What makes a good professor? For many students, it is the teacher who gave you a good grade. Perhaps it is someone who has a good sense of humor. Some students may define a good professor as one who most challenges their beliefs.
Professor Booth Fowler, who is retiring this May, is to many students a great professor. \Amazing."" ""Phenomenal."" ""Marvelous."" That's how he was described to me. Hearing that he was retiring, I set out to understand what the buzz was all about.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays he teaches an integrated liberal studies course, which focuses on the development of modern Western political, economic and social thought.
From day one, Fowler was different. The Ingraham basement lecture hall, which could double for an auditorium, was packed with students. A few minutes after the clock struck 12 noon, Fowler stood in the front of the class, extended his arms and directed the class to silence. He sat on the stage, looking out into the crowd. The students listened closely as the white-haired, man with thick, black-framed glasses began the last semester of his 35-year career on the UW-Madison campus.
""The TAs have passed out the syllabus. We're not going to go over that. If you have any questions or anything, you can go over that in discussion,"" he began. He briefly detailed the outline of the class. ""As some of you may know, I speak in first person as the historical figures we study.""
He proceeded, throughout the lecture, to take on the persona of Thomas Hobbes, explaining and defending his beliefs.
Now, Fowler is not exactly like those guys you see on C-Span, offering their interpretation of Abraham Lincoln while donning a top hat and beard. He does not attempt to imitate their dress, voices or mannerisms. To the contrary, all the figures happen to share Fowler's dry wit, address the audience as ""my friends"" and find it effective to make their point while pounding their left fist into the palm of their right hand.
At any rate, Fowler is truly an expert orator whose intimations generate sympathy for the characters he presents and the beliefs he explains. He chalks a brief outline of Robert Blake's thoughts on the board, along with a couple of quotations. When Fowler begins to lecture, he does not stand behind a podium, or even on the elevated platform in the front of the class. Instead ,he paces in front of the class and down the aisles.
He offers Blake's background, and tempts the students to sympathize with Romanticism. At one point, he explains Romanticism through lines of poetry'""to see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a flower.""
