for that week. Halfway through the semester, we turned that task over to some of the most promising graduate assistants, who had in the meantime observed the experienced teachers. My credo of model setting was once more in full operation. As a corollary my credo also argues for the efficacy of the Equal Opportunity Act. A diverse faculty will set exemplars for various distinct groups within the student body. With some gentle chivying of our administration, our German Department was one of the few with an African American professor, Alfred Cobbs, coming out of the ranks of our graduate students.
I introduced a course on exile literature, one of the few to be on the curriculum of American universities in those early years. Also, the new theories of literature were making their way on our campus as they were across the nation. In 1975 when I was granted a yearlong National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the German novel, I had the crazy idea of trying theories which, at first glance, would seem all but inappropriate for a given text. With varying success we tried a sociological approach to Goethe’s Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther), forced structuralism on Hilde Spiel’s exile novel Lisas Zimmer (Liza’s Room), and imposed deconstruction on a Zeitroman (Novel of Contemporaneity) by Barbara Frischmuth. I stretched a course on the works of Bertolt Brecht across an entire academic year and team-taught a course on German literature with Professor Fishbein of psychology. This adventure in team-teaching also gave birth to the not entirely welcome side effect of being psychoanalyzed by a colleague. “You are guilt-ridden,” he said after one seminar. “Curse the Nazis, not yourself!”
Sometimes these seemingly inappropriate approaches can reveal hidden aspects of a work of literature. For example, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, the sociologists tell us, the character’s suffering springs not only from a thwarted love affair but also from his frustration with a calcified social hierarchy. I enjoy these insights, but I must also admit that I remain committed to my earliest approach to literature: “explication de texte,” meaning: Let the text speak for itself!
This decision was not an easy one. I was well-liked at Cincinnati and had made an easy transition to a vice-presidential level under a new president, Warren Bennis, a well-known specialist in management. I got along with him, because we were kindred minds who strongly favored the humanities and the arts. Our close relationship also allowed me to make a significant appointment on campus. As university dean of graduate studies and research, which allowed me to teach one graduate-level course, I felt comfortable in my position, but I also learned my limitations. I realized I was sorely in need of the assistance of an academician with an educational background in the natural sciences, in order to help me with decisions such as the consideration of grant applications. I met with Warren to make a request for the appointment of an associate dean with a specialty in the sciences. I also told him about my concerns that our university’s administrative structure needed to be enhanced with minority members, who were well qualified. He readily agreed.
Among the many applicants there was a highly qualified African-American, Albert C. Yates. He was a magna cum laude graduate with a B.S. in physics, chemistry, and math from Memphis State University and a Ph.D. in “Theoretical Chemical Physics” from Indiana University, where he was then a professor of chemistry. Dr. Yates accepted the University of Cincinnati’s offer to come on board. Albert and I worked well together.
Whenever we needed to attend meetings of the Ohio Board of Regents in Columbus, we would drive together. These hours in the car provided time for conversation and sharing of our life stories with one another. At the moment I am remembering one particular exchange, which makes me smile. In a restaurant at which we had stopped for a meal en route there was a menu item that neither of us was familiar with. Albert inquired as to what it was. The waitress’s answer didn’t really clarify what it was, but Albert, nevertheless, said to the waitress, “I’ll try it.” It was the perfect moment for me to rejoinder, “Now I know, you really are an experimental scientist!.” We could r
elax and have fun like this, although, of course, the majority of our time spent together was involved with the serious matters of our positions as dean and associate dean.
One of our mutual successes was in winning the approval of the Board of Regents for the University of Cincinnati to add a degree in Medical Communications to the curriculum of the School of Medicine. This was a blossoming new digital age arena, which enables physicians to confer through internet channels instantaneously—even in the operating room.
Sadly, as so often happens in life, we lost touch because of the demands of our professions and our families. In a recent phone conversation renewing our too-long-neglected friendship, I discovered Albert had gone on to become the chancellor of Colorado State University, from which he retired in 2003. We reminisced for a moment and then he said, “I’m so glad to hear from you. You opened the door for me.” Since his retirement Albert has remained very active, and he has received awards for his continuing contributions.
Albert advanced diversity at both the University of Cincinnati and at Colorado State University. In addition to many other programs at Colorado State, he was instrumental in developing the Albert C. Yates Leadership Institute, which was named in his honor. He opened the doors for many.
