A Gift: A Conversation with Maurice Stein

Maurie was my professor when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University, and he was my study group leader a half century later at HILR. He had then, and still has now, a wonderfully different way of looking at the world, at life, and at intellectual exploration. We’ve been friends for a long time and, as part of this New Pathways project, we sat down together to discuss things like teaching, learning and leading at HILR. Once again, I came to learn from a master.

Stan Davis

Stan: You’ve been teaching for over five decades now, mainly at Brandeis and for the past few years at the Harvard Institute. How would you compare these two experiences?

Maurie: HILR has a little of the feeling of the early years at Brandeis University, where I spent virtually my entire career. It was a bounded community of 550 people, all relatively available, and with a sense of the need to confront real issues of human life in their courses. At HILR, many members want to pull together their studies with their lives. In my life, the two places are like bookends, and the big story for me is the evolution over 55 years of my teaching and learning self.

Stan: That’s a pretty strong statement. What happened to cause this?

Maurie: I taught my first class at HILR a year after I joined at age 75. I’d taken a few study groups before I began teaching. I had been teaching at Brandeis University for almost 50 years, so I thought I knew how to do it. I developed a study group on aging and some of the most interesting people at the Institute showed up. I had a very difficult and long reading list and intended to go through it by focusing, not on the texts themselves, but on what we learn from the texts. Probably very few of the members got through the list.

Stan: Why was that?

Maurie: I used Helen Luke’s classic book, Old Age: the Journey to Simplicity, which discussed Homer’s The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The second section dealt with meditation texts about aging, including Ram Dass’s Still Here Now and Toni Packer’s The Wonder of Presence. These texts involved a lot of reading and we were all having difficulties.

I was wiping them out, and they were wiping me out. I’d unleashed a terror in me and in everybody! My lesson from that was that we shouldn’t let this go by, that we needed discussions about aging.

I never found time or felt safe enough to talk or let anyone else talk about our shared experience of aging. I was torn between talking about the texts and talking about ourselves. Apparently, this was the first aging course taught at HILR, save for one in the distant past. I guess I had hoped to explore my own aging. At that time, I had not yet had a major illness.

I was also trying to take off from a course I had been teaching for a long time at Brandeis, “The Sociology of Birth and Death,” but I really had not done the hard work of adapting it for a class of elders.

I had decided to teach “The Sociology of Birth and Death” when my daughter was born as I turned 50. Suddenly, I had to learn about both beginnings and endings. When I tried to transplant the course into HILR, I had great difficulty. Still, I was convinced that HILR needed a place where we could discuss aging.

Stan: So what did you do?

Maurie: Rhoada Wald and I encouraged the Curriculum Committee to let us set up four conversation groups on aging, outside the regular curriculum, to look at research on aging, wisdom and aging, literary approaches to aging, and the politics of aging. The groups were quite wonderful and they motivated several of us to lead regular study groups on the topic.

Stan: Then health problems got in your way.

Maurie: Yes. You might say that my personal study of aging accelerated when I fell several times, the worst down a flight of stairs at home. I also collapsed in a supermarket in Hartford, Connecticut. It turned out that I simultaneously had a kidney stone and acute urinary retention. They didn’t 88 New Pathways for Aging New Pathways for Aging 89 quite know how to treat either because the two were interwoven. I became really sick and had to withdraw from HILR for a year. People tried to visit me, but it was hard to deal with my catheter and my mental state. I returned in the fall of 2007 to take one study group and then took three the following spring.

Stan: You taught sociology and anthropology. How did these subjects enter into your explorations of aging?

Maurie: Well, HILR facilitates exploring big questions about how the world works. My focus as an anthropologist and sociologist has long been about the different ways societies handle vital information—from the epic stories and myths in the non-literate world, to the role of print and other media in the literate world, and finally to computers and the internet in post-literate society.

Before I got sick, for example, I led a course with Peter Spellman on three Polish poets: Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. Understanding them required combining poetry, history, politics and spirituality. This course gave me a sense that HILR could allow me to examine the deeper threads of my intellectual life. Milosz had entered my life in the early 1950s with his book on communism, and he inspires me through his poems and essays to the present moment. He explained through life stories what it was like to become a communist. He honored the dead. And he gave me a sense that HILR could give you the chance to examine the unexplored threads of your life.

Returning to HILR after being ill, I was delighted to find that all four courses that I took dealt with large issues of aging. Murray Smith’s superb study group on “The Greek Awakening” was directly relevant. And my study groups on Yeats, the Koran, and Japanese landscape gardens could also all be placed in this context. The connections among these seemingly disparate subjects continue to be a source of delight and new knowledge for me. It’s the opportunity to connect what’s in my head with the energy that’s present in these subjects. This intellectual gift was almost as important as the personal experience, after being ill, of being welcomed back by so many friends.

Stan: Two threads that come across strongly are that you specifically learn by teaching and that you strongly integrate your learning into who you are.

Maurie: My strategy as a teacher was always to arrange courses that allowed me to expand the growing edge of my own learning, which eventually led to the conversations on aging. I always tried to select texts and classroom settings that help push me beyond my current level of understanding. At Brandeis I taught to learn. I taught meditation for 25 years and learned something in every class, particularly from students who had trouble getting a hold on it and finding out what they gained when they did. I never quite realized how dependent I was on learning from the classroom encounter. Our conversations on aging were an effort to do the same thing by allowing us to figure out how elders could explore this ever-present issue together.

Stan: One of the reasons that you were a favorite professor when I was an undergraduate is that we could see how hard you worked at applying what we were studying to your life. You still have that knack.

Maurie: Retiring, aging, and dying are great mysteries and sometimes we like to pretend they aren’t. I don’t know why my recent illnesses had to happen simultaneously and I still try to understand what it means to have eight months of forced withdrawal from the world. I had wonderful support from my family and friends but was incredibly dependent on them. I learned that I could come back but I also realized that at some future time I wouldn’t be able to do that. I vastly underestimated the severity of retirement, the demands of aging, and the finality of death. In the meantime, though, I can stay at school, which means that I can continue to use my head and to learn from friends.

One of the most profound teachers I have had at HILR is Tom Hooper. That semester his poetry course was on Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Philip Levine. The most important lesson he taught me, above and beyond new insight into the poems, was his supreme confidence that when he is teaching, if he doesn’t know something, someone else in the class always will. Tom creates a learning environment in which everyone feels welcome and able to contribute.

Stan: You and Tom are very much alike that way. People will take whatever you are teaching, because they “take the teacher, not the course.” But where you let us see your struggle to find relevance, Tom is much more laid back. He’s much more relaxed about the different meanings that people find and apply. 90 New Pathways for Aging

Maurie: One great lesson of HILR came rather early on. It is wonderful to watch people invent so many different styles of teaching. We come from many different backgrounds, but HILR allows us all to recreate ourselves as innovative teachers in our own ways. We’re all members of study groups that we’ve chosen. Unlike the university there are no tests, no grades, and everyone has lifetime tenure. Students in one class turn out to be teachers in another and everybody participates on committees and community service.

They’re all intellectuals, but they hadn’t taught. One was a librarian, one a computer specialist, one a physicist, and another a human resources manager. HILR is a seedbed of novel ways of teaching. Some are very cynical about this, and say you can find this variety at any university. But they’re wrong. It’s different because, unlike the university, HILR students don’t have to be there. One’s teaching therefore comes more from your human qualities than from a curriculum or an agenda.

Those who have the gift have become real elders, esteemed elders in the HILR community. They’re bringing equality, cooperation, openness, and recognition to the classroom; they’re embracing mystery, not resolution. Kids require and deserve structure, so you can’t do this with them.

Stan: I remember taking a course with you on economic anthropology. Does this apply here?

Maurie: Offering a study group here is a gift and participating effectively in one is equally a gift. No one is paid and the fees are relatively modest for membership. We are an economy based on mutual gift-giving and mutual recognition. Most of us are trying very hard but no one is working in a conventional sense. Everything people do here, like teaching and committee work are gifts. It’s community service, not work, and that’s one of the beauties of the place. It’s also the confusion between these two that makes contributing such a complicated enterprise. We all have to make the jump from education as competitive, to education as collaboration and gift.

Maintaining quality in the context of mutual aid becomes a complicated enterprise. The Curriculum Committee has a delicate task when it decides to modify or reject a proposed study group. If you’re on the Curriculum Committee and turn down a course, you’re turning down a gift. And this New Pathways project, after all, is also self-study, a special kind of ethnographic research, and hopefully a gift to HILR.

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