Stan Read prepared me for a risible existence in Academe
Upon my graduating high school, I proclaimed that I should never again take English or Mathematics. I did not live up to that brash proclamation. I took Calculus in my final undergraduate quarter. What was worse, in my first three quarters as an undergraduate, I took three classes that resembled English classes! Western Washington State College [now Western Washington University] required me to take six credit hours of Humanities for three quarters. By chance, I landed in Stan Read's discussion section of Humanities 121 in Fall Quarter 1970. Thereafter, I chose his sections in Winter Quarter and in Spring Quarter quite deliberately.
Stan Read died six years ago today. I recall him fondly for many reasons. The most important reason was that he taught me that I could slog through classic works of literature but adhere to my own precepts. Because of Mr. Read, I adhered to my contrarian views better than to my determination to avoid Math and English.
Stan Read was, to this naïf of the Pacific Northwest, a good old boy such as I had seen in Montana, Wyoming, and other Western states. He chewed an unlighted cigar through class [in an era in which professors freely smoked if they pleased]. He put his cowboy boots on the table that situated 15-20 students. He occasionally wore his cowboy hat or an outsized belt buckle. So costumed, Stan wielded great authority when he urged us to "Never let them make you take your jeans off." [I should add that to my laws!]
Despite the getup, Stan had a master's degree in English Literature from Texas Christian University and soon would head to law school and, eventually, to a term as a District Judge in his native New Mexico. Thus, he had some intellectual chops. Beyond erudition, he oozed thaumazein, astonishment at the twists and vagaries in the physical world and especially the human condition. I applied such thaumazein to bullshit from politics, politicians, and political scientists.
In his sections Stan encouraged free-ranging discussion and tried to keep first-year students on task [or within a few miles of task]. What an experience! Stan could make all experiences and perspectives relevant to eighteen-year-olds but suggestive for adulthood. He made of his sections a "Land of Enchantment," a marketing moniker that seemed to me at least somewhat true of New Mexico once I made it there 23 years later.
First, he liberated us from attending the three lectures per week in Humanities 121, 122, & 123. Skipping class had been nearly a mortal sin at [Bishop] Blanchet High School, so I was exhilarated that such naughtiness should be sanctioned. From the few lectures I attended, I did not imagine I missed much. Plato, a philosopher, came to the conclusion that he and other students of Socrates should run society? The soon-to-be political science major guffawed at such self-serving blather. In nature, animals that drink as opposed to lap water are all vegetarians, so humans are by nature herbivores? Humans are by dentition ominvores! I should have profited from missing more such lectures. Thanks, Stan.
Stan was partial to the phrase "putting the shuck on," as in "Don't let Plato put the shuck on you!" [I do not recollect Stan's having views on vegetarianism.] To encourage critical thinking that would pierce shucks, Stan assigned us to write a satire while we were reading The Satyricon. My satire ended with "We are all liars," a sentiment that has run through my scholarship and life. The license to doubt reinforced my continuing to break away from convention as well as The Church. Stan was as much a master of "What if . . .?" as of "Wouldn't it be amazing if . . . ?"
While I wish a career in academia had not disabused me of so many of the ideals, values, and aspirations in which Stan believed, he prepared me for the probability that academic shibboleths would be used against ideals, values, and aspirations. I was forewarned. He changed my life for the better. Open, sensible, erudite, and thoroughly human, he prepared me to survive adulthood and its opposite, academia.
