A great educator
Toolan, David S.
the soundest of arguments but also one that was consonant with his ulidivided personality. It was not only truth but his truth. This is the full sense of the Socratic dictum that virtue is...
...Yet Pollock was nothing if not a transmitter and animator of a great Catholic heritage...
...You wouldn't go to him for a strict textual course...
...she was worried about coming up for tenure...
...said it destroyed transcendence and he preferred many a warehouse...
...I'm told the throng at his funeral was comparably diverse, a fitting testimony to this most democratic of men...
...to know truly who one is and the reason why one acts is the good life...
...Beyond this it cannot go and yet it must not aspire to less...
...Pollock's thesis here is still largely unexplored and vastly significant--especially if he was right in asserting that Perry Miller never understood the Puritan mind...
...SELF-GOVERNMENT 49 . 4 9 9 9 C o l l e c t i v e v i s i o n & collective bargaining I I DENNIS O'BRIEN O NE OF the longest running tales in academia is that of Dwight D. Eisenhower's initial day as President of Columbia University...
...In the first place, Yeshiva is a private university and as such labor relations are determined under federal legislation, namely, the National Labor Relations Act...
...He would teach briefly at Notre Dame, for thirty years at Fordham's graduate philosophy department, and at various times held appointments at Manhattanville, Pace University, The New School and Seton Hall...
...Education may be likened to stage directions...
...Yes--and seer, oracle, prophet, iconoclast, enchanter, mystagogue, holy fool...
...Pollock had a mother's wisdom with fragile new things--or was it the child's heart...
...She had some tubes in her;, and her bed, one of six in the room, was nearest the door...
...And on his funeral memorial card was this statement of his on the Eucharist: "I don't want the most common meaning...
...In our last conversation--concerning one of my former students who was facing the same fate as Claire and wanted to know how to spend her remaining time-she told me she had never been happier in her life...
...He then moved to Toronto's Medieval Institute, and worked under Gilson, for his Ph.D...
...This made for a mind like Gregory Bateson's or Buckminster Fuller's, one that draws connections where you were sure there were chasms...
...To a linear mind, it was sometimes like entering one of E.M...
...There was a line of descent, he atgued, from the Christian naturalism of Scotus Erigena and Bernard of Clairvaux's individualism down to Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, up through C.S...
...Thus one can defend the argument that education is our greatest moral resource9 Like other resources it can be exhausted, squandered and polluted...
...Holy Mother Church," he'd once told a solemn assembly of reverend Mothers and Fathers, "is a fat ass...
...While in Cambridge, for a time he had been tutor to Emerson's greatgrandchildren...
...in psychology and philosophy there...
...The General was shown about the premises and toward the late afternoon attended a meeting of the faculty...
...The moon shot, he knew, was a profound psychic event, no less inner than outer...
...The experience of God has to be tied in with the experience of the jet engine," he would say...
...Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked 9 . .?" Indeed yes...
...He loved to turn your world upside down, and then give you new eyes with which to see a wider, richer one...
...H E WAS born, Jewish, in Glasgow, Scotland...
...No mind so free, we students judged, could possibly have arisen out of cradle American Catholicism9 So we thanked the rabbis...
...He had trouble worshipping in a neo-Gothic church...
...I mean his classes always drew a crazy-quilt group, including young and old non-specialists and visiting relatives...
...For ages, he thought, humans have been battling their way into time...
...I will always remember how radiantly beautiful she appeared, as she told me how in suffering she had renewed her own faith and had liberated herself from the pain of her earlier life experiences...
...A few years later, in October 1975, when I was feeling worn down by a number of things, including an impending, prolonged, public tenure battle of my own, I visited Claire in New York Hospital...
...Afterwards, you knew what Hegel meant when he called cosmic history a bacchanalian revel in which not a soul is sober...
...She was, more than ever, as one student said, "like a basket of loaves and fishes that never emptied once you started giving it away...
...He loved the city, New York, but there was something very Californian about him, wacky and Dionysian...
...You always had the impression he'd started the lecture on the subway coming uptown, and was smack in the middle of it when he entered the classroom and, without usually alluding to them thereafter, dropped that ill-assorted pile of notes all over the desk...
...But we laughed a lot too...
...It was Catholics, he felt sure, who would finally rescue Hegel9 But he was far more than an academic9 His classes were theophanies...
...In a unanimous ruling by the three-judge panel, Yeshiva University won an appeal against the National Labor Relations Board to the effect that its faculty were not employees under the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act...
...The sense of God's transcendence," he would say, "is the transformation of the earth...
...The Yeshiva ruling is carefully restricted...
...I volunteer with the Open Curriculum, an experimental independent study community, and also to teach at night for three years at Malcolm-King College in Harlem...
...It tells us how to play the game of life with aesthetic dan and ethical f'Lrmness...
...He was a convert, we'd heard, from Judaism9 I later found he'd become a Catholic while a graduate at Harvard, at a time when that must have appeared intellectual suicide9 But he was a man to defy appearances, a born maverick...
...Whether that anecdote is true or not I have been unable to verify, but the claim of the legendary senior faculty member appears to have received unusual confirmation in a recent judgment of the United States Second Circuit...
...each "turned on...
...This is education's dimension of ultimacy...
...Like Teresa of Avila, he could see no conflict between devotion to God and thoroughly enjoying a hearty meal of fine partridge...
...Attending one of his lectures was like an encounter on the road to Emmaus, a pentecostal event9 He had the gift of tongues...
...Education is ultimately the study and formation of the human self and, as Aristotle said, to attain any assured knowledge about the self is one of the most difficult things in the world9 The difficulty is indicative of its importance and it was for this reason that Aristotle placed it in the front rank of human activity9 IN MEMORIAM: ROBERT C. POLLOCK, 1901-1978 A great educator DAVID S. TOOLAN W GREAT educator...
...If something was incongruous, there must be something good about it...
...State universities are governed by state laws which may or may not permit in some fashion the unionization of state employees...
...He was buried in the earthy brown habit of Francis, the saint who hymned the sun--and the earth...
...Her cancer was inoperable, but she was hoping for a remission--determined to return to the classroom by January...
...There were no fixed shrines here...
...His God was not the post-Tridentine legal supervisor, but the self-expressive God of Bonaventure and the Oxford Franciscans (and of Edwards and Emerson, he claimed) who creates, out of sheer ecstatic love and joy--a poet's universe, fit for dreaming and making...
...Peirce, James and Dewey...
...I kissed her as I left, thinking I might never see her again, but knowing she had liberated me from some less important suffering of my own...
...Hundreds of Fordham students knew and loved her as the infectiously dynamic, enthusiastic and witty teacher who began to teach them about Chaucer and Yeats and ended teaching them--by the manner in which she faced death-the beauty and richness of a life lived fully no matter what the pain...
...Small wonder that it is the most difficult of the human arts, more likely than all the others to fail, to lower its Sights, to sell out...
...and FATHER DAVID S. TOOLAN, S.J., teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Canisius College in Buffalo...
...Schumacher plays for keeps and swims like a sturgeon against the modern current in recalling education to its ancient role of promoting metaphysical awareness...
...Like Sturzo, Pollock felt that for four hundred years Catholic intellectuals had been largely unconscious, abstracted from and athwart the central movement of history--and that meant profoundly out of tune with what God was doing in time...
...we could unmake it, remake it...
...Americans were a quantum jump in this process, and their experience required a new statement of the religious life, one adequate to a new form of contemplation and spirituality...
...with all this she was still generous enough tc help me as a faculty FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.L...
...Though he taught under the auspices of a philosophy department, I've always felt at base he was an American Catholic Hegel, that is, a theologian of history...
...He was a great friend of the Italian priest-sociologist and political leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, and they collaborated in writing Del Metodo Sociologico...
...belong together...
...This is the full sense of the Socratic dictum that virtue is knowledge...
...A nice rhetorical turn to play on a General of the Armies...
...For one thing, he was a defender of Marx and Marxist social analysis (of the Frankfurt School type) when this was scarcely popuLOAVES AND FISHES REMEMBERING CLAIRE HAHN T ills IS a good time to say a personal word about Claire Hahn who died of cancer last summer...
...It takes extraordinary courage and vision to face wave after wave of unformed human substance, thrown at us like armed divisions in an endless war, day after day, year after year, generation after generation9 Each effort in education is, as Eliot said of art, "a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating9 But there is really nothing surprising about the difficulty...
...Many of his peers found him suspect, alarming...
...Pollock's Catholicism was not so much Roman as it was of a kind that predated the great 16th century schism in the western soul, and equally all those Cartesian divisions of mind...
...I think he could have prayed in the new East Building of the National Gallery-- his kind of space...
...We humans had made this world...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH 2 February 1979:49 lar...
...What I want is the More than this, he assured us, "mysticism and technology most exalted meaning...
...He was afraid we might turn our back on our dynamism, forgetting that the saints pray to us to create the mystical body on earth...
...He was a Catholic edition of the Sufi comic seer, Nasrudin, a mystical Charlie Chaplin9 He would talk, deliberately, in circles, synchronically...
...Whether the subjects taught are subjects of science or the humanities, if the teaching does not lead to a clarification of metaphysics, that is to say, of our fundamental convictions, it cannot educate man and, consequently, cannot be of real value to society...
...Somewhere in this process he would develop his own distinctive interpretation of medieval and classic American philosophy...
...I may recall him most fondly, though, for understanding what few intellectuals seem to: how gentle and respectful one must be toward new ideas when they come into this world ill-fitting, inarticulate, passionate and one-sided...
...He put the history of dogma into the perspective of an evolution of human consciousness and culture...
...you'd go to him if you had a child's metaphysical questions, and hungered for really big ideas9 He would take you on a tour of outer and inner time-space, ranging about the whole history Commonweal: 48 of western Consciousness, as if he were guide for a 20th century version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales...
...Commonweal readers know her as a regular poetry reviewer and contributor to the Commonweal Papers #5: Faith: The Struggle to Believe (November 15, 1974) where she wrote, in her article on culture and belief, that, "Perhaps if we look steadily enough at this emerging face of contemporary man we can learn to love and compassionate his image and hear the Word spoken in time...
...THE ADVERSARIAL MODEL VS...
...This is the mark of the Christian soul, a soul that wants to be in time, to naturalize, terrestrialize itself...
...is associate professor of communications at Fordham and an editor of Commonweal...
...For many of us, it was this eccentric Fordham professor who took us into this world of relativity and process, future shock and revolution, and made us feel, at once, both awed and at home there...
...Being introduced, the new leader arose and said how pleased he was to be there and what a pleasure it was to meet "the employees of Columbia University...
...If our ideas are "mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic...
...The kinds of ideas that fill our minds, E. F. Schumacher argues, determine the quality of our experience...
...Like the "open" middle ages he loved, he wanted to embrace the protean abundance of creation in all its diversity...
...This from a man who edited a book titled The Mind ofPius XII, a mind I think he deeply disliked...
...it was eminently the world of historical consciousness, the world of Einstein and Whitehead and Teilhard, of Marx and Freud, and cybernetics and the sociology of knowledge, of Auschwitz, of jazz and Jackson Pollock (no relation) and revolutions...
...A second qualification of the Yeshiva ruling is suggested by an am&us brief filed by Commonweal: 50...
...This puts poetry at the heart of things, and demands that scientists be mystics...
...Like his intellectual heroes, Pollock inhabited one all-inclusive environment which embraced both spirit and the world of nature...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN is the President of Bucknell University...
...She lived to teach for three more years, to go on writing, to encourage other writers, to win promotion in the English Department (which meant a lot to her), to show her students--even when she could hardly pull herself along the hall and had to teach sitting down, and told her class (wrongly) 'Tm not as much fun as I used to be"-that the greatest sin was i~ waste life...
...A man I1 Ilwho relished a contradiction as much as Hegel must have, and for a similar reason: it got things moving...
...Yet when I remember him, I think of the most extraordinary catholicity of spirit I've ever met...
...Our friendship began when I first arrived at Fordham eight years ago, when Claire was going through a particularly critical period in her life--one which in some ways mirrored the broader struggles of the church: her illness had been diagnosed...
...Everyone seemed to hear him in their own tongue...
...Emigrating early to Chicago, he did his undergraduate work at Harvard, studying with Alfred North Whitehead and William McDougall, and also took an M.A...
...Finally, a senior member of the faculty arose and said, "With all due respect, sir, we are not employees of Columbia University, we are Columbia University...
...Forster's magical Hindu caves--dizzying...
...she was leaving the Dominican order to marry (with an unbounded joy she was so anxioiJs to share) Jack Becker who was leaving the Jesuits...
...Stunned silence...
Vol. 106 • February 1979 • No. 2
