The Doctor Will See You Now

My first year on campus, I had one academic experience that would remain with me for a lifetime of teaching and learning. I had been a middling high school student and calling me middling is being charitable. My grades would never have gained me admittance to a top university had I not aced my SAT. High school bored me - and I do not function well when bored!  Girls, baseball, radical politics, and rock n’ roll, in no particular order, held far more interest than the uninspiring, sleep-inducing, drone like teachers and mostly brain-dead semi-racist classmates in my suburban high school, out there in the newly subdivided pastures of central Jersey. 

To this day, when I hear anyone extolling special times and glory days at the football games or homecoming dances found at those uniquely American four years of torture, I am dumbfounded. I never attended high school reunions and maintain contact with nary a soul from those largely wasted four years. High school left virtually no impression of any kind on me, it being solely a necessary pit stop on the road to somewhere else.

The only academic initiative I successfully pursued during my senior year resulted in a strong showing in AP history, which allowed me entry to a special universe my very first quarter in college. Professor Bell Wiley, a legendary Civil War historian, was retiring after the quarter and was teaching one last course, open to upperclassmen and any freshman who had tested in through Advanced Placement. Two hundred and fifty rapt students signed up, and the class would meet across from the main quad in the law school auditorium. 

Dr. Wiley’s maternal grandfather served with the Army of Tennessee, fighting against Sherman’s forces, and while Dr. Wiley barely knew him, he grew up with his widow, who enthralled him as a boy with stories of the hardships of that terrible war. Often during Sunday dinner, his family would play host to ex-soldiers from both sides of the conflict, and it was this personal history of the average soldiers and civilians, not the generals and politicians of the era, that would guide his scholarship and classroom teaching so many years later. 

More critical than his intimate knowledge of the details of the war, the rank-and-file soldiers who did the fighting, the generals, and the politicians, was Wiley’s passion for the subject matter. Even in the intimacy-challenged environment of the spacious auditorium, Professor Wiley made history come alive. He brought props: a Union corporal's cap, a Confederate officer’s sword, and many more. The classroom was performance art. Execution of battle plans was not a dry list of dates, battlefields, and officers, but rather a tapestry of colors and personalities, landscape, and strategy. 

To this day, I can almost hear Wiley’s soft east Tennessee drawl describing J.E.B. Stuart’s efforts atop Cress’s Ridge as the war turned below at Gettysburg. “Stuart, a bold and dashing cavalier from a different era, in a resplendent gray uniform, gold buckles gleaming, jauntily attired in a scarlet plumed hat and cape, leather thigh-high cavalry boots spit polished, spurs jangling, riding to and fro across the ridgeline, urged his exhausted troops forward into battle.” 

One other event from that quarter still sticks with me. On the first day of class, Professor Wiley asked each of the 250 students to choose a seat and stick to it. He also requested that each go to the Student Center and have a headshot taken, and under the photo they were to list their hometown, major, and reason for taking the class. Professor Wiley kept the seating chart with photos in front of him during lectures so he could call on students by name - not totally unusual. 

At the start of the third week of class, a still nondescript freshman, mainly skilled at keeping my head down in class, I was leaving the history building on the main quad and starting across Clifton Road to the law school, walking slowly, enjoying the crisp autumn air, when who comes up next to me, but the great professor himself, unmistakable in his white linen suit and full white Colonel Sanders beard, sticking out his hand in greeting. 

“Mr. Cooper, Bell Wiley. So happy you could take my class. Are you enjoying yourself? A little advanced for a freshman. Come by my office if you are having trouble with any of the material. Happy to have another history major at the university. Must be quite the change from Central Jersey, which I know well from my time at Princeton.” 

I was in shock. Not only did this incredible educator recognize me, an indistinguishable freshman sitting buried in the tenth row, but he had memorized the personal data. And not just me; as it turned out, he had done this for each of the 250 students. 

I was lucky. While Dr. Wiley did in fact retire from teaching after that quarter, he was granted emeritus status by the department and maintained an office and certain faculty responsibilities over the next few years. I would stop by often when I saw the door open and simply enjoy the company of this brilliant, kind, and humble man. 

I learned of Dr. Wiley’s death while living in the Bay Area in 1980. I promised myself that if I were lucky enough at some point in the future to be entrusted with a classroom, I would do my best to live up to Dr. Wiley’s inestimable standards.

Fifteen years later, I would begin teaching a class at the University of California, Davis, an undergraduate course in Environmental Policy that I would teach for twenty-five years, during which time I had the extreme privilege of spending six hours per week with impressionable young minds who were paying good money for an education. I owed it to them to pay it forward - to do no less than what Professor Wiley had done for me. To impart on my students both information and a love for the process of education. 

A love that passed in a direct line from those dinner tables in Dr. Bell Wiley’s east Tennessee childhood to a classroom at the Emory University Law School to thousands of eager young university students in Davis, California. I do sincerely hope that in some small way I succeeded in this nearly sacred responsibility in such a way that would make the old man, smiling gently down from wherever men of superb character might spend eternity, proud.

And while never quite becoming the professor that Dr. Wiley was, I did meet at least one of the standards I set for myself. Over my many years of teaching, I made it a habit to learn the name and background of every student who walked through my door.