Profs Without Pitchers*

* With full and complete apologies to whoever ran the "Pitchers and Profs" programs at the Overcup Oak.

Offered for your consideration are some very random recollections of just a few of the lecturers and professors. (For those of you who were, for instance, Nursing, Pre-Med and Engineering students, please accept my apologies in advance, since these memories are drawn from experiences that are by necessity heavily weighted on the A&S side of the house. If you don't like it...well, you'll get over it. Time heals all wounds.)

John Lachs: Several years ago, Professor Lachs wrote a book aptly entitled "In Love With Life." If you have not read it and if you were half the fan of Dr. Lachs that many of us philosopher-kings-and-queens were, then trust me on this: you really need to read this book. It is just like the best of his lectures: distilled and erudite to their essence, humorous and sometimes poignant, but always full of deep insights and wisdom. He'd have half the class giggling like schoolkids when he'd pepper some otherwise-dry reference to John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham's theories with a way-out hedonistic comment like, "To the Utilitarians, this is a very good thing: to them, it's just as good as getting stoned out of your mind on Friday night. Or, like you just had really great sex." (I always figured that the half of us who were laughing were doing so nervously, as we had little or no practical experience with either of those things. Or, I figured, somebody else actually had, and they got the inside joke. One never really knew.)

Madame Popovich: Fine Arts program. A brilliant woman and Yugoslavian emigre with a categorical and, as best I could tell, darn-near-photographic memory when it came to art of the classical and pre-Renaissance periods, but she did not take distractions, interruptions or whispering in class at all well. Mme. P. never hesitated to stop class in mid-sentence to lecture the offenders sharply. A sampling of this follows: "The next slide is of a ....Quiet, you children!!! I am not your kindergarten teacher!!! Now, what was I saying? Yesss...the next slide is of a fine Doric temple...."

Robert H. Birkby: He must have educated more lawyers of the future than any other Vanderbilt professor outside of the Law School. His Constitutional Interpretation and American Political Thought classes had a fearsome reputation, and Dr. Birkby was allegedly Kingsbury of "The Paper Chase," Dean Roscoe Pound and Gen. Patton rolled into one. He had an amazing stunt, replicated daily, that could not be repeated at VU anymore. That is the case because, you'll recall, once upon a time in Vandyland, professors could smoke in class--and smoke, Bob Birkby most certainly did. When he finished a cigarette, he'd take a brief glance at its remnants to ensure he'd smoked up all its last dregs; deftly flick it to the floor with a snap of the wrist; and while he leaned on his desk or podium, his right foot would snap out, squash the stub, and with a quarter-turn side kick that would do Beckham or Pele proud, sent the stomped-out butt careening some 6 to 7 feet into the halls of Calhoun's 3rd floor as it passed under his classroom's doorjamb. He did this entire drill--I swear, I am not making any of this up--in about 3 seconds of elapsed time. Passers-by unused to this routine would do a double-take as the spent butt whooshed by their feet. One day, the guy who was the supreme wiseass of the Poli Sci undergrads, and the local Miller beer campus rep, waited until Birkby did his usual procedure with his last cigarette. Imagine the look on Prof. Birkby's face as the same butt came whooshing back under his door, mere seconds after he had kicked it out.

Prof. Thweatt: Economics was not an area of the curriculum that came naturally to many of us, but at least he made macroeconomics kind of fun. (OK, that's qualified somewhat by admitting that he made it as fun as it can be to a non-economist.) He was fond of peppering his allusions to economic choice theory by giving students a choice between various kinds of Scotch whisky versus Jack Daniel's. Mel Thweatt was no great fan of Reaganomics trickle-down economics, and he made that quite clear in his lectures. (Before I saw it written on a bathroom wall in Sarratt Center, I heard someone mumble in his class, "The Laffer Curve is a joke.") Prof. Thweatt had been a real globetrotter and apparently lived in India for some years, references to which he would also drop into his lectures occasionally.

Professor Delzell: Dr. Delzell was the expert on Modern European History in the History Department, and he never ceased to cause people to squirm when he talked about Hitler's sex life or horse lovers to whimper when he talked about rioting Parisians in the 1930s trying to cut the legs of soldiers' horses with razors taped to poles. He encouraged his classes to sit in on some showings that the Fine Arts program featured of classical movies and documentaries like "Night and Fog," "The Grand Illusion" and "The Battleship Potemkin," which was a very ecumenical way to encourage inter-disciplinary studies. Besides learning much history, one could also end up with a better overall cultural appreciation by taking Dr. Delzell's suggestions on these great films to heart. While the map of Europe--complete with all rivers and mountain ranges--that he had his students prepare at the beginning of Modern European History was an utter pain to construct, the general knowledge it provided of European terrain proved useful with the Iron Curtain's fall and the conflicts in the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia.

Professor Bryant: One of the stalwarts of the Mathematics Department, he was just about the only teacher I ever had, whether in or before college, who actually had me enjoying mathematics. Professor Bryant was also one of the kindliest professors I ever encountered at Vanderbilt. Having him as a teacher and lecturer was much like being patiently taught some very difficult tasks by your favorite uncle, who also just happened to have a passing physical resemblance to the late comic actor Ed Wynn. Every time I have to do anything in my work that deals with statistics or probability, I still think fondly of him and his TA, almost 30 years later.

Harry Howe Ransom: A Political Science Department member and cousin, I believe, of the great Vanderbilt Fugitive John Crowe Ransom: instead of looking at his students' faces while lecturing, he would kind of gaze upwards, as if he was looking at something hovering collectively over the heads of the class. (It was speculated that in doing so, he was actually carrying on an invisible conversation with McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan or one of those other diplomat-statesmen.) Nevertheless, his criticisms of the CIA and U.S. intelligence system--he had been an expert witness for Sen. Frank Church's Congressional committee, which investigated the 1960s and 1970s intelligence failures that contributed to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis of our own college days--were spot-on at the time and seem remarkably prescient now, in that he posited that the intelligence system was structured to give our leaders exactly the kind of information that the policymakers wanted to hear--not what they needed to hear. This occurred 25 years before most Americans had ever heard of words like "stovepiping." Or "waterboarding," for that matter. One can muse on the fact that the title of one of the textbooks he used was called "The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked."

We'll save other memories for another time. Until we talk again...Vaya con Dios, folks.