(Chicago, September 8) William Parker of Yale University was awarded the 1995 Jonathan Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching Economic History at the annual meeting of the Economic History Association. The Selection Committee consisted of Mary Schweitzer (Villanova), Chair; David Mitch and Hugh Rockoff (Rutgers). The Committee received nominations for a number of outstanding candidates from all levels of instruction.

Through the force of his intellect and personality, Professor Parker formed the required coursework in economic history into one of the cornerstones of the graduate program in Economics at Yale. His lectures are noteworthy for their wit and humanity. Rather than imposing the approach of some ÔParker SchoolÕ, he has conducted seminars and advised dissertations by drawing out and clarifying his studentsÕ own lines of thought. Many of ParkerÕs students have become eminent economic historians in their own right, making important contributions to such diverse areas of economic history as early modern Dutch economy, the Irish potato famine, economic development of the 19th and early 20th century American South, and 20th century Japanese labor markets.

How deeply Bill Parker cares about his teaching responsibilities is evident in the remarks he prepared in acceptance of the Hughes Prize.

My teaching career began 44 years ago this week in front of an elementary macroeconomics class at Williams College. Even the professors wore jackets in those days, and I had honored my inauguration by wearing a brand new pair of black oxfords--leather soles and leather heels. I had prepared a far too elaborate lecture on the origins of money in the late Middle Ages--which seemed to me the place to begin, and as I stood behind my desk and warmed to the subject, I leaned against the chalk rack below the blackboard behind me--and suddenly, both my feet slipped from under me, and I found myself sitting on the floor and behind the desk. The students disappeared from my vision, and I assumed that I disappeared from theirs. But I continued to lecture, lobbing the sentences over the desk like mortar shells, and hoping they were hitting their target. As I got up sheepishly to my feet, I laughed awkwardly and the Williams' boys--their first day in a college class, too--registered a variety of reactions, ranging from alarm to nervous embarrassment to delight to total contempt. (The latter I learned later was not an uncommon attitude of these aristocrats from the vice presidential class of American industry toward their hired preceptors.) All I can say is that for a teaching career to have come from such an unpromising beginning to arrive at this event today is to have come a long way. I must have learned something too from a lifetime of teaching.

I am obviously gratified to be given the Association's commendation on these years of teaching effort. The instinct to teach is both a bit exhibitionistic and a bit altruistic. Once acquired it is hard to shut off even in the social company of one's peers. And so I wish also to inflict on you a few comments about teaching which I would like to have made had I been able to be present.

In my view teaching can be conducted in one or both of two modes: the sadistic and the masochistic. Sadistic is the powerful lecturer who thunders out his simplistic assertions from his pulpit, connecting them with a web of seeming logic, thus showing off his memory and the strength and flexibility of his reasoning powers--And such a one revels in having it all fed back to him on the exam.

'Like Cato, gives his little Senate laws,
And sits, attentive to his own applause.'
(Pope)

In this mode, a teacher conducts a discussion by vivisection--cutting up a student live, seeking to embarrass him, trap him to make him (or preferably her) blush, all to achieve a cheap mastery over a defenseless wretch.

One example--a very bad example, I feel--was the famous positivist philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper. I heard some of his lectures at the London School of Economics in 1954. He stood before a large class, without notes, and armed with a long list of provocative but unanswerable, philosophic questions. The technique was to lure a student into making a foolish generalization, and then spend the next twenty minutes shredding him--'Well, Mr. X, I would infer from your statement, etc.'

Once, when a student pleaded nolo contendere, saying 'I simply don't know what to say about that,' Popper begged, 'please Mr. Y, you must cooperate in this inquiry.' The student replied, 'Yeah, put my neck on the block, and let you slice my head off.'

Another, slightly different and more forthright example was that of the famous Texas institutionalist, Clarence Ayres. During World War II, Ayres helped in the war effort by offering a special course, 'The Sources of International Conflict,' to a thousand or so undergraduates in a large, deeply raked lecture hall. In the course, as you will suppose, wars were shown to result from the rivalry of imperialistic, capitalistic powers over markets, labor supplies, and raw materials. On the last day Ayres held a review class before the exam. It was well-attended. The review consisted of Ayres, walking back and forth across the platform, roaring, 'What's the cause of wah?', and pointing to a student to answer. The answers would come back--

STUDENT: I guess Hitler has got something to do with this one.
AYRES: WRONG. What's the cause of wah? You on the aisle--
STUDENT: The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
AYRES: WRONG.

At last, Ayres spotted a student--a little 'co-ed,' as they were called, with no offense meant, in those days. He got down from the platform and stalked down the aisle way to the back and sat down beside her, and said in the quietest possible voice, putting his arm over the back of her seat,

AYRES: Now, honey, you tell me, what's the cause of wah?
STUDENT: (With all eyes on her, looking down, trembling, at her notebook) could it be--er--the international struggle for markets?
AYRES: (Explosively in a bellow) YOU'RE GOD DAMN RIGHT THAT'S THE CAUSE OF WAH !!!

The masochistic mode, on the contrary, is better suited to the research scholar. Such a one feigns reluctance to instruct. It is enough, he feels, that he offers the example of his endlessly open mind and exhibits his saintly, self-torturing humility. He exercises his passive-aggressive personality not only before the altar of the unknowable Truth but before the personalities of his students. If he sees them at all, he sees them as individuals, not to be impressed or conquered but at most to be helped to gain their own goals, whatever they may be. In teaching, he listens--absorbing what a student is and knows, dropping only an occasional word that he believes will show his own deep knowledge of the student's nature, his sensitivities, the individual strengths of his mind.

In effectiveness of teaching, both these character types have their strengths as well as their weaknesses. The human mind can learn out of fear as well as out of sympathy. If a student loves the subject really, it is enough. For then he will suffer anything from any personality and be grateful for it, as long as he can fill his bucket with the precious gold of learning. The student can take away facts and a simple picture of their coherence from the pompousness, even the stinging sarcasm of the sadist. And he can get a fuzzy picture of greater depths from the muttered, shy, ramblings of the masochist. From the one he learns that Truth is a clear and encompassing revelation; from the other, that Truth is at the same time an endlessly shifting stream lit by half-lights and leading on into the shadows. Socrates knew both these Truths and tried to teach them, and each of us has his moments or subjects in which he is captured more by the one than the other. The TRUTH--let me pronounce in firm tones, to be written down in the student's notebook--is that if a student is determined to learn, how he is taught doesn't matter. I would suspect that all of us would say that we learned more from books than from lectures or seminars. The classroom gives an experience that is sometimes exciting, sometimes miserably boring. It is often memorable more for its human details--the personality of the teacher, than for the content of what is said.

In my own case as a dissertation student, I can claim two 'Doctor-fathers' as the Germans call the thesis director. I began my dissertation work under Abbott Usher at Harvard, who retired when I was just getting under way, and I was turned over to his then relatively unknown successor, Alexander Gerschenkron. They represent to me almost modal types of these two personalities. Gerschenkron was a notable lecturer who spoke with commanding passion and intensity. But nearly all of his students will admit that he had a certain enjoyment in holding their feet to the fire. Usher, on the other hand, was extremely kind, though impersonal or formal. His lectures were solid, but--let's face it--dull. His main job, he seemed to think, was to write some marvelous research monographs and two beautifully designed and well-balanced texts--and so to furnish serious students with the example of the library scholar. I recall being lulled to sleep by the rhythms of his long lecture on long waves. The ironic thing there is that twenty or so years later, when I was giving my lecture at Yale on that subject, based in part on his notes, he, having retired and visiting in New Haven to see his daughter, showed up in my class. And when I got to the part on long waves, I turned to him to introduce him to the class.--And he had fallen asleep!! This time, however, I was wide awake.

Cutting across the distinction I have just made lies the distinction between graduate and undergraduate teaching, a distinction, that is, between different audiences and the motivations of their members. It would be far too simple to equate the two teacher types with the two groups of students, separated, as they are, by the flimsy divider of the A.B. degree. Undergraduate teaching lends itself perhaps better to the harsh disciplines of the sadist--the powerful thundering professor, asking mean questions, putting the student on the spot, calling on the obviously unprepared. There is room for that but I never have been able to steel myself to engage in it. I have, however, occasionally preached--and enjoyed preaching--when I had a synthesizing idea that I thought was new. That could make me thunder and I have had each term at least one or two occasions where I can proudly say that I had my audience's rapt attention, where you could hear a pin drop. Those are rare moments when the lecturer can stand--'like stout Cortez and stare at the Pacific'--and communicate the excitement he feels. Of course we know that like the raptures of love this sensation vanishes after a few days. It is a cloud castle, but for a shining moment it is a glimpse of heaven.

And interestingly enough, it was late in my career when I came upon the oddest of the many circumstances encountered in the classroom. It appears, I surmise, only in a discussion of topics in the history of one's own era, especially out of one's distant past when the emotions felt for great events lay close to the surface. Along in the 1970s when students, having read the novels of Ayn Rand were slowly turning before my eyes into McKinley Republicans (that is, believing in laissez-faire in every business little or big in every particular except the protective tariff and, later, the financial 'bail-outs' and other acts of corporate welfare), I found I had a deeply hidden perverse emotional bond with the Progressives and the Populists of the decades from the 1890s right through the programs and inspiring words and deeds of Franklin Roosevelt. I could not read to an undergraduate class Bryan's peroratio in the Cross of Gold speech or Roosevelt's great words about 'we have nothing to "feah" but "Feah" itself' to a class without a catch in my voice and a moistening at the eyes. The first time that this happened, I was horrified, afraid that the class would titter and that I could never again teach them a thing. But looking up I realized that they--bless their young, would-be-aristocratic-but-still-tender, hearts--were awed! Then I remembered my own college lecturer in the class on the New Testament, a gentle Englishman named Kersop Lake, who read from Corinthians and Romans the famous purple passages about love and death with a similar display of emotion. The word went around class not to miss the next lecture on Paul's Epistles because Lake would erupt like Old Faithful. I did not make this display an annual feature of my course but I must admit that I did play it again once or twice to see if I got the same results. And lest Don McCloskey should feel that this showed my leftist biases, I should add that when I lectured on property rights and the Constitution I experienced the same phenomenon when I quoted to the class the conclusion of Daniel Webster's great plea on the inviolability of the royal charter of Dartmouth College against expropriation by the state of New Hampshire. 'Sir,' he said, fixing his great black eyes on John Marshall and the justices, and in the presence of the attorney for the defendant, Woodward, the Attorney General of New Hampshire who, like Webster, was also a Dartmouth graduate, 'it is a small college--and yet there are those who love it.' Worse yet, I remember this because it had been my own father, himself a Dartmouth man, who had told it to me. Dad said that Webster broke down in tears like a child. Then mastering his emotions, the god-like Daniel turned on the Attorney General. Pointing at him, he declaimed, 'when I behold my alma mater, like Caesar in the Senate House, surrounded by her enemies who reiterate stab upon stab I would not for my life see her turn to me and say like Caesar, "et tu quoque. mi fili! And thou too, my son!"' When my father recited this to me it sent shivers down my filial spine.

This is not a rhetorical device that I would urge on us here or an audience of the 1990s but I can say that it moved a room full of Yalies. Presumably it showed the depths of their love for their alma mater as well as their enthusiasm for the establishment of inalienable private property in the United States.

With graduate students the matter is rather different, especially in the technique of directing a dissertation student to his great goal. Here indeed is a personal relationship. Apart from listening to the myriad problems of a financial or emotional nature that graduate students have, an advisor can really help both in the choice of thesis topic and in giving access to whatever sources and techniques he has at his command. But the main task is to avoid killing a student's good ideas, encumbering him with help, or worse scooping him into the advisor's own research projects unless the student has absolutely no ideas of his own. I do not think that economics is enough of a science to give a student his maximum benefit by assigning him to a narrowly-defined task in the division of the advisor's research labor. Instead--and certainly for able students of independent mind--the advisor should serve as a kind of bridge between his own knowledge of the market--his sense of what areas of research are going to sell, on the one hand--and on the other hand his understanding of the emotional sources of the student's interests, energies and motivation. Here is where a little humility plays a role. I can recall several examples of this in my experience. Sometimes I was inclined to suggest a topic currently fashionable but then I would realize that the student's whole background conditioned him to work on something else quite different. In one notable case of a big city boy, when the topic of sharecropping was on everybody's tongue, I encouraged the student to consider a topic in the area of the Great Depression, an area which was lying just over the horizon of people's interest. The student produced in fact a marvelous book, followed by, so far, a happy career as a historian. In fact I sold that student to a history department whose chairman called looking for economic historians. I told the chairman that we had one, but of course this student was getting his degree in economics, so a history department would not be interested in him. He took the bait and said with some annoyance, 'Oh, I wouldn't say that; we're not that narrow minded,' and had him down for a seminar and a job.

Well, this is enough. I just want to say thanks--sincerely, I mean it. I am proud of my teaching memories which like all memories I can improve on at will. The mixture of pride and humility we all feel at such times as this makes us realize how strong these giant egos of ours are, whether of sadistic or of masochistic bent--strong and devious to a point where we can swell with pride at the contemplation of our own humility and bow our heads humbly before the awesome spectacle of our monumental pride. Oxymoronically I offer you proudly my humble thanks.