The Art of Teaching - Mim memory

“The real duty of man is not to extend 

his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs,

but to enrich and enjoy his imperishable possession: his soul.” 

Imagine having a university professor who based his teaching - his life - on that basic premise.  That was the happy fate of Columbia University students blessed to have Gilbert Highet as their Classics professor.  

Gilbert Highet was as multi-faceted, mega-accomplished as they come.  Teacher, author, scholar, spy - and devoted husband to fellow Scots, Helen MacInnes. 

Mim & Gilbert Highet enjoyed a delightful correspondence.  She wrote to him, sharing how much she loved The Art of Teaching  & The Immortal Profession (both of which she gave me back in my BACES teaching days) - and was he the same Gilbert Highet married to her favorite author?  

He responded in the positive & the two were off & running!  

For all of my life, I was awed by Mim's ability to connect to every sort of person.  She gleaned & responded to their deepest interests, whether it was a tween grooving out on Fabian & Frankie Avalon or one of the greatest minds of our day.  Via mail or personally, her interest in the person & THEIR interests, her knack for the spot-on question, the small telling gesture, drew out responses from even the busiest man or woman.

Gilbert Highet fell under her spell.  He loved that she could discuss esoteric ideas & give rich details about his wife's characters & plot lines.  Mim's range & depth of interests was catnip to the great classicist.  

Gilbert Highet & Helen MacInnes were two Scots who made the USA their adopted home.  While his own university years were rooted at Glasgow University & Oxford (Balliol!), his greatest love was saved for Columbia, where he taught for most of his life (excluding WWII, when he served with British Intelligence).  

There seems universal agreement that Highet was the most brilliant lecturer of his day at any university anywhere on the globe. In 1977, a few years after Highet's retirement & one before his death, Columbia President William McGill summed up his essence in one sentence - "A Varro in learning, a Cicero in eloquence, you have not only defended the vitality and grace of the classical tradition, you have also embodied it.” 

A glimmering of Gilbert Highet*:

Highet became the most famous classical scholar in the United States, with a career that streaked through the sky like a blazing comet. 

Consummate teacher, author, and literary critic, he used the classroom, his publications, and the electronic media to bring the classical world to the specialist and the general public. 

For countless thousands who had never studied the classical languages, he breathed new life and meaning into the literary masterpieces bequeathed to posterity by the Greeks and Romans.

Highet’s defining moment (professionally) came in 1937, when Columbia hired him as a visiting associate on a one-year appointment...  In 1938, within one year of accepting the temporary appointment, Highet became Professor of Greek and Latin—a remarkable accomplishment for a man who was just turning 32. 

During the war he pioneered the art of preparing psychological profiles of Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and Himmler—based on his psychoanalysis of Roman emperors.

As America armed herself for battle, he shuttled between New York and Washington, and traveled to Canada and South America and Great Britain on military airplanes and ocean liners. (Sounds like one of his wife's characters!)

As a member of the British Army of Occupation, he entered the smoldering remains of Hitler’s bunker and became responsible for helping to recover the gold reserves hidden by the Nazis.

Although he had offers at the end of the war to pursue a more lucrative career, he turned them down to resume teaching at Columbia—a decision that he claimed he never regretted. He regarded the ex-soldiers who came in on the GI Bill as highly intelligent and remarked that in those postwar years he got from his students almost as much stimulus as he gave them.

In the spring of 1953 Oxford University asked Highet to allow his name to be entered as a candidate for the Corpus Professorship of Latin, which would open at the end of that academic year. He wrote to President Grayson Kirk that although he had aspired to that position for many years, he would not permit his name to be submitted because Columbia had treated him so well.  

When Gilbert Highet entered the classroom, one felt as though the curtain were going up on a Broadway play, with a living legend in the lead.

He consistently gave his audience a commanding performance, whether he spoke or sang or stood or walked, with a presence comparable to that of Laurence Olivier or John Houseman.  

The inspired anecdotes, the poignant pauses, and the sudden bursts of laughter formed part of a magnificent, comprehensible structure that gripped the heart and held one spellbound. 

He loved Vergil and taught the Aeneid (in the original Latin) every year to packed classes; he loved his “darling” Juvenal and the Roman satirists for exposing decadence and corruption. He detested Plato and Julius Caesar—the one, for outlining the principles of dictatorship; the other, for becoming the accomplished dictator who crushed the life out of the Roman Republic.

On the 1968 Columbia student riots - - When demonstrators blockaded the entrance to his building, he angrily told them that after teaching at Columbia for thirty years, he would be damned if he would leave through the window. He wrote to President Grayson Kirk, who resigned in 1968, that he blamed him no more than he would blame the director of a museum if a gang of hoodlums began slashing the paintings. 

Highet’s books on pedagogy sprang from his seeing teaching and research as two complementary endeavors, each replenishing the other. 

His ideal teacher— a liberal educator in the best sense—will consistently and enthusiastically communicate to his or her students the genuine and permanent importance of the subject. Such a teacher will also engage in productive scholarly research, as a means of discovering new knowledge and demonstrating the importance of reevaluation and reinterpretation. 

In this age of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, some may see him as a “liberal humanist,” with an unwavering belief in the moral value of the literary classics. Indeed he was, in the sense that he believed in the universal value of the classics and that the great authors can provide the standards by which people may lead happy and productive lives. 

All in all, he presented his audience with a humane form of scholarship—free of the vacuous, jargon-filled kind of literary criticism plaguing some areas of current classical scholarship. 

He enabled his readers to experience (heaven forbid!) something called “literary appreciation,” to travel through a world of truth and beauty, elegance and splendor, or just plain meaning. 

A frequent focus of media attention in the United States and abroad, he became the most recognized and most talked-about classical scholar in American history since Thomas Jefferson. 

A popularizer in the positive sense, he provided the classics establishment with something that it desperately needed (as it does today)—respectability with an audience of nonspecialists.

 The very antithesis of the stereotypical academician, he paraded the classical authors from the groves of academe into the public’s living room with his incisive books, articles, and lectures. 

He invited his audience to a celebration of classical literature, on a journey in search of broad knowledge about classical civilization—a journey open to both specialists and nonspecialists. 

A romantic at heart, he published in American Scholar the following poem—a self-composed epitaph—in which the poet pictures himself (not his persona) in his own special landscape:

Obit

What shall we say about him in the papers?
Stepped out into the path of a speeding car
No. Not such a stupid end for a man of mind.
In Claremont Hospital after a long illness
Among his scholarly works the most important
He had continued yes yes yes no. No.
Suddenly, by a stroke, after a class
No. Not that either, although possible.
Yesterday on the third floor of the library
Among the immortals speaking silent Greek
That would be peaceful, yet perhaps too pat.
But no, the air is wrong, the place is wrong:
Where are the heights, the trees, the wind, the birds?
Write in the notice: on the slopes of—what?
Some insignificant hill, it doesn’t matter,
But climbing, with the wind around him and
The sky above and his remembering head
Quite full of poetry and music, climbing
Together with his one true friend and love
Up through the stalwart trees to timberline—
After a life of effort, rest and sleep.


Reprinted from American Scholar 32 (1963) 597.
Copyright © 1963 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society
* from Gilbert Highet and the Classics at Columbia, by Robert J. Ball