Hugo Adam Bedau, this year's 25-Year Extension School Faculty Teaching Honorand, was the featured speaker at the Alumni Banquet. Poking some wry fun at his profession--philosophy--and revealing the reasons why he elected to teach at the Extension School for many years, Professor Bedau charmed his audience with his observations, conclusions, and prescriptions.

By trade I am a philosopher and a teacher of philosophy, and despite some evidence to the contrary--notably, Socrates' speech in Plato's famous dialogue, The Symposium--we philosophers are not gifted after-dinner speakers. So far as I know, we have rarely been afforded the opportunity to display our lack of such gifts.

History records no after-dinner speeches by Descartes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Wittgenstein, or Sartre--philosophers familiar to those who have taken my Harvard Extension course, Makers of the Modern Mind. So my willingness to offer a few words tonight marks me quite out of their company--but then in any case, I hasten to add, I am marked out of their company on other grounds as well.

Since I am being honored this year by the Division of Continuing Education for my quarter century of service on this faculty, I thought it perhaps appropriate to say a few words about the history of my association here, followed by a few valetudinarian thoughts that occasions like this provoke.

But before I share with you those observations, I want to pay a word of tribute to the students and alumni of Harvard Extension themselves. Harvard Extension students have a dedication to higher learning and a determination in overcoming obstacles between their matriculation and their graduation that most college students who arrive on campus fresh out of high school can barely imagine.

George Bernard Shaw is credited with the wise observation that the terrible thing about youth is the way it is wasted on the young. I have often had just that thought as I look at the behavior of the late adolescent students enrolled in my regular daytime courses.

Not so with Harvard Extension students. True, some of them, too, may have wasted much of their early youth in one way or another. But once they enter the rigors of the Extension classrooms at the advanced ages of 30 or 40, their youthful follies are behind them. Not only that, they are typically burdened with a full-time job and a family as well. Not for them the leisure of four years full-time undergraduate study as residential students on some bucolic campus.

No, it is finish work at the office, grab a sandwich while poring over the evening's assignment, then into class for two hours, followed by a subway ride home and collapse into exhausted sleep--only to do it all over again the next day or the next week.

Perhaps I exaggerate a bit. Nevertheless, I admire the dedication of our students, and so I begin my evening's remarks with a verbal tip of my hat (or is it a tip of my verbal hat?) to all Extension students, current and alumni, here tonight and elsewhere.

How and why do faculty such as I, who hold a professorial appointment at a local university other than Harvard, come to join the Harvard Extension faculty? It is not always a tale of greed or of moonlighting to pay for that summer house in Vermont; nor is it a result of desiring to keep younger academics, desperate to find any vacancy they can fill, unemployed; nor is it necessarily the desire for affiliation with the nation's premier institution of higher learning. I cannot, of course, speak for others, and my story is probably atypical. But here it is, for what it is worth.

My entry into the faculty ranks of Harvard Extension is a direct consequence of having known former Dean Reginald Phelps. I had the good fortune to meet Dean Phelps in April or May of 1953, not in his capacity as director of the Extension Division, but in his then office as Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

As a Master of Arts candidate at that year's June Commencement, I received a summons from his office. When I arrived there and introduced myself, he told me I had been chosen to be a Commencement Marshal for the Master of Arts ceremonies. I don't recall that it was ever explained to me just why I had been chosen for this modest role; I like to think it was some sort of award or honor rather than a duty. And while I am sure I was told what my responsibilities were in that sometime role, I cannot now recall what they were.

Be that as it may, to this day, I keep my red and black Marshal's baton next to my framed diploma--one of the last sheepskins signed by President James Bryant Conant before he left Harvard and set off to be United States High Commissioner in Germany.

My meeting with Dean Phelps in the spring of 1953 was brief, and I am sure I remember it more vividly than he does. But in retrospect, there is no doubt in my mind that my long and pleasant association with Harvard Extension began with that meeting, even though neither he nor I could possibly have foreseen such a future.

Fast forward now 13 years to 1966. In the interval I had completed my doctorate, and my career had taken me from Harvard to Dartmouth, then to Princeton and to Reed College, and then back to New England as the newly appointed chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Tufts.

One of the reasons I left Reed for Tufts was because of my yearning to stroll the sidewalks of Cambridge and Harvard Yard, browsing in the book shops of Harvard Square, and eating some of the worst restaurant food in town at the well-named Wursthaus, with its nonpareil location in the Square.

Only I quickly discovered that living in Acton and then in Concord, as I did, I too rarely had occasion to visit the Yard or the Square or the Haus. Although Tufts is less than an hour's walk from where we are this evening, it might as well have been in the next county for all the good it did me in renewing my ties with Cambridge and Harvard. Try as I might, I simply never got to Harvard Square, not even once a month. How disappointing!

Eventually the thought came to me that if I had a regular reason for visiting the Square, I'd be able to incorporate its delights into my life without any special effort or planning. But how to arrange such a routine? Then the penny dropped. Even if Harvard inside the Yard was not prepared to invite me to join its faculty, perhaps Harvard outside the Yard would.

So I looked into the Harvard Extension catalogue of 1966 and discovered areas where I could plausibly hope to make a contribution to the curriculum of studies in philosophy. A course in modern philosophy, for instance, from Bacon to Kant, was conspicuous by its absence, and so I proposed such a course in a letter to the director of Harvard Extension. The director, I quickly learned--to my surprise and pleasure--was none other than Dean Phelps.

Trading on our not exactly intimate or extensive prior association, I arranged an interview with him. That meeting transpired in 1967 or '68. The rest is history.

Thus, from January to May this spring, as in many prior years during one or both terms, my regimen has been rigidly fixed: I arrive in Harvard Square about 6 pm once each week--usually a Tuesday or Wednesday; I head for Gnomon Copy on Mt. Auburn Street to make copies of my evening handout to the class. With the handout safely in my briefcase, I round the corner onto Boylston Street (or, as the newcomers call it, John F. Kennedy Street) to dinner at the Wursthaus.

Once there, I secure my usual booth, order dinner, and immerse myself in the material for the evening's lecture or discussion. After an hour or so I take my leave in time to spend 15 or 20 minutes at the Harvard Book Store before crossing Massachusetts Avenue and heading for my 7:30 class in Emerson Hall. On that basic itinerary I embroider various alternatives as opportunity and inclination dictate.

I reveal all this detailed information to you about my habits with some trepidation, lest my hitherto reclusive behavior prior to my evening class encourage the curious, the over-eager, or the annoyed to intercept me along the way. Be forewarned! I value my privacy on those evenings and tolerate no companionship or other interventions--as my wife will readily attest.

I should say a few words about the course I currently teach for the Extension School, a course I have taught for 15 years or so. It provides a link with some of my fondest memories of my days at Harvard in the early 1950s.

In my terminal year as a graduate student in philosophy, two of my professors in the philosophy department, Henry Aiken and Morton White, decided to take up the challenge of the so-called Red Book, Harvard's post-war guide to curricular reform built around "general education" courses in all fields of instruction.

Professors Aiken and White responded by inventing a year-long humanities course for freshmen, which they would jointly teach. The aim of the course was to introduce students to classic Western philosophy in its literary and cultural context, construing philosophy as broadly as possible, and presenting it in suitable chronological order.

Accordingly, the course Humanities 5 began with Aeschylus's Oresteia and ended with the short novels of Franz Kafka. In between were selections by philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Marx. In short order it became the most popular course in the College, enrolling hundreds of students each year. I count myself lucky to have been one of the half-dozen teaching fellows assigned to that course in its first year.

Harvard's Humanities 5 resonated like no other course with my earliest interests in philosophy as an undergraduate. As a young man I entered the precincts of philosophy in part by the search for an integrative and synoptic schema through which I might better understand my own life and culture. I quickly discovered that familiarity with the canon of texts beginning with the Greeks was a necessary (even if not a sufficient) condition of such knowledge.

Harvard's program in General Education has long been replaced by the Core Curriculum, and Humanities 5 did not survive the transition. But the syllabus and the purpose of the course remained in my mind, and I put the experience of having taught it to good use later at Princeton and especially at Reed.

To this day at Reed, all freshmen are required to enroll in a year-long humanities course that feeds them a diet of philosophy, literature, art, and history covering the development of Western civilization from Homer to Galileo--a grand tour through the cemetery, as the "politically correct" would put it, of the DWEMs, that is, through the lives and works of Dead White European Males. As you can see, I do not share their scorn for the centrality of such a course.

I would not, of course, be so foolish as to claim that a diet exclusively of such courses is enough to produce an educated man or woman today--or even yesterday. But I would claim that the more acquaintance one has with Greek, Latin, French, and German and with the great literatures in those languages, the better, because therein lies our heritage, for which we have no substitute--even if we also need to supplement it with materials from other cultures peripheral to that tradition.

Given those convictions, I thought it might be appropriate to create a semester course for Harvard Extension inspired by Harvard College's defunct Humanities 5. My focus would be on the crucial representative thinkers beginning with the Western European Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and would be aimed at presenting the fundamental features of the "modern" Western world, with its distinctive emphasis on the ideals of personal autonomy, political equality, and secular pluralism.

Thus was Philosophy E-5b, Makers of the Modern Mind, created. As of this year, I am happy to add, that course is now preceded in the curriculum by a parallel course in the fall term being taught by my colleague Dr. Jeffrey McConnell. His course tries to do for the period from Hesiod and Aeschylus to Aquinas and Dante more or less what I try to do for the period from Luther and Machiavelli to Wittgenstein and Sartre. Thus, Harvard Extension students are now able to benefit from a year-long exposure to the DWEMs, just as their predecessors in Harvard College once were.

I want to close with a few thoughts about being a classroom teacher in college or university. When I began my teaching career as a teaching fellow in General Education in 1952, I did it out of necessity and prudence--economic necessity (I had a young wife and an even younger child at the time) and professional prudence (I knew the experience of teaching duly cited on my resume would help to secure interviews and possibly even a job offer).

But I had no great independent desire to teach, and in this I was typical. Indeed, you could lay it down as a rule: The better a graduate student was in his or her field of concentration, the less he or she was interested in teaching undergraduates. And along with lack of interest went a lack of ability.

So--in all candor--I began my teaching career rather in a spirit of naive selfishness. I viewed myself as one who had the glorious good luck to have ahead of him a lifetime in which he would be paid to read and think about issues of interest to him, whether or not that interest was actually shared by the students in the classroom. What I wanted was to be free from worry about putting food on the table and a roof over my head, as I devoted my energies to philosophy--and teaching philosophy and its literature proved to be the means to that end.

This attitude did not make me indifferent to my students, but it did insulate me from discouragement by their often casual attitude toward their studies, just as it freed me from dependence on their approval for positive reinforcement in my chosen vocation. I knew that I was at least interested in the subject--whatever it was, a text, a problem, a theory--even if they weren't. And if they were interested, then they'd follow my guidance wherever it led.

My attitude freed me to think about issues of interest and importance to me, whether or not my students ever learned or cared about those issues. Not for me the career of a Mr. Chips, with nothing written and published to show for his career as a teacher, even if he could bask in the affection lavished on him by generations of admiring former students.

Forty-odd years and thousands of students later, I take a rather different view. Long ago I learned that the challenge of explaining myself to undergraduates in the seats before me is often more difficult than explaining things to myself on a blank sheet of paper. More difficult and often more rewarding, too, since the unexpected encounter with a question from the floor--an external stimulus--is often the gateway to new ideas that a purely internal stimulus fails to provide.

Nor is a blank sheet of paper capable of responding to one's enthusiasm and the desire to share that is aroused by a new interpretation or a new insight into some text, problem, or theory.

So I have learned to be grateful to my students for the opportunities they have presented me to share my ideas with them and reflect on their responses. I have tried very hard not to abuse their trust. Recently, I have put aside other work to help them improve their cognitive skills by publishing a little book called Thinking and Writing About Philosophy (a book that I should have but did not put on the recommended reading list for my course this past term).

Most of all I hope I have succeeded in repaying my students in the only coin I have to offer: the excitement of encounter with the greatest thinkers of the past two-and-a-half millennia, with their problems and theories, their values and ideals, and the enrichment of one's life that only such encounters can provide.