Professor Interview

I received all of my degrees from Cambridge University in England. 

I did study for one year at Harvard on a Kennedy Scholarship, which is like a Marshall, but in reverse—it’s for getting British people to study in Ivy League American universities. But I wasn't working towards a degree, technically the status was special student, actually. It was a great year—I sang in the Harvard Glee Club and went on a Pan-American tour in the summer there. 

So that's probably why I'm here sitting with you today as an American citizen. That time in Boston made such an impression on me that when the opportunity to take up a position at Yale emerged at the end of my PhD in the philosophy department there, I happily took it in preference to an opportunity that I had available back in the country where I'd grown up. I wanted to start the adventure again, not realizing that I'd never return. But that's how these things happen. So I then spent 10 years at Yale as a junior professor in the Philosophy department. At the end of that period, the Classics Department at Berkeley (now the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies) encouraged me to apply for a position that had opened up. I did, and I got tenure here, and have since moved up the ladder. I've never been anywhere else. I came to Berkeley in 1988 so in a couple years time, I'll have done 40 years of service. Well, it's—I shouldn't just say a couple—I came in 1988 and it's 2024 now. So I guess I've got another more, like three or four to go. God is it that long? I thought it was gonna be sooner, but yeah, I'm plodding along towards my 40 years. 

What do you teach now at Berkeley?

Hmm, let's see. So, Classics is just limited to ancient Greece and Rome, those times. Within that, you can study literature, philosophy, art and architecture, history, and linguistics, and I was interested in lots of those branches, especially literature. But the reasons I turned to philosophy were not especially good reasons—I thought the professors in philosophy were the best ones. They struck me as the most exciting and smart, basically. The subject itself seemed to be the most challenging of those branches, and I wanted the biggest challenge I could get for myself. That's what got me into philosophy. It's not that I found it more interesting than literature—it was about evenly divided. But then I learned to love philosophy the more I did it. And so I then became a true believer, in that sense, in the worth of studying philosophy. 

Why did I get into being a professor? I don't want to pretend I was on some kind of crusade or anything. Sometimes, for many people, it is simply the path of least resistance. You know, you're enjoying your studies immensely, and the way to keep that going and never leave school is to become a professor. Certainly, there was an element of that in what I did because I was always good at foreign languages, and I kind of liked to collect them and learn as many as I could, especially the ones with strange pronunciation. I flirted with the idea of becoming a teacher of English as a foreign language, and traveling from country to country, becoming one of those nomads in my 20s. In the end, I didn't do it, and just applied to graduate school instead.

Looking back, I have to admit that I was an awful teacher and had a real baptism of fire in my first couple of years at Yale. I almost gave up because I wasn’t taught to teach in the British system, and I didn't do much teaching. Here, our graduate students—as you may know already—finance themselves. We give them fellowships, but we also give them GSI-ships, and they get a salary for that. They learn to be teachers that way, so they come out of graduate school with years of experience. And many of them, I'm just astonished at how good they are. It's one of my duties, to go and sit and inspect how they're teaching, and I'm often quite humbled by how much better they are than I am at certain aspects of the job, you know. I never had any of that, because I was at Cambridge. Maybe it's different in other British universities, but Cambridge is divided into colleges, and each college is like a small community. I mean, professors did give lectures, but they mostly gave supervision and tutorials to, you know, really tiny numbers of students at a time. So I had no experience in handling the kind of numbers that I was faced with in American Schools, or how to hold the attention of a class, or how to vary the pace. I thought that if I just gave them my own thoughts on reading this or that book, reading them out from a copious sheaf of notes… I was just droning on. I got terrible teaching evaluations in my first year, and it was my wake-up call. By the end of my 10 years at Yale, I’m happy to say I won a teaching prize — but I really had to learn to turn on a dime. America gave me that, you know. Britain probably wouldn't have—I would have been allowed to coast in my rather pompous ways that I'd gotten into the habit of. So I'm very grateful to America for giving me the chance to improve my teaching. 

And I do find now—you know, I could retire tomorrow if I so chose—but one of the things that keeps me in the job most is teaching undergraduates. Because in the kind of classes that I teach a lot of the time, I'm not teaching majors. I'm teaching people like you guys. Even when I'm teaching classes that have DAGRS majors in them, you're not careerists yet. Or if you are careerists, it's because you want to become computer scientists or the next tech billionaire or whatever. But you're not careerist about academics, whereas when you teach graduate students, academic politics gets involved. So it's a purer experience with the subject, if someone is a computer science major and then comes to one of my classes for the humanities breath. They're just doing it to get their humanities prep, I realize that, but they're also generally choosing a class of mine out of interest, because I don't teach the easiest of classes. And that gives a kind of purity to the teaching experience that I prize and don't want to give up.

Why did I come to America? Because I had a great time that year at Harvard. And so when I had to choose between a professorial opportunity in Britain and one at Yale, I chose America. Not because I had always set my heart on America, but because I thought, let's give it another try. I mean, I had a great time before, maybe I'll have a great time again. 

As I told you, my first two years were very far from being a great time, but thankfully, I persisted, and then I found lots and lots to like about America when I came back. I liked the university system. I liked the way graduate education was less specialized, and undergraduate education, of course, even less specialized. I thought that America made students into more complete people than I had seen Britain doing. There were plenty of very well-rounded British students back then, but the system can lead to someone like me who was just really—what you would call in British slang—a swot. It’s not so much that I was an actual nerd, as that all my self-validation came from being an excellent student, being top of the class, doing well in exams and that kind of thing. So I found myself being valued as a swot. Whereas in this country, yes, you're more likely to get denounced as a teacher's pet in the scholastic environment, but the British system tempted me to do nothing but that.

In the early days, when I came to America, it made me more adventurous and willing to try stuff that I'd never tried.  I started going to auditions! I'm a terrible actor, you know, I never got anything, but I went to auditions. I would never have done that in Britain. I did a lot of dancing. I did a lot of singing.  I became a “song-and-dance man,” you could say, in ways that I did not back in Britain. I liked that encouragement to adventure, which in part was just because here I was—this Brit—but I think it was honestly, you know, America itself genuinely encourages that kind of thing. 

What else about America? Oh well, again, this is not the most noble of reasons, but back then especially—I've lost some of my accent now, but not all of it. I still retain enough of it where everyone can hear that I'm not from here when I open my mouth. Back then, you know, that made me cool! And I was in my late 20s. I wasn't cool where I came from—suddenly I was cool, right? So I enjoyed that aspect of it as well. Then I married and sobered up. 

Came to California, that was…well, at first, there was this terrible disappointment. I had no idea about climate differences in California, so I thought I was coming to some golden California beach culture or something. And when I discovered coastal fog, I felt like I was brought here on false pretences. When I first went to meetings and stuff at Stanford, I would always tell people, “Berkeley is Berkeley, but Stanford is California.” And that meant something wonderful to me because I love the sun. But on the other hand, you know, I often tell people that I'm here for the groceries. I mean, I love the food culture around here. 

And of course, I found a different kind of diversity here than at Yale. At Yale, I mean, New Haven is a very Italian town, but the Italians come from a different part of Italy than my Italian background. I’m of Italian origin all the way through—both sides, my grandparents were immigrants — but they're from northern Italy. Most Italian immigrants to America, certainly to the East Coast, are from Southern Italy or Sicily. So people would take me to Italian festivals to say, “Oh, you're going to love this.” But I found it quite foreign. You know, sort of—

what the hell is a calzone!?

I did not grow up with that kind of Italian food, because the different regions of Italy have quite different Italian food.

Then I came here, and of course, there was much more diversity of Asian students and Asian culture, which I absolutely fell in love with—literally so: my wife is Japanese. British people who grew up in Britain and became academics that I know have stayed in much closer contact with British culture, and some of them even retire to Britain. But I became an American citizen, and I would never even consider trying to retire to Britain. I go back there almost exclusively to see family who are still there. 

How do top institutions in the UK and in the US, such as Cambridge versus UC Berkeley, differ in terms of academic environment, and is there any reason that you would prefer one to the other?

Retiring!—at some point…or maybe not? But of course I will at some point. As I said, what really keeps me here is doing more of the same in terms of undergraduate teaching, because I feel I have to, you know, always try to get better and better at teaching. Every year I ask “how did I screw up this semester,” and “how can I make sure I don't do that next semester?” But basically, I want to sort of keep doing what I'm doing because it's really enjoyable. So long as the students keep on seeming to enjoy it, I will, you know, I'm not in a hurry to stop doing that. 

I'm editing a new book, a collection with 12 other Plato scholars, with the theme of “Plato and poetry,” “Plato and literary studies.” So that's a project that's going to keep me going for the next two or three years. I’m going to China for the first time in the summer of 2025, giving a series of lectures in Beijing. So I'm trying to learn a few phrases — what were they, now? Things like 谢谢 (xiè xiè; thank you), 对不起  (duì bù qǐ; sorry).  I'm still conducting adventures and still learning new languages wherever I can.