Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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George Kennedy graduated from Princeton and went to Harvard for graduate work, where, as a consequence of an interest in paleography, he re- ceived a traveling fellowship to study Quintilian palimpsests in London and Rome. Eventually an article arose from his studies, hut, hy the time of publication, he had realized that it took a special patience and aptitude to spend great amounts of time for no discernible purpose in the study of minutiae on the off-chance that some key might be established later justifying the time spent, and his interest in paleography waned. At Harvard, Kennedy was greatly influenced by Wer- ner Jaeger, who convinced him of the importance of considering literature and history in a common context and encouraged him to do a study of Greek rhetoric, a study which eventually resulted in a book, as well as an article elsewhere in the RECORD. There is an increasing number of classics stu- dents at Haverford. This increase is due in part to a national revival of interest in the classics, and is due in part to the cooperation of the other departments in giving credit in their own fields for work done in the classics. In part, how- ever, the increase is traceable to the attractive- ness — intellecual and personal — of the two men comprising Haverford ' s Classics department. With Dean Lockwood, who taught Howard Comfort at Haverford, and Wally Post around campus, Haver- ford presents a strong contingent of classics schol- ars. A personality cult is not sufficient to save 23

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elicited from each the kind of insight each is best prepared to give, has coaxed from some a first statement of a vague intuition, and has somehow skillfully woven a precarious unity at the last moment. Beneath these doings there is an understanding between student and teacher, subtly pointed to only in the breach, that work will be assigned and done because of its potential value to the stu- dent as man, and that it will be done. If class is to be a dialogue, in which the crucial things hap- pen between students and teacher, then we too must know at very least the language of the day, I and Thou, the Encompassing: ultimately empty or not, these are the frames for our speech, and we must have them at hand. Above, we wondered why G e r h a r t Spiegler came to Haverford; guessing that he might very well have come just to see what it was all about, we wonder why he has stayed. The answer can only be that he sees here one of the increasingly few opportunities to teach ways, not things. Only the continuing honest response of the whole stu- dent can justify his staying here, for if it is things that are to be taught, they can be taught far more easily at a cosmopolitan graduate school: his being here is a faith in us, as ours is a faith in him. To those who have taken courses in religion, Gerhart has been an unusually competent teacher; in some of us, he has stirred a new ambition, too, or revived one nearly dead, for his involvement, knowledge, and impressive articulateness in our foreign language have shown us an enviable stand- ard of scholarship. But what is most remarkable is that we have seen ourselves and our indecisions in this tense man who lives his indecisions day by day. Perennially suspended between college and university, he weighs with us the academic career, and seeks its true rewards : a religious man study- ing religion, he asks us what relation we would have between what we think and what we are; a European in America, he views us critically, yet he is one of us. And we think of him, as of our- selves, not as someone who IS somewhere, but as someone GOING somewhere : his tremendous en- ergy, and the possibilities to which his thoughts point, convince us that despite his sincerity we know but a part of him. We begin to realize that if he remains who he is, we will never know Gerhart Spiegler as we know those who have yielded to the contradictions in themselves, and have become simple monophony. Nor, we realize, will we ever know ourselves in that way unless we too give in. But we also begin to see a greater knowledge of a more human self emerge in the meeting of people who dare to in- volve themselves totally. And we remember Gerhart as one who better than most makes Haverford what it uniquely should be, and shows us the excitement and joy of living dangerously with ourselves. Eric Lob 22

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the classics — nor is there any need at this time to save them, sprung Aphrodite-like from the mal- content r(f. of a mechanistic universe — but in a college like Haverford where some de- partments are weak, others in flux, a department offering a lasting tradition is attractive to some, who, all things being equal, might have majored in something else. Too, the Classics department vigorously proselytizes to win its few converts each year. George Kennedy runs the Classics 19-20 course, a history of Greece and Rome, which has around 89 students and is the second-largest course in the college — next to Freshman English. The end of the course is two-fold. It is designed, first, to pro- vide the non-specialist with what might be his only disciplined look at the achievement of the ancient world and partially to define the at- traction-repulsion inherent in one ' s relationship with a world where one must acknowledge, in opposition to the glory and the grandeur, the animalism that was in Greece, the lust that was Rome. The course is also designed as propaganda to aid the regenerative and reproductive powers of the department, and is aimed at Freshmen and Sophomores in keeping with the propagadistic determination to indoctrinate the young. Out of say 80 students, some two last year majored in classics as a direct result of the 19-20 course, and, from a subversive point of view alone, the course was viewed as a success, although the expenditure in time and effort seems proportionate to that required to get a few Negro children into a southern school. Kennedy is confident that a history course featuring a reading list of Homer, the great tragedians, Aristophanes, Thucydides in the first semester, and the likes of Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus, Seneca in the second will be able to hold its own. Kennedy ' s small classes occasionally get out of hand, taken over by the Bolsheviks in our midst. In a period of lamentable decline in his Homer course, the chariots of Achilles and Hector became Volkswagens. His gestures occasionally go far beyond the duty of the professor. He once tele- phoned me before an exam, which I was due to flunk, to tell me he had raised my grade on an essay and, thus, he announced, to spur me on to an all-night stand. Kennedy shares the latent snobbery of the department and the conviction that classics men go to a different heaven than other people. Comfort, for example, in the midst of a learned essay defining the nature of a study which considers at once the political, economic, social and artistic history of a culture for some reason seen as classical introduced the thought that his field included the study of circumstances evoking emotions too deep for tears, or some such thing, and, to date, although modestly ac- knowledging the possibile reminiscent quality of the phrase, has been unable to bring himself to retract it. George Kennedy, himself, feels that the difference between Greek and other languages is defined by the first sentence in his Greek primer, h H CK a anc i- T ' v ' , the soul is immortal. He has heard that the primers of other languages begin with more trivial utterances. Although known as a liberal, Kennedy is by no means consistent in his position and does not seem to want to be. Often his liberal point of view is more pedagogic and therapeutic in intent than philosophical. He is in favor of the limited elective system at Haverford, and wishes he, him- self, had been urged to take more courses unrelated to the classics, deploring the gaps in his knowledge with the happy confidence of a man who never expects actually to hear the call to take calcu- lus and natural science. He is, he says, experi- mental by nature, but he is probably so more by training. He is willing to see some experimentation with the grading system. He is very disturbed by the 10-13 percent of the student body he thinks is concerned with grades to the decimal point. He has come to favor either four courses per semester or obviating the forty course requirement for graduation, because he thinks it is true 4hat the student is hounded. What is important ulti- mately is not his specific position on various issues but his general conviction that Haverford should be able to take advantage of its small size and be flexible. George Kennedy is not an eccentric man, but he does have highly individualistic opinions. One of his ideas that has been ill-received by his profession is that there is in most civilizations such a thing as a classical stage, and that the field of classics in the West should reject ethnocentric- ity and broaden its base to include a study of all classical civilizations — Indian and Chinese, for example, as well as Latin and Greek. The future western classicist might, as I understand it, have a good knowledge of either Latin or Greek and then a knowledge of the language and culture of at least one other society not directly in the west- em tradition. Bruce Tulloch 24