When I look back on these many years at Columbia, forty-three now, with only two brief interruptions, my mind is suffused with a host of memories. I suppose there are few who knew, as I did, those giants of an even then outdated classical training: Nelson Glenn McCrea, Frank Gardner Moore, and Edward Delavan Perry. Perry, who as the oldest of the group, was Jay Professor of Greek. He had immense learning as well as a kind of puckish playfulness which I can illustrate by a story about one of his exploits. Perry had a typewriter which could be changed from the Roman alphabet to the Greek. Frequently, with professorial absent-mindedness, he would forget to shift types and would find that he had typed a page or two of English in Greek letters or a page or two of Greek in Roman letters. So he composed a short poem in ancient Greek to paste on the typewriter, the burden of which was designed to remind him to shift to the appropriate type. A native devilishness led him one day to approach several of the younger member of the department with copies of his poem and to inquire gravely whether they could help him to identify in Greek literature the source of the verses. You will realize that, not knowing the purposes of the verses, the young instructors had considerable difficulty fathoming their meaning, to say nothing of the difficulty of locating them in the corpus of Greek poetry.

I was one of those young instructors. Some of you may remember two of the others, H. Theodoric Westbrook, who died many years ago, and Moses Hadas, who himself went on to a distinguished career as Jay Professor of Greek and whose tragic death was reported only recently.

I did some if my teaching in Barnard College, and since I was only twenty-two when I started to teach I was, I am afraid, a bit victimized by the girls in my classes at Barnard. I recall a class in the poetry of Catullus. To show off a bit I had assigned as our textbook the Teubner edition of Catullus, a text which contained his complete poems without any notes except textual notes. One day early in the term, quite unwarily, I assigned the next ten pages or so pages without looking ahead. When I got around to preparing my lesson I found to my horror that I had assigned one of Catullus’ most obscene poems. There was nothing that I could do about it then, so when I got to class I announced that we would skip that poem. “Oh no we won’t,” said my class of Barnard girls. “You assigned it and we have worked on it. We want to read it.” You may think it was the girls who did the blushing. But it was not.

One of the nonclassical professors I remember best was John Erskine. He used to play the piano from time to time to illustrate points in his lectures. I shall never forget his demonstrations of how the language of Hamlet was pronounced in Shakespeare’s day. On one occasion after I had begun to teach classics I was riding up in the elevator at Hamilton Hall with Erskine. He said to me, “Why doesn’t one of you fellows write a book making Helen of Troy out to be a modern day flapper?” (Even the word has an old-fashioned ring!) I laughed and replied that I couldn’t believe that such a book would have much of an audience. A few months later there appeared The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine. And as you well recall the book was a best seller for many weeks.

One of the few professors we had in College who is still living is Mark Van Doren. He stands out in my memory not so much as [a] brilliant teacher but as a quiet, gentle man clothed in a mantle of modesty.

Still thinking of the English department, the dullest and most inept teacher I ever had anywhere was one who also wrote a best seller and a very exciting one – Hervy Allen, who wrote Anthony Adverse. He was so completely without imaginative resources as a teacher that he spent many class hours reading to his students from a textbook that they had in their hands.

Among our other teachers was John Dewey, whose teaching methods influenced so profoundly the so-called progressive education with which our children have to deal. His own teaching method was sui generis. He would wander around the room stopping from time to time to look out the window or to examine a picture on the wall. Occasionally he would sy something. When he did so he appeared to be talking to himself and rarely were his remarks relevant to anything the class was supposed to be considering. But with all this there was an air of greatness about Dewey that left his classes considerably in awe of him.

—Paul R. Hays

“Paul R. Hays, 1925 College, 127 A.M., 1933 Law, has taught Greek, Latin and Law at Columbia, practiced law, served city, state, and nation on countless legal and political fronts, and is United States Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Wesley First, ed., University on the Heights: A Collection of Essays about Life at Columbia, by Prominent Columbia Alumni, New York, 1969