Mark Livingston . 1637 Posen Avenue . Berkeley, California . 94707
28January 2011.
Prof. William Wagner, Dean of Faculty
Hopkins Hall
Williams College
Williamstown, MA 01267
Good day, Professor Wagner and esteemed colleagues on the Committee.
A word of introduction first. I’m pleased to ‘bookend’ these letters, chronologically, alongside the comments of some of Sheafe Satterthwaite’s recent and current students. Graduated (s.c.l.) in 1972, in English and secondarily Classics, I enlisted as one of Sheafe’s first 50-odd deckhands on the maiden voyage of Art 201. It was to prove a lengthy and a rewarding journey.
I’d been introduced to Sheafe by Bill Carney (’70), a gifted poet and naturalist who, under Sheafe’s aegis, published a handsome little book, Man, Land, through the College’s pioneering Center for Environmental Studies. Bill drafted the Great Barrington Town Plan soon after graduating, and went on to lay out many urban parks and public spaces as landscape architect for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.
Over the rest of my own time at Williams I hobnobbed with Sheafe informally a good deal, frequently stowing away on field trips; and spent one summer in Williamstown under his tutelage, multifariously researching a local history/land use project that resulted in the Center’s issuance of an oversize, composite interpretive wall map, nicknamed the Stone Hill Map, during my senior year.
Throughout that project Sheafe—quite characteristically—figured hugely: as its originator (based on personal acquaintance and an Art 201 term project), funding coordinator, general factotum to the floundering intern, multidisciplinary librarian extraordinaire, professional/official/local resources & contacts broker—and in that connection, field expedition guide as well; historical, scientific, cartographic and typographic design and production advisor, general editor, publishing agent—down to enlisting a childhood employer-mentor of his own, the distinguished typographer Bert Clarke, as our scholar- printer.
Although the Stone Hill Map may’ve been more elaborate than most student projects (Art 201 projects did however tend to be multi-media and cumbersome—probably still do), it actually incorporates a fraction of what I learned making it. More to the point: my experience typified the sense of a blank check drawn on his time, the painstaking, ever thoughtful attention, and the polymathic wealth of knowledge that I’ve watched Sheafe lavish on his students one after another over the years: a whorl of learning synergy.
i
Now as I read through testimonial letters eddying in the gust that bears us news of Sheafe‘s employment termination, my thoughts fork. On the one hand I’m moved by the powerful, thematic witness borne throughout these accounts—showing as many persuasive turns and nuances as there are witnesses—to the actually transmutative effect of his teaching on the tenor and course of his students’ lives, four decades going now.
On the other hand I marvel that Williams, to its great credit, would have so long preserved the presence of mind, tolerance of difference—the intellectual and professional liberality—to accommodate (if never quite come to terms with) the works and ways of someone so brazenly unconventional, bordering at times on the eccentric. Institutions, we understand, thrive on regularity: consensus, consistency, balance, tradition—on the steadying hand of system and authority—in both their materia and processes.
For its longtime harborage of Sheafe’s outrigger we have Williams to thank, not merely as a community of scholars but as a concourse of worldviews, value systems, methodologies—a banquet of mutually illuminating differences.
ii
Enter Sheafe: anachronistically the gentleman, who seems however to relish the role of maverick. Fortified with an insatiable curiosity, he prefers to catch his subjects, especially his students—perhaps his colleagues, too—just off-guard: to hold up our preconceptions, prejudices, even our self-images against realities we may scarcely have been aware of; to pursue those realities tirelessly into dimensions where ‘plain facts,’ winnowed for their whys and wherefores, types and patterns, become immeasurably enriched and enlivened: leavened, one might say. ‘Let us never underestimate the value of a fact:’ as Thoreau cautions. ‘It may one day flower in a truth.’
More habitually than anyone else I’ve known—unless perhaps Robert Gaudino, his late colleague—Sheafe not merely practices but embodies the Socratic method: persistently querying and coaxing, raveling the skein of dialog that nominally binds the canon of the humanities and liberal arts. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ might be engraved on his calling card as aptly as over the doors of the College library. No less so Montaigne’s humble yet mischievous corollary, ‘What do I know?’—armed with which he cheerfully takes on the Socratic role of personal and institutional gadfly.
We fondly recognize these qualities and attitudes that, far flung and unalike as we are, we came to cherish in common during our own privileged days at the College—regardless what focus our studies took otherwise, or what bent our lives since. They leavened all our studies then, like a second nature, as they have done our perceptions, our values, and our undertakings all these many years.
iii
All which makes the decision to cut his service off summarily, at this late stage of his career, at once both unsurprising and puzzling. Yet we must wonder now if, among the unusual circumstances of his apparently unsecured 40-odd-year teaching history at the College, Sheafe has benefited from the consideration enjoyed by other teachers of such long standing?
iv
Dialectical learning, Sheafe’s natural element, depends above all on engagement, starting with the student actively engaging him or herself: with the subject matter, be it exalted or commonplace; with those whose works and days are laid open before us; with the instructor himself, who may offer a wealth of information, guidelines, and prompts, but few pat answers or simple definitions. Such a teaching style invites—for its success, enjoins—the student’s commitment.
Small wonder that not all students find Sheafe instructive. His eccentricities may amuse some, his ‘factoids’ seem absurdly overabundant to others: he makes no effort either to disguise or to entertain with either. He broadcasts all these facts, names, dates, places, it’s true, like seed—by myriads: but not to be individually recorded and memorized. (If Sheafe were an artist might he be a cubist? composing multiple viewpoints of his subject at once, sizing things up differently from each angle?)
On the face of it he may seem to tread (even sink in) a vast drift of inert, factual knowledge, more or less of which may appear little better than randomly related. His instant associative command of all those increments and iotas truly, is little short of miraculous—a byword among all who know him. But it’s actually a distraction from the main event.
His (evidently long lingering) efficacy as a teacher distils from those vast banks of data; condenses in a ‘cloud’ of constant reconsideration or reperception; thence runs along every channel it finds, first tracing, then carving out provocative cross-references, revealing analogies—relationships, real and perceived, of all kinds, however gross or subliminal, and whether well established or freshly detected. Public and private, people, nature, products, places, processes: his subjects know few bounds.
He takes particular pleasure in connecting people. From distant walks, down diverse paths he brings them together, lumberjack and luminary, who may never have known they had something important in common, or who perhaps unexpectedly find that there’s something valuable to be shared between them. This approach itself is the Other Subject in the room—always standing just behind or to the side of the nominal one.
Some students, every year, every class—among them those avowedly enrolled in hope of a hayride in the back row—unwilling to focus and to stay alert, bringing little initiative of their own to the discourse, balk before what appears to them a blank wall of loosely mortared detail: while at their elbows others, awakened to the codes and formulas before them, venture on new perspectives entirely through subtly drawn gates.
iv.
In the same spirit, to their mutual enrichment, even, as we would nowadays say, their repurposement,Sheafe is forever infusing the methods of the social sciences—particularly field investigation and candid interview—with the spirit and lore of the humanities, and vice versa: academic disciplines seldom so at ease with each other.
He faithfully models that humanism himself, not merely in greeting each novelty with goodwill and cheer: but in showing respect if not admiration for the real other in persons, customs, sentiments, values, occupations; keeping bracingly fairminded in his approach to class, trade or profession, age, gender, or cultural distinction.
Sheafe presses his students to engage themselves hands-on, minds outstretched, with a world every inch and aspect of which presents itself, on scrutiny, like Darwin’s “tangled bank:” a hieroglyph—palimpsest—oracle of life evolving in a complex webwork of shifting form and function. And so we set off on the Long Field Trip: a perennial search to understand the shaping forces, drives and constraints, that define us.
So, in the matter of Sheafe Satterthwaite's past and present fitness for duty on the faculty, may I add my testimony to the record. I’ve taxed your time unduly: my thanks for your patient hearing. I know that in this matter as otherwise we share a common interest in the welfare of the College.
Yours very truly,
Mark Livingston, class of 1972
cc: President Adam Falk
B. Zars, et al. 