A Student Remembers a Great Teacher

It happened 12 years ago, in my third year at university but I still remember it quite vividly, as if it happened a week ago.

The Gulf war was about to reach its climax (or with the benefit of hindsight, should one say anti-climax). The Americans had bombed Iraqi Republican Guard positions in the south of the country and probably hundreds had died. But we in America really weren’t being told how much “collateral damage” (a term pioneered by the Pentagon and popularized by CNN) was being inflicted on the Iraqis. Day in day out, those keeping track of the war had no choice but to listen to the propaganda being meted out to the press by America’s war commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Luckily for me, I was studying at a university known for its history of political activism, dating back to a temporary university takeover by students in 1968 protesting racial discrimination. Even more fortunately, there were people like Edward Said around. His formal title was the rather high-sounding Dominion Professor in the Humanities but when you met him, spoke to him and interviewed with him, he was decidedly less grandiose and unassuming. He was supposed to be quite an authority on comparative literature and his field of specialization was 19th century English literature, especially writers like Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen. If you saw him (he did not have a beard then), he would be the epitome of sartorial elegance – tweed jacket, bow tie, rimmed glasses and a pipe. There was such a demand for his classes at Columbia that their was a waiting list and students who wanted to enroll either had to be pursuing graduate study or in their last year of undergraduate study, in which case they also had to be interviewed.
Because of his support of the Palestinian cause, he had his fair share of enemies. And like at most campuses in America, especially the more prominent ones, the Jewish student organizations were more than well-represented and tended to hound him. That also didn’t stop him, and other like-minded and concerned professors, from organizing massive ‘teach-ins’ at the university. Going to them was quite an experience in itself – unfortunately, we don’t have anything even remotely similar happening in Pakistani universities when wars break out.

The idea behind a teach-in, as opposed to a sit-in, was that it would engage students concerned about the war in a productive, non-disruptive exercise. Faculty members came and spoke on the need for America to exercise restraint and about the long-term damage its actions would cause on the rest of the world, specially the Middle East. Often, the featured speaker would be Edward Said, and students from other universities in the New York area, as well as non-student activists would come to attend. The auditorium – usually the one in the university’s International Affairs building – would be overflowing with students. There would be no place to walk literally, not even in the aisles. Professors, and some student organizers, would take turns and come and address the audience.

Now a measure of Edward Said’s eloquence can be judged from the fact that he spoke as well as he wrote – and that is saying a lot. Much of the audience would be spellbound – to say the least – by this dapper Jerusalem-born Palestinian Christian (with degrees from Princeton, Harvard and Yale to boot). However, there would always be people from the Jewish Students Union or, worse still, the orthodox Jewish students group. They would make it a point always to ask questions that had little relevance to the theme of the teach-in – which was America’s invasion of Iraq – and made personal attacks on Mr Said, clearly because of his advocacy of the Palestinian cause.

The man’s greatness lay in the fact that he would not let these harangues and diatribes – framed sometimes in almost indecent language – get to him and would almost always answer with dignity and reason. Maintaining such restraint actually ended up troubling the person asking the loaded question, with Edward Said standing on the podium perfectly unfazed. The end result, usually, was that the Jewish questioner would either quietly walk back or launch a personal, mostly incoherent attack, on the professor, which would eventually be drowned out in applause from the massive crowd.

The teach-ins at Columbia, of which Edward Said was such an important part, were proof that a truly educational experience could indeed come from a non-academic/non-classroom setting. And this is not to say that as a teacher of comparative literature, he wasn’t a huge influence on his students in terms of the perspectives and insights that he offered while teaching a text. Besides, his students also owe much to his literary works, especially Orientalism, which completely revolutionized the way in which writing – and not just of a literary nature – is perceived and comprehended.

As a university teacher of a popular seminar class, or as a key speaker in a teach-in, Edward Said had this ability to establish a connection with his audience.

He will be sorely missed by his students, admirers and readers.