CVEC – 5/6/07

What CVEC has taught me. –George Soule

I

One of the things that first attracts teachers to CVEC is that, even though they have been put out to pasture, they can still teach some of the things they have loved teaching the most. In my case, it was first Hamlet, and then Jane Austen’s Emma and George Elliot’s Middlemarch. As a matter of fact, I have managed to teach my favorite novel, Emma, twice: in my second year and last year. Then on to such favorites as The Great Gatsby and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

But after awhile, you get more grandiose ideas. I hadn’t read James Boswell’s Life of Johnson for twenty years when I embarked on it. I will never forget the fun that course was, especially with the contributions of two of my students who also had doctorates in English, Michael Foote and Lowell Johnson. (Lowell actually had been a student of mine—well, he audited a course from me, at the University of Wisconsin in 1960.)

Then I had the courage to do something new. I’d been doing a lot of reading about the poet William Wordsworth, but I had seldom taught him on more than the introductory level. Doing a whole course on him I found very challenging, especially towards it end when I had to face up to the fact that I really didn’t understand the ending of The Prelude very well. (I think I made up for it the next year when, in writing a lecture for the Wordsworth Winter School in Grasmere, England, I think I figured the ending out. I repeated the talk at Carleton, and I think, I hope, a number of my students the previous year were in the audience.)

Emboldened by this attempt, I did a course on “Reading and Listening to Poetry.” I think I got a nice enrollment because students did not realize that “listening to” meant “listening to” me. All my career I have specialized in English literature. What I had to learn from that course was something more about American literature, especially Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Their poems are not easy, but I’m very glad I had the challenge.

II

CVEC has taught me about my students. What a wonderful group they are and have been. Some of them, like Nancy and Bill Child, Bob and Joan Reitz, Nancy and Dick Cantwell, Deane and Ian Barbour, Andrea Iseminger, Bill and Molly Woehrlin (sorry if I have forgotten anyone)—they have been friend of mine for almost 50 years. One student, the late Mary Finn Nelson, was my piano teacher at Carleton (I was no good). And there are many others from Carleton, from St. Olaf, from many other places—whose names I don’t have time to list here, but who contributed mightily to the classes. I always tell prospective instructors that you will not believe what good students we have—intelligent, experienced, literate, and vocal. I tell them that we have no disciplinary problems, except for a bit of whispering in class and a disinclination to get back to work after our coffee breaks.

III

The third very important thing that being associated with CVEC has taught me was something I have thought of as “Hands Across the Cannon.” It’s wider than that, but let me explain.

If you have spent most of your life associated with a particular institution you tend to become narrow. In my case I came to Carleton in the fall of 1947 (the same year I found out that Tom Porter came to St. Olaf). I graduated in 1951, and came back to teach (with my wife Carolyn, Class of 1958) in 1962. I retired in 1995, but continued to teach a course a year until 2000. It is not surprising that my horizon was pretty much bounded by Carleton (and the Ordway, Orchestra Hall, and some very good restaurants in the Twin Cities).

I began to broaden these horizons in 1993 when I joined Rotary and met and talked to an amazing group of men and women of Northfield. But the real thing that as helped me know more about my fellow Northfielders has been CVEC. I have had as students and colleagues (and sometimes both) a wonderful group of associate and friends. Some come from outside Northfield, like Ron Ronning, Marion Hvistedahl and Jerry and Liz Haskins, who ran the program for several very good years. And Bob and Teresa Ballentine, who I sense have give more to CVEC than I can comprehend. But many are from that other college in Northfield—St. Olaf. I know I will forget some names, but I must mention Lowell Johnson again and my old friend Mary Hove. Karen Wee was wonderful in contributing to my poetry course. Vern Faillettaz was a stalwart on the curriculum committee when I was its chair and has done a better job than I did in the past two years when he had been chair. Lori Stanley has been an invaluable Operations director. And most of all (I wish he was here today) has been our Director for the past few years, Bill Carlson. His vision for the future and his grasp of how institutions should be configured has been masterful. Next time you meet him tell him how much you and I appreciate what he has done.

All of this has given me a larger insight into how lots of people live—not just those in the somewhat closed society I have lived in for many, many years. I have thankful for what CVEC has taught me.