I’m not sure if anyone remembers the erstwhile Soul-Making Podcast, but I’ve revived it in a somewhat different format for this week in order to bring you a very special guest: my former undergrad professor, Professor Daniel R. Schwarz of Cornell University. Professor Schwarz has taught English at Cornell for 58 years and just recently retired. One morning we sat down together virtually and talked about everything from the evolution of the Ivy League to the ways that pop culture can reveal historical insights to his candid thoughts on grade inflation and the role of teachers in the lives of their students.
The transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is below.
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Ramya
Welcome to Soul Making, a newsletter where I, Ramya Yandava, draw on insights from literature, art, and culture to unlock the wisdom and whimsy of everyday life at soulmaking.xyz. Today, I’m doing something a little different. I’m interviewing Professor Daniel R. Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. Professor Schwarz was my professor when I was an undergrad at Cornell, where I took his classes on modernism and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he served as my thesis advisor for my honors thesis. At Cornell, Professor Schwarz has taught undergraduate and graduate students since 1968. His most recent books include the nonfiction books, The Story in Fiction and Film: A French Collaboration in the Occupation and Complicity in the Holocaust (1940 to 1944): German Occupation, Vichy, and Truth, Reading the Modern European Novel Since 1900, How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning, and a collection of poetry called The Garden of My Saying. He has recently retired after this past academic year and joins me now to talk about his long career of teaching, thinking, and writing about literature. Professor Schwarz, welcome to the Soul-Making newsletter.
Professor Schwarz
Thanks very much for inviting me, Ramya.
Ramya
Can you describe how you first discovered a love for reading and literature and what led you to your career as an English professor?
Professor Schwarz
Well, I loved reading from a very young age, and even when I was in high school, I would find time to read books that weren’t part of the assignment. I learned also that for me, at least, reading about people in other times and other places taught me a good deal about sympathy and empathy and how to treat people. So I really believe that a life of reading is an important way to develop one’s skills in life, even when I went to a small college and there were not so many people who knew they wanted to major in English from the outset. I went to Union College in Schenectady, and I also realized that I was a pretty good reader and an insightful reader. Then, when I did my junior year abroad in 1961, I realized that I could keep up with people who had graduated, who were students or graduates from top universities, and so I decided to apply to graduate school at a time when, to be honest, I got a draft exemption because there was a dearth of college professors. But I think the love of literature conjoined with the love of teaching, even when I was a graduate student at Brown. I believe that reading opened the door to understanding people from different nationalities, different times, different values, and I also realized that I loved teaching. That came in my second year in graduate school.
Ramya
Was studying English literature different back then, or were there challenges that you faced then that are different now or that have gone away or become better?
Professor Schwarz
Well, that’s a good question. I think the emphasis on close reading without kind of a political agenda was very much part of my training. I really began as a formalist, namely studying the intricacies of the text and talking about how reading closely meant understanding the relationship between form and content. But there were also, honestly, not so many Jewish professors. The Ivy League did not have any Jewish—very few Jewish professors—until after World War II. The public university is where the Jews were. City College, I think, had as many or more Nobel laureates than Harvard. And I think it’s worth saying that before World War II, there was a strong emphasis really on WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—even Irish and Italians were not so welcome—and so that was part of it. And I think it’s fair to say that Jews were instrumental in opening the doors and windows to people of color, to women, to other people who were outside of the profession. I hear there were no tenured women when I arrived at Brown—I think there was one, Barbara Lewalski, who eventually went to Harvard, but I was very fortunate in that the opportunities were developing when I was going out on the job market. The reason I was hired at Cornell was because I was doing something other people didn’t do, namely theory of the novel. I think you know that the balance of my classes, in part, is a kind of position about humanism and what I call “always the text, and always historicize.” And I think I moved more to historicizing a little bit later in my career, but I was hired because I really was doing something other people weren’t. It was a good job market, and I had interviews at quite a few of the top schools. Right now, there’s much more emphasis on political readings or resistant readings, so that can be gay readings or readings that recognize that the power is in the hands of the elite. Things like that. You look for a particular theme; it’s almost like a kind of Braille. You sort of look through the text for shapes that you recognize, and that kind of reading can become reductive—not necessarily, but it’s what’s called hermeneutics of suspicion, that you look for what the author left out, and this is valuable and important, but I’m not sure it’s the only way. An example would be “The Secret Sharer” by Conrad. When I was taught “The Secret Sharer,” there was really not a gay reading, even though the men are sleeping in the same bed. And when I did a collection for Bedford on “The Secret Sharer” and asked four well-known scholars—I edited it and also contributed a couple of the essays—we all noticed that. Nobody noticed it when I was in graduate school in 1968, but in the ’90s none of us could write about “The Secret Sharer” without mentioning that. This would be an example of how texts change.
Ramya
You spoke about how your approach to literature made you stand out, and I remember your humanistic criticism really resonating with me. How did you gravitate to that approach, and how did it develop over time?
Professor Schwarz
Well, the humanistic perspective was really still foregrounded when I was in graduate school. Probably one of my best-known books is The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller, which sounds wonky but really kind of had an impact because before it was published, some parts of it were published in the leading deconstructive journal Diacritics and also a leading humanistic journal Sewanee Review. I was very fortunate to kind of carve that out. What I argued is that there was theory before theory, and that the profession didn’t only belong to one group. That was both a controversial and a successful book. I would say I’ve always stressed that literature is by humans, for humans, and about humans, and I was somewhat skeptical of people who were writing about literature as if it was a verbal game. I think that was part of it, and probably part of it comes from just who I am—someone you know who likes interactions with students and who looks them in the eye when we talk. I would say that humanism was also something—there was a strong tradition of that in literary criticism, and certainly Mike—M. H. Abrams, who was probably the most influential person at Cornell—was part of that. I also was in the Aristotelian school, which emphasized formal analysis and asked questions about what genre we were reading. So I would say that the humanistic tradition kind of goes back from Abrams to Lionel Trilling and maybe includes Leavis. The Aristotelian tradition takes us back to people like Wayne Booth and R.S. Crane, and I was kind of identified with that group, which was also a group that was very important in the journal Narrative, which I was—you know, I was president of the Narrative society, so I was probably considered not a deconstructionist, and I wrote one essay that was very often read and somewhat controversial on de Man.
Ramya
With all these theories—and it seems like there are always new ones that are emerging—how do literary critics embrace new approaches to literature without falling into what you’ve called “fashionable academic garble”?
Professor Schwarz
Did I call it that? Where did I say that?
Ramya
That was in In Defense of Reading.
Professor Schwarz
Oh, okay. That I like. I like that. I mean, part of what drives academic criticism is the need to say something new, whether it’s true or false, and we try to stay away from that traditional “academic garble.” You also know that I try to write in such ways that people can understand. That’s sort of one of my other mantras, right? I think what drives the profession in some ways is the need to say something new, but sometimes the something new is just old wine in new bottles. It’s not really very new. Certainly feminist criticism and gay criticism and criticism that calls attention to implicit colonialism or implicit male entitlement—all of these things are very much worth pointing out. As you know, I try in my class to be kind of eclectic and talk about those things. We don’t neglect the fact when we talk about Heart of Darkness that we are talking about racism and we are talking about sexism. You know, in Heart of Darkness the women are out of it. This is ridiculous, and so you try to learn from each new school. You don’t oppose it, but you try to keep a balance, and you also understand that some of what drives new “approaches” is the need for graduate students to say something different, and young faculty. So I think, as I’ve said to you in class, you want to think about a bunch of approaches sitting around the table. I mean, I’ve been called an Aristotelian critic, a humanistic critic, a psychoanalytic critic. I don’t worry too much about those things. What I try to avoid is dogmatic criticism, telling students that they can’t do this or they can’t do that, or claiming that other people are 100% wrong. Sometimes we’re all 100% wrong, but most of the time dialogue is fun. We appreciate difference, and even when you’re in the classes you took from me, we brought people with different points of view, and we let them express it. The idea is to open the doors and windows. I like to think of myself not just as a literary professor, but as a kind of public intellectual, which I’ve been called by others, not just me—I’ve written books on The New York Times and New York City culture. I also think there probably is a tendency of academics to sort of burrow into a hole and not be aware of what’s going on in the world, and I’ve tried to possibly—I think this comes from my New York background—I try to keep in touch with as many fields as I can. I’m certainly not very good at tech or fixing things, but things that apply to the general culture I try to keep in touch with and write about as many things as possible.
Ramya
Yeah, I remember in our Modernism class you used to show us various artworks that we looked at in relation to texts that we were reading. In The Story in Fiction and Film of French Collaboration in the Occupation and Complicity in the Holocaust you look at film and TV shows. Do you think that there should be more integration between different areas of the humanities, and should the study of literature broaden to include more forms of narrative media?
Professor Schwarz
Well, not you know, not to be immodest, but my book Reconfiguring Modernism was one of the books, as well as a few others by Wendy Steiner, W. J. T. Mitchell, Charlie Altieri—we kind of set up the field of integrating literature and visual arts. So the short answer is yes. We should be thinking outside the box, and a lot of younger people are working in this field. We weren’t the very first, but the book Reconfiguring Modernism is certainly one of my more influential books, and it called for audience explorations in the relationship between modern art and modern literature. I know quite a bit about painting and sculpture; I’ve studied it. I even at one time thought of a second Ph.D., but I’ve written about it in many different ways. I’m doing it even now; I have a book project that’s going to involve some work on Caravaggio and how we respond to art, as well as TV series, and you’re right, the book The Story in Fiction and Film: A French Collaboration in the Occupation and Complicity in the Holocaust does touch upon many films and artworks, as well as literature, and what that book basically does is show how popular culture changed the story of what happened in World War II in France. After World War II, we found out that 125% of the French were in the Resistance. That’s clearly a joke. Everybody was part of the Resistance, and we let de Gaulle tell that story to prop France up as the Cold War began. But in fact, very, very few people were in the Resistance. Very few, and in fact, many people in France were collaborators, and then as the war turned, they became basically neutral bystanders. So they went from collaborators to bystanders, and then in 1944, when the American and British army were marching down the road after Normandy, they became part of the Resistance. It’s sometimes called “Resistance at quarter to midnight” in France. The actuality is because of the pact between Stalin and Hitler, after the Germans surrendered, the Resistance was mostly Jews. Only after Germany attacked Russia and also began to lose at Stalingrad were the Left even part of the Resistance, and there were a lot of people who collaborated, including painters, okay—Vlamnik, for example. So we find out that the revelation of what happened came from fiction—Modiano won a Nobel Prize—and it came from films, by Malle and Truffaut and a man by the name of Melville, who was actually an American and took on the name Melville. But so the truth of what happened really was revealed by popular culture, somewhat journalism, but we didn’t know, for example, that Mitterrand had been part of the Vichy government. There was so much we didn’t know because we let de Gaulle have his own narrative. De Gaulle was part of Free France, but Free France was much smaller than one thought, and there are even people now who call Vichy Free France, which is absolutely absurd. So this is an interesting way that you use humanistic documents to make historical points.
Ramya
I remember you always saying, “Always the text, and always historicize.” How did you come to get more interested in that historical approach, and why do you see that as important?
Professor Schwarz
Well, as I said, I was trained in the heyday of formalism, close reading. The belief then was that if we all worked hard enough together, we would have one reading. One of the things I believe is that the largest community of readers is one. We all bring different things to a text. This doesn’t mean that I can’t understand a gender-based criticism or somebody whose family comes from Asia’s criticism. Reading teaches us how to read, in a way, and teaches us empathy, so the historicism came I guess as I began to work on projects that required me to know a lot about context. You know, my first book was on Disraeli’s fiction. Obviously you had to know a great deal about his career in government. And I find that how much you need to know to contextualize a text depends upon really what your goal is in reading, and also on different texts. I think you have to—for example, you read Conrad and Joyce with me—you have to really know more about Joyce’s life than you have to know about Conrad’s. You don’t have to know as much about life when you’re studying Wallace Stevens, right, as you do when you’re studying Conrad or Joyce. So, the approach varies from writer to writer, and also from the questions you are asking. I think when I got here, there was a scholar on Hawthorne named Michael Colacurcio. He’s at UCLA. He was doing very historical criticism, and we became close friends, and I think he influenced me on how much you have to know about context, and so did Abrams, the great Romantic scholar. I think I learned that historicism was extraordinarily important and the balance was important. I moved from the kind of pure formalism, the idea that there’s one reading and that we all can work hard on a text and come out with exactly the same thing. That was in vogue when I was a student, and it didn’t allow for reader response and the fact that your emotions and values also shape a text.
Ramya
You mentioned popular culture earlier, and recently we’ve been seeing a lot of hand wringing in public discourse about the “end of reading” or the dawn of a so-called “post-literate” age. Do you feel like literature is under threat now, or is it just evolving and changing?
Professor Schwarz
That’s a good question, Ramya. It’s very hard to predict the future. I mean, we didn’t expect that we would be in what I call the idiocracy of Trump, and the idiocracy certainly discourages talk about books, and we have fewer English majors than when you were here. On the other hand, for example, in the Ulysses seminar, we usually have 18 [students] or something like that. I don’t remember. Is that about how many you were in the class? Yeah, I used to limit it to 15 and then let a few extra in. They’re more likely to come from computer science or from other fields, and more and more of our majors are double majors. But the quality of the students is just as good as when you were here. My experience is that the students read what I give them to read, what I put on the syllabus. Does everybody read everything closely as I would like? Probably not. But I find that students I teach do as well as they ever did and are as interested, if not more so. My classes, as you know, are pretty self-selective. Everybody knows it’s going to be a serious class, and everybody knows that if the students don’t work, I’ll probably invite them to, you know, depart. So, I’ve been fortunate, but maybe because I’ve had recognition I attract students who come to do the work, right? And so I can’t speak for what goes on in other classes. I think that we have grade inflation, and we have some lowering of standards. Some faculty during COVID here and elsewhere didn’t take the time to learn how to do Zoom and sort of didn’t teach as strongly as they might have. At least that’s what I hear from students. So that led to grade inflation, and when the only possible grades in someone’s course are A or A+ or A-, it doesn’t put the pressure on. But your basic question is—I think there’s a core of students who still want to read and still want to seriously take courses in English. I am cognizant of the fact that even at many middle-level universities the humanities are being downsized, but even though we have fewer majors and more double majors, we have a pretty active group. And also, some of these people who come from computer science are as good in English as our English majors, and so the classes are as vital and alive as any I taught at any time.
Ramya
What about the other side, kind of writing as opposed to reading? Do you think that most great literature has already been written, or do you think that somebody like Joyce or Dante or whoever could emerge today?
Professor Schwarz
Yeah, I’m constantly reading in the New York Review and the New Yorker about writers emerging, and we’re much more conscious that literature is being created in different venues, too. I mean, the magic realists in South America, for example. There’s more attention to women, to people from other cultures. I mean, I remember when Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature, writing about the Holocaust. Nobody in this country had ever heard of him. Before I wrote my book, Imagining the Holocaust, I asked quite a few people what they were teaching. Kertész was on nobody’s list. He wins the Nobel Prize. I call Northwestern Press, and they have like 25 copies of the book in stock, and they’ve sold about 25 the last 20 years. And so, you know, there are people for various reasons being rediscovered. When I was in college and probably graduate school, we were very patronizing to Spanish culture. You know, Franco in Spain was a dictator that everybody hated, and most of the South American countries were run by dictators when I was younger, and we didn’t know about, say, Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize from Peru. In fact, [my wife] Marcia and I usually, when we’re on vacation, read a novel together. So one year it was Middlemarch, another year it was The Magic Mountain, another year, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This year we read Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat; we patronized Spanish culture. So things change and evolve, and I think great books are being written every day. The problem is, and you and I want to keep up, but every day more books are being published than we’re going to read in our lifetime. I’ve written a couple of books about the great European tradition, as you know, and even doing that, particularly the first volume, was pretty easy. It was Reading the European Novel to 1900. The second one [Reading the Modern European Novel Since 1900] was more quirky because it’s still being sorted out, even from 1900 to now exactly who the great writers are going to be.
Ramya
What defines a great work of literature for you?
Professor Schwarz
That’s a good question. Turning that question around a little bit, this film on the Odyssey is very interesting because somebody like me sees it through the prism of a whole tradition, and it may be that I agree with T.S. Eliot, that no important work can be viewed outside of the tradition. So this film has clearly generated a lot of discussion. Have you seen it?
Ramya
Yeah, I wrote a review of it a few weeks ago.
Professor Schwarz
Send it to me. I’d love it. But so somebody like me sees it kind of synchronically through the prism of the various translations that I’ve read, plus the Iliad, plus the Aeneid, but also takes into account that just like Nolan kind of reconfigured it, so did Joyce. So for me, it’s through that prism, and also shorter works, like the poem “Ulysses” by Tennyson, the poem that you know that I like by Cavafy, “Ithaka,” the canto in the Inferno where Ulysses is a figure, really a false counselor, because he came back and got all his men to go off, and they all drowned. So what makes great literature? I think it’s something that has resonance for over a period of time and also gives you insight into an imagined world, and the imagined world can be very much related to the real world. I wrote a long chapter in the Holocaust book that we just talked about on French Village, which was a 72-episode video series, very much watched in Spain from 2009 to 2017. This taught the French a great deal about themselves, and this is an important historical work. There’s another series called Babylon Berlin, which gets into the rise of Hitler, and that too is an important series. And books are important when they open the doors and windows to a culture, as Ulysses did to the Irish culture. And also experiments in style can be part of a great book. One Hundred Years of Solitude really gives us a sense of Latin culture. A great work of literature tells you about people, it tells you about time. Another very strong TV series is something called Derry Girls. Have you ever heard of that?
Ramya
Yeah.
Professor Schwarz
That’s a terrific show, and it shows really the individual quirks of adolescence, but it also shows what it’s like to grow up in a period where the Troubles—where there’s violence in society. The Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Protestants are aligned with the British. The Catholics want to leave Northern Ireland—not physically, but they want Northern Ireland to withdraw from the UK and become part of the state of Ireland. You know, it’s a ridiculous arrangement. It would be like where we talked about before we went on the air—New England—if that would still belong to Britain. And it talks about what it is to grow up with a great deal of violence and also stifling Catholicism. So great works tell us things that we don’t know and open the doors and windows to our awareness. But they also can tell us about language—Joyce’s experiments with language in Ulysses and even more so in Finnegans Wake. So—you’ve heard me say this—great works teach us how to read them.
Ramya
Turning to the teaching side of your career, in the dedication of one of your books you thank your students for teaching you. What surprised you about what your students have to teach you?
Professor Schwarz
Well, I think in a seminar you should always be learning. You need to listen to students and realize that they have insights that are valuable, and particularly with Ulysses where I’m supposedly one of the people who’ve taught Ulysses the most in the world, I still find every time through it there’s learning. I mean, your honors thesis had a kind of a psychological depth that I appreciated and was different from other honors theses. You appreciate students finding their own voice. My job is to grow young adults, teaching them how to think for themselves, teaching them to value their own insights. Teaching is collaborative, just like really reading is. Reading is a transaction between the book and the person reading it. Teaching is a transaction between the teacher and the students. I hope students realize that I respect their opinions, and also that we try to teach them to read better and more closely. I would say that’s my job: to teach them to write better, to think more powerfully and independently, and to take their work seriously so they’re ready for the next thing. I don’t feel I’m just teaching prospective graduate students. Some of my colleagues over the years have. I feel I’m teaching undergraduates how to be serious, how to balance time, how to have some integrity in the process. Students know I’m going to grade their papers within a week, right? And they know that I’m going to come to class prepared, and that I’m not going to call in sick. Probably in 58 years of teaching, I’ve missed five days for illness. So I think that teaching is really a great responsibility and a great privilege. And I keep in touch, as I think you know, with hundreds of my former students. Like when I was in London in February, I had a couple of students there in their junior year abroad. I had another who graduated recently. I have still another one who’s living there and working there. And we all got together and went to a play together. And before that, we met at the art museum, and I gave a mini talk. I think teaching for me doesn’t end when the student graduates. If the student wants it, they can keep in touch. And when I go to big cities, we meet students at museums.
Ramya
Yeah, one thing that really stands out to me about you as a professor is how you go out of your way to help students. You attend performances with them; with me, you read some of my articles in the Cornell Daily Sun; you host dinners at one of the dining halls for students, and you really bring them together in a community, for example, with Bloomsday on Zoom. So, what inspired you to engage with your students beyond the classroom in this way, and how did that develop over your teaching career?
Professor Schwarz
Well, it’s just who I am, I guess. I mean, I guess I found my voice as a teacher, and from the very outset, I enjoyed interacting with students. As you know, sometimes that included my wife, right? She was a retired professor. I just think I like people, and I like to see them grow. And I think helping students grow goes beyond the classroom. I don’t know if you know this, but I became the visiting columnist for the [Cornell Daily] Sun during 2023–2024, and that was a lot of fun. I’ve always had just more contacts from the very beginning. We try to enrich the students by taking them to plays. We used to do more of that before they kind of downsized the theater in 2008. And it’s part of why I got the one of the early Weiss Awards, which is the big teaching award. I think it’s just who I am. I want other people to grow and succeed, and I want to be part of the process. For me, it’s not just the recognition from my books. The teaching matters a great deal. It’s just great to see people like you evolve and grow, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. Two nights ago, one of my students from 50-odd years was here, and she had become a very famous academic, editing the Norton Shakespeare, and she was here actually just showing her partner Ithaca, and I think there was a family event somewhere upstate, but it was just great to see her and all she’s accomplished. And you know, I like to think that maybe I play a tiny part in what happens after. I much prefer talking to young people than old people, honestly, even though I’m an older person. During COVID, I started to take walks with classes, and that was fun. I don’t know if I was doing that then, but now I do a lot of walking with my students. And even now that I’m so-called retired, I’m still doing mentoring and doing stuff like that. I just think teaching is more than coming in and talking about books. I somehow was able to balance research time with time spent with students. And it’s true, we hosted dinners—for the Jewish kids, we hosted a Seder, and sometimes the non-Jewish kids—often, we had some of those who were dating Jewish people. Sometimes we had mixed people. Sometimes we had people who were just interested. So we still do a lot of that stuff you mentioned.
Ramya
Do you think more professors should be allocating this sort of time towards their students, or you know, do you think that professors have a responsibility to help students career-wise if they can, even if the student is not necessarily pursuing a graduate degree?
Professor Schwarz
The answer to that is yes. I think some of my colleagues could do a lot more, frankly. I mean, most of my colleagues are good teachers, but could they do better? Yes. You know, there are great professors at Cornell. Besides, obviously, David Feldshuh, we could mention Tom Gilovich. These are great professors too. But could we do better? Of course. I mean, some people think at a research university you just sort of do the bare minimum. This is more true in the STEM world. But actually, the STEM world is—since I got here, the teaching has improved much greater than our field. When I first came here, teaching in STEM could be pretty casual, and sometimes for the big classes, they hired somebody just to be the teacher of those classes rather than a research scholar. That’s improved a lot. It may be that we’re still coming back from COVID. I mean, great inflation is very strong, and I probably know more about it than most because, as you know, I’m president of Phi Beta Kappa, and we see just ridiculous high grades from 10% of the class. If 10% used to be 3.80, now 10% is like 4.025 and things like that. And 3% for the juniors is like this year was over 4.15. My wife made Phi Beta Kappa at Berkeley with 3.25, and nobody told her she was the cutoff. For all she knew, she might be the highest. Think about that.
Ramya
Yeah, things have really changed. What’s most meaningful for you when you look back on your 58 years of teaching and see the impact that you’ve had on your students?
Professor Schwarz
I just think watching people grow and evolve, thinking that I had some input with some people. I’ve had some input with people who became famous. I think you know I was Christopher Reeve’s advisor here, and Kathleen Sullivan became head of Stanford Law School and the dean. If I contributed .01% to people having a satisfying life, I’m happy. The idea that I contributed to people’s finding direction and doing something important, not just teaching English, not just my graduate students—you probably remember I had a bunch of graduate students when you were here. I think what I feel is I have contributed. That doesn’t mean everything I’d said was right, but, if anything, I’d like to think that I set an example of human decency in treating people with respect, and also treating people as individuals, not one size fits all.
Ramya
If there’s something you want your students to carry forward from you and pass on, what would that be?
Professor Schwarz
Well, I guess there’s two parts to that. One would be: take some chances, think powerfully, be articulate—I always encourage students to speak in class, as you know, because I think that helps. Speaking articulately, writing precisely and lucidly, reading with imagination, thinking outside the box, being independent, not just following the herd: those are things I would like them to take. So those are academic things. Treating people with decency, respecting different cultures, different genders—I had one of the earlier trans students, who wrote me and a few other professors a note that we were the people who treated them with respect. I think I would like to be an example of working with integrity, not cutting corners, coming to class every day prepared, and encouraging students to use their time well. I sometimes have said, “EMC.” Do you remember that? “Every minute counts.” But also find joy each day and take time to take a walk. It’s not all about the mind. It’s also about the body and physically enjoying yourself, and, you know, I’m 85, and I’ve been lucky. But I try to live a life that’s fit and decent and treat people with respect.
Ramya
On that note, Professor Schwarz, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me! I really enjoyed it.
Professor Schwarz
This program that you’re putting on speaks to your own process and your own excellence, and I admire this program. I’ve tuned into it before, and sometimes you’re teaching me. Yeah, I think this is great. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Dear readers—or I should say listeners—thank you so much for tuning in. As always, feel free to join in on the conversation in the comments and share your own thoughts!
