Letter from Belle Zars '79

M. Belle Zars

1706 Maple Ave.

Austin, TX 78702

January 8, 2011

Professor William Wagner

Dean of the Faculty

Williams College

Williamstown, MA

Dear Professor Wagner and members of the Williams community,

I was a student of Sheafe Satterthwaite’s from 1972 when I arrived at Williams through December 1978 when I left on a Watson Traveling Fellowship.  I came to Williams from rural Colorado on a full financial aid and graduated with the class of 1979.  Since then I have been back to Williams to visit Sheafe and have taught in various of his classes.  I also accompanied him on a Winter Study to Dominica and traveled with him to prepare for a class he taught in New Orleans.  Because my interest is in education (I received my doctorate in history of education from Harvard in 1986) I have consulted with Sheafe on many occasions about his teaching and his courses.  Although there have been gaps, we have stayed in touch over these 38 years and I feel I know Sheafe pretty well.  My most recent contact with him was as a guest teacher in his Spring 2010 class on pasture and rangeland.  We first talked about the class in the summer of 2009 and I sent him some books I thought would be useful.  He sent me the course outline and later a packet of student writing with his course notes.  I found these fascinating and I was overjoyed to see that Sheafe was spending his usual intense time reading student papers and commenting on their work.

In my time at Williams and since then as an educator, I have found no one who teaches with the intensity and expectation of growth and change as does Sheafe.  He expects learning to be a transformative experience – he expects a student to learn to see with new eyes, to read afresh, and to experience the world in a deeper, more complex and thoughtful way.

In my mind Sheafe’s pedagogy has its roots in the most interesting time in Williams’ recent history.  Following the Vietnam War and the student unrest that unfurled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Williams changed.  Teachers were again expected to actually converse with students, to make a real connection, not simply to lecture.  The idea of the student and the teacher on different ends of the Log was revived and reconsidered.  Teachers like Bob Gaudino, David Park and Sheafe Satterthwaite did not sit in their offices aloof from their students.  They questioned, taught by the Socratic method, and they believed that experience opened worlds and shook up biases and inherited opinions.  At the same time I think Williams took a long look at its white, bright and polite heritage and realized that something was missing.  The college became coed and more racially and economically diverse.  What went on in the classroom was expected to be more than chalk talk, and more than buying an expensive set of books to be skimmed and regurgitated on an exam.  Gaudino and Satterthwaite were great friends and admired each other’s work. Before Gaudino died he and Sheafe spent many hours discussing their students, classes, and teaching at Williams.  I don’t think anyone understood Gaudino better than Sheafe and I am sure that Sheafe appreciated Gaudino’s teaching methods and innovations and followed in his footsteps, naturally, as an extension of his own sense of how to teach.

Which meant getting out of the classroom and into the world.  Sheafe truly has carried out Gaudino’s dream of Williams at Home.  Sheafe has organized and taken students on hundreds of field trips.  He has expanded student’s knowledge beyond what they can read in the library or find on the internet; he has taught them that the world – physical and human – is open to them to learn from and grapple with. 

I wonder if any of you who are making a decision about the worth of Sheafe’s teaching have ever gone on a field trip with him?  Suddenly the world opens, like a many-layered box of chocolates.  Fences are interesting and have a history and meaning; a sheep farmer becomes the wisest person you could ever hope to encounter; you learn about how roads are built, why they circumvent valuable cropland.  Most importantly you learn about questions:  how to build a question, how to ask a question, you learn the courage to spring a tough question on someone who has probably never had someone take such an interest in their work or their life.  And of course, you learn how to question yourself.  What is it you know?  What is it you notice?  How aware and awake are you?  How conscious are you of your surroundings – physical and human?  No one asks more questions than Sheafe and he inspires questions.  He has the most inquiring mind of anyone I have ever met.  And he awakened my inquiring mind.  For this I will always be grateful and I have always understood what a rich gift he has given to the students of Williams year after year.

Various times I have asked Sheafe when does he want to stop?  How can he possibly put so much energy into teaching for so many years?  I don’t know the answer but I do know he has dedicated most of his working life to the college.  He has thrown himself into the work of forming inquiring, gentle, generous, open minds out of the rough clay that arrives every year.  And he has done it with so much good humor and respect.  Like Gaudino, Sheafe’s students rarely know what hit them.  They do not typically fall over in appreciation.  He does not flatter students, he does not run himself in a popularity contest.  And so students leave puzzled and challenged.  And even confused.  As Gaudino used to say, “You need to be confused.  You are too comfortable.”  This is the kind of deep teaching I associate with Sheafe.

He’s not a whiz entertainer.  The Teaching Company is not going to pick him up and sell tapes of his classes.  He is not slick and he is not superficial.  He was not made for the marketed, commercialized college experience.  He drills deep.  He probes.  He exposes.  If you are a fool and writing your way around to nowhere, Sheafe will let you know.  If you haven’t done the reading and are babbling, you will know.  He never insults, he asks questions and he expects serious work.

There is no one more important to my education and I am deeply grateful to Sheafe for being at Williams, and for Williams for keeping Sheafe.  The two are inseparable.  I cannot imagine Williams without Sheafe and I am deeply concerned that anyone would seek to sever that relationship and cast a shadow over 40 years of earnest, generous, light-filled work.  There must be some mistake.

I am also simply sick at heart to think that a committee, a group of individuals, could be so cruel.  The college should be looking for ways to inspire others to teach like Sheafe teaches.  Williams should be full of humble gratitude that anyone would devote their life to such rigorous, intensely thoughtful, life-moving teaching.  Williams should be looking at awe at someone who 38 years later can still inspire a former student to stay up most of the night writing an impassioned letter on their behalf.  Williams should celebrate the loyal, long, hard work given by a teacher and at least have the respect and grace to let that person decide for themselves when is the right time to teach fewer classes and eventually retire to other endeavors.  I cannot imagine how treating someone like this, at this point in their life and career, can be justified.  I hope you will take another long, considered, inspired look at this situation.  I hope you will find a way forward that is generous, kind, and full of light.

Respectfully submitted,

Belle Zars