English at Amherst

by Theodore Baird

Hardcover

First published December 30, 2005

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baird is a legendary teacher, who designed the most interesting department-wide daily college Freshman English course (not adequately understood by Prof Varnum), who read most books in the Amherst College Library, yet who did memorable classroom stunts, like entering the first day through the window, pointing at it and asking his students,"What's that?" They, "A window." He, "It's a door, can't you see I just came in through it?" He then threw his hat into the wastepaper basket, "What's that?" They, "A wastebasket?" He, "It's a hatrack, can't you see I hung my hat there?" So began Eng 1-2 at Amherst College in the Baird and Craig years.

Baird would also invite R Frost, a frequent house guest at Baird's FL Wright house, into his class; mischievous Frost would tell the students, "Forget everything Prof. Baird has told you." Frost understood professional and poetic animus, and made a point of not hiding the ego that supports classroom teaching--and poetry.

For this excellent intellectual history, Baird starts with the change from Latin to English as the lingua franca of American colleges; he moves through the change from piety as the standard of college study, to the German Ph.D.; and he ends with the discretion of not describing his contemporaries. The prose reflects Baird's admiration of both Gibbon and Henry Adams, of Shakespeare and Frost. He once asked of Thompson's Frost biography, "What does this sentence have to do with Frost, a great maker of sentences?" His correspondent thirty years, I found Baird's letters filled with insights, such as, "I compose myself after a night's wild existence." Great definition of dreams.
Although focused on one department in one small liberal-arts college, it is an essential account of the growth of humanities even as they are declining nationally.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the sort of strange and interesting book that makes you happy there are still university presses around publishing books that almost no one will read, but that will be appreciated by those who do. I read this volume because, although I never met him, I feel a sense of lineage with Baird, since he taught people who in turn taught me how to teach writing. The book is itself pure esoterica, an adamantly local history of the teaching of writing at a small New England men's college (Amherst). It is hampered by a sententious tone that often lapses into snarkiness. There is an uncritical fascination with famous male authors and their male exegetes, and a corresponding condescension toward women, when they happen to be mentioned. And yet . . . there is often a true wit and anger, the expression of a smart and ambitious man who decides to be a teacher more than a scholar or writer, and who feels, as a consequence, passed over, yet is still fascinated by and committed to the complexities of teaching writing. I suspect that Baird's legacy is better expressed in the work of the writers and teachers he influenced—Bill Coles, Walker Gibson, Roger Sale—than in these pages. Still, I'm glad to have read it. The book expresses part of what formed me as a writer and teacher, and part of what I hope to push beyond.