The Man Who Changed My Life Forever

Prof Robert L. Gaudino

In 1972, I entered Williams College as a very  sheltered 17-year old freshman.  The extent of my world experience had been Long Island, New York, and now Williamstown.

In my sophomore year, I took a full-year philosophy course with Robert L. Gaudino, a professor of political science.

Gaudino’s course reading was heavy – and it ran the spectrum from Plato to Montesque to D’Alembert and Diderot to Kant. The class was small, perhaps no more than 20 students, and his method of teaching was both Socratic and intense.

Gaudino, although young, was also fairly well advanced in a neurological disease that was soon to kill him. He sometimes slurred his words, his body was often bent over. But his mind was incredibly sharp.

In the second semester, he was so ill, he moved the class to his home. We continued there, often for hours or on weekends.  It was more like an intellectual club than a course now. You could always drop by his house and find some of his students and him involved in a deep discussion.

Towards the middle of the second semester, he took me aside. He invited me to come over to his home for a cup of coffee. We talked about my life (what little there was of it).   Then he leaned back in his chair and paused for a few minutes of silence. The room grew very still, perhaps uncomfortably so.  Then he leaned forward and with his kind of crooked smile he said, ‘you have to get out of here’.  I was taken aback.  ‘What do you mean’?  He paused again and smiled, ‘You have to get out of here and I am going to help you’.

Gaudino ran a program called Williams At Home, where students from Williams were placed in what we might called ‘different lives’ across the country, and in the case of his Williams in India program, around the world.

This was not your ‘semester abroad’ class. This was something else entirely.

Gaudino liked to push intellectual thinking to the place where it got uncomfortable. Where it forced you to think.

In 1974, instead of returning to Williams for my Junior year, I found myself living with Liz and Bill Stacey a family in a small shack on the edge of Troublesome Creek, in a place called Lick Branch Hollow in Hazard County, Kentucky.  I also found myself working for the Consolidated Coal Company as a coal miner.  From there, I moved on to Waterloo, Iowa, where I lived on a mid-sized farm with a farm family, raising Duroc hogs and harvesting corn and soybeans.  From there, I took a job on a construction company, building confinement breeders in Mediapolis, Iowa, digging ditches, pouring concrete and laying re-rod.

By the time I returned to Williams, I was a very different person. I had left a boy and I had come back a man.

Bob Gaudino died while I was away.

He never knew what he had done for me.

When I graduated from Williams, I received a Watson Foundation Fellowship that paid my way to spend the next three years traveling around the world, photographing, and also extending what I had done in Kentucky and Iowa.  Soon I was living in Palestinian Refugee Camps, with Tahposa tribesmen in Sudan or with villagers in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. Bob Gaudino taught me a way to see and experience the world.

The rest of my life, and all I did after that (and still do to this day); the way I work, the way I live, the work I have done and much of what I try to teach others is all derivative of the experience that man forced me into.

Yesterday, I received an email from Dale Riehl, also a Williams Alum and a Gaudino student.

Another former student, Paul Lieberman (’71) has made a documentary film about Bob Gaudino.

They’re going to screen it at The Williams Club in NY on September 13th.

I watched the film on Youtube already.

It’s been 37 years since I first walked into his classroom, but his lessons never left me.