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LETTERS TO THE EDITOREditor's note: A memorial in honor of Professor Jim Shenton ‘49 will be held on campus on Thursday, October 2. Please log onto www.college.columbia.edu or call (212) 870-2288 for further information. CCT has received many letters and e-mails in
the wake of Shenton's death and is pleased to present
some of them beginning on page. 20 as part of our
coverage of his passing. This also includes an obituary,
a remembrance by DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Eric Foner ’63 and a reprint of a 1996 CCT
cover story about Shenton. Alumni, faculty and students
are invited to share their memories of this remarkable
Columbian by writing to CCT at 475 Riverside
Dr., Ste 917, New York, NY 10115-0998 or cct@columbia.edu. Take Teachers Not Subjects
I was delighted to read your article about Kathy Eden (July), a masterful, caring teacher whose gentle, Socratic prodding I remember fondly. I had Eden for Lit Hum during the fall of 1992, and how I got into her class is a story in itself. Because one of my mentors, the late Wallace Gray, told me to “take teachers, not subjects” as an undergraduate, I wound up taking Lit Hum and CC off-sequence. In other words, during the fall of my freshman year, I took the first semester of CC, but then, during the spring, I switched into the second semester of Lit Hum, where Gray was my teacher. When I returned to Columbia for my sophomore year, I went to see Gray, who had arranged for me to be in his section, this time for the first semester of Lit Hum, which I had yet to take. We were to read the Greeks, and Gray was such a splendid teacher that I did not mind learning the material out of order. However, two weeks into the semester, Gray was rushed to the hospital. The students in his class were told he would no longer be teaching Lit Hum that year, and that we would to be farmed out to other sections. I approached Kathy Eden, explained the situation, and asked for permission to join her class. It was thus my good fortune to be able to take the first semester of Lit Him with a teacher whose mastery of the material and love of teaching matched Gray’s. Eden was a treasure. She had the ability to bring out the voice of every student in the room, drawing on Columbia’s diversity. When we read the Greeks, for example, she often let an Orthodox Jew in our class begin by giving his opinion of the texts, before prodding someone else to offer a different interpretation. Back and forth, we went like this for an entire semester, poring over literature that obviously was dear to Eden’s heart. The students in the class constantly were learning from one another, which is not to say that we were not also utterly in awe of our professor. Effortlessly, Eden often would turn to the blackboard to write something in Latin or Greek, explaining the derivations of the words that we came across in our texts. Her course was one of the most exciting I took in my four years at the College. Many years later, when Gray, my mentor and friend,
and I met for dinner, he recalled that fateful semester.
“I desperately wanted to call you from the
hospital to say that they should put you into Kathy
Eden’s section,” he said in his raspy
voice. “But you managed to find her by yourself.
How did you figure out where to go?” “It
was simple,” I confessed. “I went to
the Lit Hum office and asked them to look through
their records to find the last time you had taught
Lit Hum for only one semester. When they figured
out when that was, I asked them to tell me who had
replaced you. And when they said, ‘Kathy Eden,’
I knew exactly where to go.” Eugene D. Mazo ’95 CorrectionThe Columbia Forum article in July, “Listen To Learn,” by Eugene Goodheart ’53, contained an error in the penultimate paragraph. The last few sentences, which discuss a quote from the poet William Butler Yeats, should have read: “In The Second Coming, he wrote: ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.’ ”
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