ALUMNI PROFILE
Lit Hum Never Leaves You By Alex
Sachare '71
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Eric
Foner ’63
PHOTO: JOE PINIERO
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When DeWitt Clinton Professor of History Eric Foner
’63 was a Kellett Fellow at Oxford’s Oriel College,
he was selected to be a member of a four-man team that competed in
a British quiz show called University Challenge (similar to College
Bowl in the United States). “Our team was very
successful,” he recalls. “I contributed to many of our
wins, and the team won the British championship in 1966, although
by that time, I had returned home.”
Earlier this year, Foner received a phone call from the
producers of University Challenge, who were bringing back
championship teams to compete against one another.
“I was flown over to Manchester, and our team was
reassembled to compete against Magdalan College, Oxford, the
champions in 1998,” says Foner. “We competed against
them and we won, to my utter amazement, as I figured we had
forgotten most of what we knew, and these younger people would be
sharper.”
Foner says that the Core Curriculum played a significant role in
the victory.
“There was a series of questions about lines from
Shakespeare’s sonnets,” he says, “and I knew all
the answers. I don’t know where I dredged them up from, but
it must have come from Literature Humanities. It just shows you
that the Core Curriculum imbeds things in minds that you
can’t even imagine.”
Despite the victory, that was as far as Foner’s team got
in the competition, as only the top four scoring teams from the
first-round winners advanced to the final round. “That was
the beginning and the end of my second career on University
Challenge,” he says. “I retire undefeated.”
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