ROGE Interview

“Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are essential tools that I use every day.”

A Conversation with Bob Elder (class of 1999)

by Emma Love (class of 2006)

Emma Love: Tell us about your educational background.

Bob Elder: In terms of Northfield, I was in the seventh grade when it started, so I had the experience of coming up through all the grades. The only people below us that year were the first sixth-graders, and they were actually a fairly intimidating bunch. I had been taught at home up to that point, but I guess everybody around me agreed it was time to move on when Uncle Bob [Love] started the school (then called The Learning Alternative). I graduated from Northfield in 1999 and went to WSU for a year before I transferred to Clemson University in South Carolina. There were four Northfield graduates at Clemson while I was there: myself, my brother, my cousin Peter, and James Bendowsky. I graduated from Clemson in 2003 with degrees in history and English, started a master’s degree in history at Clemson in the fall of 2003, got married in 2004, and in the fall of 2005, I started a Ph.D. in history at Emory University in Atlanta. My field is American history, the American South in particular.

EL: Why did you choose that field?

BE: I think my education at Northfield had a lot to do with my choices when I got to college. The classical education model at Northfield was drawn from history, and you couldn’t escape the historical aspect of any of the subjects we studied. In Latin, we studied the poetry of dead Romans, and in English, we studied Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” which memorialized a real event in the Crimean War. Even Mr. Schmidt, who taught us chemistry and physics, had a book called The Killer Angels on his bookshelf, which is about the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. In fact, it was Mr. Schmidt who took us on our school trips to Williamsburg, VA, and Washington D.C., so that we could see some of our history first-hand. I guess I just absorbed the things I was interested in, because I don’t remember much from the math classes, although Ms. Ernst tried valiantly. The reason that I gravitated towards southern history is that it is partly my history. My dad is from Tennessee, and our family—the Loves—were from North Carolina before they started to move west. I also saw the opportunity to write about a history that should matter very much to Americans since the South is the only part of the country that knows from experience that it isn’t invincible. Everybody has an opinion about the South, so it’s fun.

EL: How did Northfield prepare you for this area?

BE: I’ve already commented about how Northfield pushed me in history’s direction, but I think it goes beyond that. I feel that I would have been prepared for almost any path that I might have chosen coming out of Northfield. Uncle Bob’s favorite saying is that Northfield is “life prep” instead of “college prep,” and that was true in a lot of ways. Northfield isn’t a vocationally oriented school, and that gives the students an edge, I think. You come out of school knowing how to learn instead of simply possessing a narrow set of skills that determine what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. That’s very freeing. In other words, I think Northfield prepared me by teaching me how to think instead of what to think, although that happens as well.

EL: What part do the liberal arts play in what you’re doing now?

BE: Well, since I’m trying to be an historian, I hope that things like grammar, logic, and rhetoric are things that I use quite bit, although sometimes I’m not sure. Part of what I do is study the past and construct arguments about how it was and why it was that way. To do that well, I have to use all three of these “arts.” To me, these are essential tools that I use every day, not just nice concepts handed down to us by cruel Greeks. I don’t think it’s just me, either. I think that wherever you find a successful person, whether a teacher or a businessman or whatever, you’ll find a person who uses these skills well. Of course, there are really seven liberal arts, and I’m only talking about the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The quadrivium includes math. I’ll let someone else argue how necessary that is, which, unfortunately, it is.

EL: Tell us a funny story about your Northfield years.

BE: All my funny stories about Northfield eventually find their way to James Bendowsky, so I’ll just start there. We were in Mr. Sebastian’s Latin class one morning and we were all pretty tired. We were getting ready for the AP test, I think. Mr. Sebastian had a fishbowl with little pieces of paper in it for every Horace or Catullus poem that we were supposed to know for the test, and he would draw one out randomly every day and we would translate it in class. Then he would put the piece of paper back in the bowl, and we would start over, supposedly doing this until we had done every poem twice. Well, I guess James had missed the fact that we were supposed to put the piece of paper back in the bowl. He got to draw, and after he drew the poem out and said, “Horace 131,” or whatever, he just put the piece of paper in his mouth and started chewing. We all just sat there for a minute, including Mr. Sebastian, who had been reaching out to take the thing back. Then we all started yelling at James, which made him mad and he swallowed. I have no idea why he did it, maybe he was just trying to wake us up, which he did because Mr. Sebastian yelled at him for five minutes until James offered to try and get it back for him.