Ursinus faculty handbook

In order for the spirit of community to endure and thrive, this agreement, based upon shared values and responsibilities and a sense of mutual respect, trust, and cooperation, must be preserved. Students have an obligation to act ethically concerning academic matters and the faculty has a responsibility to require academic honesty from students and to be vigilant in order to discourage dishonesty. Lying, cheating, stealing, plagiarism, and other forms of academic dishonesty violate this spirit of mutual respect and collaboration and corrode the atmosphere of openness and free inquiry upon which the educational process is based.

Such activities are demeaning and potentially damaging to those who undertake them. Moreover, academic dishonesty is damaging to the student body as a whole, in that it cheapens the achievements of the honest majority of students and subverts the integrity and reputation of the institution with which they will be identified for the rest of their lives.

Students should be aware that there are many legitimate sources of help available on campus. Several departments provide help sessions. There is a writing center run by the Department of English, and the Library provides research help. The student body, faculty, and administration of Ursinus College therefore unanimously condemn academic dishonesty in all its forms and affirm that it is the responsibility of all members of the college commu nity to prevent such activity.

You are plagiarizing if you copy exactly a statement by another and fail to identify your source. You are plagiarizing if you take notes from a book, an article, a lecture or the internet, express those materials in your own words, and present the result as your work without identifying your source. You are plagiarizing if you copy part or all of a paper written by a friend, another student, or a writing service and offer it as your own work.

You are plagiarizing if you take material verbatim from a source even though the source is acknowledged without identifying it as quoted material by means of quotation marks. Plagiarism is easy to avoid by using common sense and following the advice and directions for acknowledging sources. Such forms and methods are available from professors and style sheets provided by departments as well as by a composition textbook. Never take notes verbatim or in your own words without using appropriate quotation marks and noting exact sources, including page number of the material.

The above has been adapted from, and credit is given to: Millward, Handbook for Writers , pp. Should a faculty member suspect you of having committed an academic honesty violation of any kind, they should confront you with the evidence. If you admit guilt, the faculty member should inform the Dean of the College of the violation and your confession. After consultation with the Dean of the College, the faculty member will impose a penalty of either a zero 0 on the work in which you were dishonest or a failure F in the course in which the dishonesty took place.

I am glad that things are different today. Teachers in India get paid better, and what is perhaps more significant, a social revolution has taken place, with the result that I can think of hardly any married teacher who does not have a working spouse. This fact does not confer riches upon them, but in India it makes them financially independent while in the US it pushes them into the top ten percent of Americans as far as income is concerned.

I doubt whether any college teacher in India starting his or her career now will face the financial uncertainties that many of my colleagues did half a century ago. Barring my critique of my law teachers and the model of my good English teachers, I had no preparation for my new job. Looking back at the earliest days of my teaching career, I would not discount the value of enthusiasm, but there is no question that my degree, which was the equivalent of or perhaps even less than an average American B.

Of American literature I knew nothing. I had respect, indeed fondness, for such essays by Arnold and Forster as I had encountered, I had read the poetry of Donne and Eliot with some care, and had dipped into a number of other authors prescribed for study such as Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Pope, Johnson, and, surprisingly, Virginia Woolf, without knowing anything more than one work by each. From literary histories I was familiar with the names of a large number of other writers and their works from all ages and aware, too, of the main lines of historical development of my field of study.

But because of the gross inadequacies of our college library I had not read much literary criticism, and what little I had read was out of date. On Shakespearean tragedy we still thought that A. Bradley was the last word looking back on it, we may not have been all that wrong after all ; on Milton we read J.

Mackail whose Springs of Helicon , beautifully titled but otherwise entirely belletristic, was published in On Pope and Johnson we turned to George Saintsbury for insights when we were not learning from Arnold that Pope is a classic of prose, not poetry. We had not been trained to think independently about what we read, nor did we have the necessary amount of reading to do so. In any case I was too young, too inexperienced, and with a mind too unshaped to offer anything more than platitudinous ideas.

As a student I offered them liberally to all my friends, and imbibed similar ideas from them, all the while thinking that we were thinking profound thoughts. But I had never had the experience of writing a long or sustained piece of literary criticism and having it discussed by peers and professors. What I did bring to the classroom were some notions about the value of what I was doing; or, put differently, I possessed an ideological or philosophical underpinning for my work as a teacher, inadequate as it might have been, which was derived in part from questioning myself over the two years that I was enrolled in the M.

English course as to the value of studying the subject, and in part from discussions with classmates about the nature of our discipline. I believed, first, that studying English systematically for a degree helped the student achieve what we liked at the time to call a trained mind, and what today is referred to in the U.

This meant that at the end of his or her studies, an English M. Like other students of my generation I believed that these skills were not unique to a study of English but could be conferred by the study of any other subject; indeed, there were many who believed that some subjects like mathematics, philosophy or the sciences were more capable of developing these abilities than English. What made English so valuable was the fact that it trained not just the intellect but also the sensibility.

This sounds like a vague concept, and I might have had difficulty explaining exactly what it meant, but in my mind I was clear. It had to do with feelings and with moral judgments and discriminations. In literature one met all kinds of characters and, through them, encountered all kinds of situations. Characters behaved differently, and through their behavior exhibited choices which, whether personal or social or intellectual, whether admirable or contemptible or obtuse, were moral as well because they were reflective of a set of values.

Heroes of literary works acted in ways that were finer, more discriminating, intellectually more satisfying, and in accordance with value systems that were more clearly defined and consciously held than the characters who surrounded them; and by sharing the perceptions of these heroes and living their choices the reader learned how to conduct himself or herself through life.

To me, educated as I had been in a Christian institution, this was important and provided a necessary justification for the study and profession of literature. To be a student of English or to teach it meant that the individual was sensitive in relating to others. It meant that he or she was always scrutinizing his or her motives and feelings and thinking about his or her actions and words, and was always making subtle, graded distinctions between different kinds of right and wrong actions and thoughts.

These distinctions spilled over into aesthetic matters as well, whether it was the beauty of a sunset, the walk of a woman, the drape of a sari, or the angle of a building. Reading English literature would provide the vocabulary as well as the insights needed for these discriminations. These were the values that we had imbibed through our education in a Christian college, and the values I thought were necessary to pass on to my students.

If we gave the matter any thought, we assumed that these were not values particular to any one society, culture, time period or religion but general and universal human values, true and applicable to human situations everywhere and at all times. For this reason I have liked to think of myself always as not specifically Indian or American or anything else, not Hindu or adhering to any other faith, but as a liberal, modern, democratic individual, a citizen of the world.

The kind of emphasis that Samuel Johnson placed on generalities as opposed to particularities in his famous statement that the poet does not number the streaks of a tulip, however much it has been challenged, has always possessed an element of truth for me. I am talking of a period shortly after Independence. We rejected the old, traditional and slow ways of doing things and wanted mechanization, industrialization, and efficiency.

Not for us the superstitions and rituals of the past; we wanted to be cosmopolitan, to experiment with life and experience new ideas. Liberalism, tolerance, skepticism and secularism were our watchwords.

Nehru had no more devoted acolytes. We were proud of our Indian heritage and wanted to learn more about art, architecture and history—and in Agra there was a lot of this at every street corner—but we also wanted to understand Western art and architecture, know something about London and Paris and Rome, and eat Western food with a knife and fork. Classical Western music was not within our ken. For one thing, there was no place in Agra that we knew where it could be heard, nor did we know anyone who might initiate us into its mysteries.

But we looked at such picture books as the library or the one or two English-language bookshops in the city possessed, and tried to read what we could about artistic movements in Europe.

So when I walked into my first class in Agra in September , a month shy of twenty, I had a clear sense of what the subject which I was now going to teach ought to help the student to achieve. But I had no idea how to bring this about because I had no idea how to teach English.

I was determined to avoid two mistakes which I had seen many of my teachers commit. One was to make my classes dull, lifeless, crammed with information but so disorganized that students had no idea of the direction in which the teacher was going or what the point of all the information was. My lectures would always have to have a point, a goal which students could perceive and which I hoped to reach by the end of the hour. Second, I would never dictate notes.

In the fifties, because libraries were ill-stocked and books were getting more expensive, teachers, inspired by the best of motives, would often dictate notes in class. These notes could be their own summaries of the books they had read but which were not generally available, or they could be verbatim passages from those books that the teachers considered relevant to students in some way.

But though the dictation method may have provided students access to books they might otherwise not have been able to procure, it precluded all teaching. The teacher came, dictated in a slow and monotonous voice for the length of the class period, and went away. The following day he—for almost all college teachers were male—started from where he had left off, and so it went throughout the year.

For the rest, what I did was modeled on what my best teachers had done, which was to teach the prescribed text and then give general lectures on an author or a work grouped around themes which were likely to be those on which questions in the final exam would be set.

The university syllabus that we followed at both the B. Though the theory was that students would study not just these texts but others by a given author, and in teaching them teachers did discuss other works by the same author or other authors as well, in practice it was well known that exam questions would be set only on the texts listed in the syllabus, not on authors.

Those were also very often the only texts that students read. Help was available in the form of various annotated editions, good and bad, of these texts. While some, like A. For them, the market was flooded with commentaries in Hindi, simplified editions, potted summaries and the like. We referred to these publications, from which some teachers had made small fortunes, mockingly as bazaar notes, but in the absence of any decent edition of the individual works of, say, Wordsworth or Keats or Browning that the syllabus prescribed, were constrained to use them ourselves.

It is in this context that the text-focused lectures of teachers gained significance, whether they were teaching B. Whether through better understanding of the text, or through having consulted better editions than were available to students, or through using bazaar notes to which he had added his own erudition, the teacher was in a position to explain texts with a clarity and thoroughness that students appreciated.

There was much repetition, but at least students could now read the text with understanding. The odd student might ask a question or offer an alternative interpretation from time to time, but usually students sat quietly through the lecture writing copious notes in the margins of their texts. And lecturing was the only accepted means of teaching.

There were no tutorials, seminars or class discussions. The teacher came, explicated a text pretty much line by line or dictated notes for forty five or fifty minutes, and left. Closer to the final exam the text and these notes would be re-read, sometimes memorized, so that when a passage was set for explanation and comment, the examinee was well armed.

Each exam had a compulsory explanation and comment question. In addition, three or four essay-type questions had to be answered. They dealt with central aspects of the different texts prescribed for study in a given period. It was generally believed that the best preparation for these essay-type questions was attendance at lectures, and indeed the reputation of teachers depended in large part on the extent to which their lectures were seen to help prepare students for these questions.

For this purpose the teacher, after he had finished explicating a text, would give a number of lectures on it in which, drawing upon his knowledge of the text and his secondary reading, he communicated in a more or less logical and orderly fashion points that could be made about different aspects of the work.

Inevitably there was much repetition, for many of the points made in lectures had already been covered in the course of textual exegesis; however, the repetition was regarded as helpful since it reminded students of what they had already learned and thus reinforced their knowledge. The points that the teacher made in his lectures, as well as some of the elaboration and examples he provided, the student would take down dutifully as notes, which he or she would study for the exam in the hope that there was enough material there for a three or four page essay.

But sometimes the question carried a twist, or it required material to be presented in a fashion that was somewhat different from the way the teacher had done. This last was as important a skill as the first two, and a good teacher invariably provided some instruction in it. I prepared my classes carefully. That meant, first, that I made myself as familiar as I could with the nuances of the texts I had to teach, as well as with the issues of artistry that they raised and the socio-political and historical contexts that gave rise to them, by reading whatever secondary materials I could find in the library.

All this doubtless helped. But nothing was more important to my training as a teacher than constant discussions with my colleagues. Together with me, three or four other young men roughly my age had also been appointed as English teachers, including M. Jain, P. Together with a few people from other departments like P. Thomas of Philosophy, we formed a tight band of like-minded people who were always talking about our reading to clarify our ideas and also to incite others to pick up the book we had just finished.

As individuals and as a group we were also not shy about approaching our senior colleagues who, till the previous year, had been our teachers, to argue with them, to learn and to share. David had, by this time, left for Cambridge for further studies, and Mr. But some of our other former teachers, particularly Mr.

Paul, were the soul of generosity. The college was small and most teachers lived on campus or very close by. It was these discussions that impelled me to read, helped me understand what I read, and enabled me to learn how to teach in the framework of the academic and cultural values which I inhabited at the time.

Through Nicholas, I gained an insight into life in a British university in the early 60s and into what undergraduates were reading and thinking. He also introduced me to the work of F. Leavis whose student he had been at Downing College in Cambridge. To Reggie Massey I owe my interest in Indian writing in English, for Massey was a poet whose work occasionally got published in Indian journals like The Illustrated Weekly of India, and he was in correspondence with other poets.

Some of us took to rehearsing our classes in front of our colleagues and having them critiqued. We used to laugh at one of our colleagues for first rehearsing his class on us, then going and teaching it, then coming out and telling us how and what he had taught. But we all did this to a certain extent. Suggestions were constantly made not only for the improvement of delivery or better organization of material or the need to cut down on waffling, but also on what other texts, writers or concepts could be brought into our lectures.

As a result I learned to express myself in my textual exegesis classes more precisely so that the weakest student would get the point while the better ones received information and insights that were new to them. Through daily practice my other lectures began to gain shape. I tried to make each of them develop an argument, however general or rudimentary, instead of merely conveying information, and discovered that the more strongly an argument underlay the lecture, the better the lecture became.

Sometimes I varied the strategy, pitting two arguments against each other, or spending much of the class developing a proposition only to suggest, towards the end, ways in which it could be countered. As I gained confidence I began to dispense with notes but would go into class with a sense of the direction in which I wanted to proceed and a general idea of the specific arguments, texts and examples I wanted to use, but with no prepared script.

As the class got going, I would let the momentum take over, speaking quite extemporaneously. On a few occasions I came to the end of my argument just as the clock struck the end of the hour. When that happened, I felt truly pleased. These pedagogical skills did not all develop during my first year of teaching, which was initially all the time I had assigned to this profession before returning to a preparation for the Civil Services exam. But so interesting did I find my job, and the idea that though I might grow older with each passing year, the students would always be the same age, thus forcing upon me a slowing of the aging process, was so appealing, that when the Principal asked me towards the end of my first year of teaching what my plans for the future were, I had little hesitation in saying that I wished to be an English teacher for the rest of my life.

So one year passed, and I remained. In fact, I remained for three. Re-reading what I have written above, it is obvious that I am looking at my days in Agra through a rosy haze.

I have made no mention of the dirt, the poor living conditions, and the narrow mindedness of the city, all of which I began to hate with a passion. In particular, I have said nothing about an aspect of teaching that occupied many of us younger teachers and some not so young as well for a good deal of the time and could make the whole experience extremely unpleasant. Nor have I mentioned two incidents, both having to do with exams, which I have all but forgotten now but which left a deep imprint on me at the time.

The hitherto unmentioned aspect was the whole issue of discipline in the classroom. The senior students, especially those at the B. Final and M. These are the classes I have been talking about all this while. But junior classes, especially the Intermediate classes which constituted the first two years after a ten-year high school diploma, were another story.

Students were young, perhaps not more than sixteen or so, and classes impossibly large, there being sometimes fifty or sixty young men and women crammed into a room. Instruction was solely through lectures. The teacher stood in front of the students and spouted without interruption for fifty minutes or so, reading out aloud and explicating an essay or a poem.

No wonder students got restless. Since many of them were going to major in disciplines as diverse as Physics and Commerce, they were not interested in studying English, and in any case the general level of English, oral, aural or written, was low. Add to this the fact that the senior teachers tended to reserve senior or upper level classes for themselves and send new recruits to teach these junior classes, and you can imagine the pandemonium that used to prevail.

The young teacher could only hope that over time, through a process of coaxing, cajoling, playing to the gallery, scolding, shouting and perhaps excelling as a lecturer, he or she would get students to settle down to a level of noise where it would only be like a background hum and never so loud as to disturb the neighboring class. Some people managed, others did not. For these others, every day was an ordeal and only the promise of a small check at the end of the month kept them going.

The first day, as soon as I walked into an Intermediate Science class, that is a class of fifty sixteen-year olds who wanted to become physicists, chemists, biologists, doctors or engineers I wonder how many made it after all , a great roar erupted and there was much banging of desks, throwing of paper missiles, and jumping up and down.

All I could do was stand there and yell at them to shut up, but no matter how loudly I shouted, my voice was lost in the din. It was only after everyone had exhausted himself for the girl students just sat there on either side of the teacher smiling and talking but not greatly adding to the confusion, maybe just dropping the lid of the desk down with a thud that I could make myself heard.

I then reminded the class that I had been a student in that college myself till just the other day and was therefore familiar with all the tricks of students, and that I was there to educate them and that it would be to their advantage to listen to my lectures instead of behaving like baboons.

It cut no ice, and a howl of derision rent the air again. By the end of the class it was all I could do to get through the attendance roster and tell those present the name of the textbook we would be using.

Over the next several days I felt terrified every time I walked into that class and winced every time at the howls and yells that would greet my entrance. I tried to keep a brave, smiling front and to teach the prescribed essays, but had very little success in the first week or two. All I could do was stand there till students had exhausted themselves, and even then I never knew when a paper airplane would come flying or desks would be pushed round or a chant would go up in one corner or another, only to be picked up by the whole class.

But gradually it began to dawn on me that there were three or four leaders of the class, young men that their classmates looked up to, people with better-than-average academic records and an air of sophistication about them. Others took their cue from them in a subliminal manner. If they yelled and shouted and threw paper balls, the others followed suit.

If they sat still and listened, some if not all of the others were inclined to do the same. As a student I had been one such class leader myself, not elected, not consciously aware of that role, and not even acknowledged consciously as such by my classmates, but able to exercise a certain moral authority all the same.

Most groups of human beings have such leaders. They provide their group with some coherence or definition or sense of itself and its goals, they help set a tone or create an atmosphere. When a group does not throw up such leadership, it remains amorphous and aimless. I think my teachers had sensed this truth, for it had seemed when I was a student that they were addressing their lectures to me and my close friends.

Now I began to direct my instruction at those whom I instinctively sensed were the leaders of the class rather than try and reach the backbenchers. This did not necessarily mean directing my teaching to the best; rather, it meant directing it to the most responsive.

Slowly this method began to yield results. The class leaders began to pay attention and even talk of my teaching in grudgingly favorable terms, and their positive assessment gradually filtered down to several others in the class, who too began to stop shouting and talking and tried to follow what I was saying.

When, at the beginning of my second year of teaching, I walked into the Intermediate Science class, I guess some of the reputation that I had acquired the previous year followed me. There was no huge roar this time; if anything, students were expectant. It was much easier to talk to them, and I found myself shedding my stiff, rather authoritarian manner and letting myself go a little.

Things went so well, in fact, that at the beginning of my third year of teaching I actually looked forward to my Intermediate Science class, was able to discuss all kinds of ideas with them and actually got them interested in our English textbook, a collection of essays.

One or two colleagues asked me enviously how I had managed that transformation, and all I could say was that I had been extremely fortunate in gaining the attention of the leaders of the class in my first year of teaching.

The lesson I learned then has stood me in good stead in later years, whether teaching in India or the United States. I have tried to reach the leaders of each class I have taught, never consciously but not totally unconsciously either, and to enlist them in my pedagogical mission. Identifying these leaders has never been hard though it has taken a few days at the beginning of the year for others to start feeling their influence, and often these leaders have not themselves known that they were exerting any.

What has been harder is to get them on the same wavelength as myself. This has not always happened, especially if my concerns have been substantially different from theirs. But generally speaking, students who are capable of influencing the tone or attitude of the whole class have also been a cut above the average, maybe more creative, maybe more receptive to instruction; and when that has been the case, it has been possible over time to reach out and establish a connection based upon a desire to find interesting answers to the interesting questions that the subject poses.

When that has happened, the atmosphere of the whole class has been altered for the better. At Hostos Community College it did not always happen.

Students there were older, not always interested in academics, possessed interests and came from cultural backgrounds which were often very different from mine. I tried to be as empathetic as possible, but there were certain situations that just defeated me.

Thus there was a student in a particular class who, having done poorly in a senior college, transferred to Hostos and began to exercise a certain fascination for other students because she could talk of what went on in senior colleges, which it was the ambition of several in the class to attend. She was also a saleswoman for cosmetic products and would often bring stuff for other students, sometimes for sale just before class began but sometimes just as freebies.

Inevitably a circle formed around her, and sometimes she and her friends would talk in loud whispers while the class was in progress. When I remonstrated, she had her supporters.

She and I fell out early in the year over a low grade I gave her work, and thereafter my relationship with the rest of the class became, not tense and certainly not hostile, but somewhat uncertain. Students did their work, but not always with good will. We communicated in and outside the classroom, but there was always a certain stiffness or formality between us.

I was glad when the semester ended, the student leader passed the course though with an unflattering grade, and was able to transfer back to her senior college.

Other times my attempts to harness student leaders to my academic purposes worked. The story of my years as a teacher of the Intermediate Science class at St.

In , more than thirty five years after I had ceased to teach there, I was traveling on a bus from Jaipur to Delhi. Shortly before Midway we found that the road ahead was closed because of an accident and we would have to take a detour. Since I was carrying a road map of India, I unfolded it to check out this new route, and when the gentleman sitting next to me noticed what I was doing, he offered to help.

We had ignored each other all this while, and I now turned to him and told him politely that I would be able to manage quite well without any help. Very surprised, I asked him how he knew. He said that he was one of the brighter students of the Intermediate Science class I taught in my last year in Agra and mentioned his name, Sahib Singh. After all those years it did not ring any bells, but he said that he had recognized me the moment he heard my voice, because during the year that I taught him, it had become so familiar that he could recognize it even at this long remove in time.

I was very surprised, and deeply, deeply gratified. A teacher can receive no higher validation of his or her efforts in the classroom than this sense of acknowledgment and recognition after a long period of time.

My former student and now traveling companion told me that he had developed an interest in reading poetry from the time I taught him some poems of Tagore. He had trained as an engineer and now worked for Delhi telephones in a senior capacity. But he still read poetry and had become interested in Langston Hughes.

Towards the end of the first year of my teaching, the day before final exams were due to begin, a visitor came to see me. I knew him slightly. He ran a bookstore near the campus which I used to frequent, and he was always very polite and welcoming and would even allow me to take books home without payment on the understanding that I could either pay for or return them the next day.

So I was glad to see him, till he told me the purpose of his visit. On the morning of the exam, he said, I would be sent to Room 2 to invigilate or proctor the M. Final exam in Mathematics together with a senior colleague. About half an hour after the exam began, this colleague would say that he was going for a cup of tea but would return shortly, whereupon I could take a break.

I was to turn a blind eye to the proceedings; if I did not, my visitor could not answer for the consequences. I was shocked and outraged. How dare he tell me to let blatant cheating take place right in front of my eyes! And how did he know that I was to be sent to Room 2, that my fellow invigilator was to be a senior teacher whom I respected, or what the seating plan was going to be?

These things were all meant to be confidential. With a smile, my visitor explained that all that he had told me was indeed going to come true, as I would find out the following day.

Then, once again warning that things could be bad for me if I did not pay heed, he left. I was scared, shocked, angered, and did not know what to do. I could not let cheating take place. At the same time, I knew that life in Agra could be cheap, and that for a few rupees it was possible to hire criminals to beat or stab enemies. I did not want to die. That night I could not sleep. The next morning I reported for duty, hoping that I would not be sent to Room 2.

But the Superintendent of Exams told me that that, indeed, was the room to which I should proceed, and that Professor— he mentioned the name of the person I had been told would be my partner would join me there. I suppose I could have protested or asked for another assignment. But by now my mind was made up: come what may, I would not let cheating take place. So when, about half an hour after the exam had started, my colleague said that he was going for a cup of tea, I posted myself directly in front of the student who I had been told was going to cheat.

He looked up at me, smiled, and said that he had been trying to pass that exam for the past three years. Every year he prepared a set of topics, on none of which was a question set. This year he had come prepared to cheat, but as luck would have it, all the topics he had prepared in the past with no luck were on the exam that day. He would not need to cheat since he knew the answers.

I could rest easy. I was very greatly relieved, but it had made me disenchanted with teaching conditions in a city where people were willing to make such blatant attempts to intimidate honest workers and where academic dishonesty was rife. I hoped I would never have a similar experience again. In the final exam I failed a few students whose answers were not up to par. A few days later, the Principal called me to his office and asked me to review the answers of a particular student whom I had failed because he had complained against the grade.

I was perfectly willing to re-examine his work with an open mind, but on a second, third and even fourth reading of his answers could not see how the student could deserve anything but a failing grade. I informed the Principal accordingly, and thought that that was the end of the matter. A few days later, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I was all set to leave for the railway station to go home to my parents when my colleague Varma came in looking worried.

He had overheard the student planning with a few of his friends to waylay me en route to the station and either beat me up or stab me. I was shocked, but Varma said that he would see me off on the train, and since Varma was a big and strong man, I felt reassured.

On the way we saw the student and a few of his friends eyeing us from a distance, but they did not approach, and I caught the train without mishap. The following term I thought the whole thing had blown over till one day, as I was lecturing before a class, a stranger came to the door and asked if I could come out for a minute since he had something to say to me.

I excused myself to the class and went to the door, where I was stunned to see the student who had it in for me waiting with a group of unsavory and tough looking friends. I retreated into the classroom immediately and somehow finished my lecture. When I left I was surrounded by my students, and so my ill wishers could do me no harm. Thereafter that student began to stalk me.

I would be walking down the street and there he would be, a few steps behind. He did nothing, but it brought me close to paranoia. I stopped going out alone and always had someone accompany me; on the infrequent occasions when I could find no companion I would glance apprehensively over my shoulder to see if I was being followed.

This continued till I left Agra for Oxford. There is no doubt that by this time I hated Agra and was keen to leave it and never return. My years there as a young teacher had been a fair seed time and my intellectual life had experienced a wonderful Spring.

I had greatly enjoyed my teaching, and would not have given up my colleagues and friends for the world. But it was definitely time to move. The question was: where? I was interviewed for a position at Rajasthan University. Balachandra Rajan, then the doyen of Indian professors of English, was one of the interviewers and flummoxed me with a question on the style of Samson Agonistes.

In the meanwhile my friend and colleague Philip had become a planter in a tea estate and Reggie Massey had left Agra without leaving an address behind; it was rumored that he had gone to France.

Where could I go? And then the most incredible piece of good fortune befell me: I won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and was accepted by Lincoln College to read for an Honors degree in English language and literature.

What could be better? I was beside myself with joy. The rest of the term passed in a daze. There were farewell parties galore, I was given much advice, dished out some myself, and was seen off at the train station by a large group of students and colleagues on the first stage of my journey to Oxford. It is never a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I have often wondered why the Rhodes selectors chose me for the award. I had a strong academic record, certainly, but then so did all the other applicants who were called for the interview.

I think that what tilted the balance in my favor were two factors. One was that I had committed myself to a career in teaching and wished to go to Oxford to equip myself to do the job better. In the early s there were very few careers open to a young man who had studied the liberal arts.

The ambition of most such people was to join the civil services. A few went into the defence services, or business, or joined a commercial firm, preferably British-owned, though Tatas and Birlas were also hiring. Some migrated to Britain or Australia. Students join with the faculty and staff of the College to form a community of learning. This community will only be as meaningful as its members choose it to be. Each community member should use mature reflection in balancing the varied, and sometimes competing, interests of personal rights and advancement with the rights and advancement of the community as a whole.