Many at Bowdon do not know who occupies the top office of Hubbard Hall. After three long flights of stairs, one arrives at the workplace of Richard Morgan, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Government.
Professor Morgan, who some say sounds like Sean Connery, graduated from Bowdoin in 1959 and later received a Masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Morgan taught at Columbia for four years before attending Harvard Law School as a fellow in law and government. He began teaching at Bowdoin in 1969.
Morgan focuses primarily on Constitutional law. He has written numerous books and journal articles and is currently working on a major study of American Constitutionalism. The Orient sat down with Professor Morgan and asked him about his 40 years at Bowdoin.
O: How has teaching at Bowdoin changed over the years?
Morgan: For better or worse, I haven't changed much in terms of how I teach, but what I teach has turned over many times in those years. These have been very turbulent years in which legal change has moved often at a breakneck pace, so most of the things I speak about in class today are things that I hadn't heard about or even imagined when I first walked into a Bowdoin classroom.
O: What was the most exciting time to teach at Bowdoin?
Morgan: There is no particular period that stands out in my mind, but there are particular occasions such as the student strike that closed down Bowdoin at the end of my first year in the spring of 1970. I also remember a great campus meeting when the Supreme Court in 1978 was considering the Bakke (Affirmative Action) case. That roiled the waters.
O: What are the most significant changes at Bowdoin over the past few decades?
Morgan: The quality of life is much more pleasant and luxurious than it was during my time. We couldn't have believed how comfortably the undergraduates lived and how well they ate. We also did a lot more work. By that I mean the semesters were longer and the vacations were shorter. Commencement was on the twentieth of June. We had Saturday classes and took five courses. There was also more testing. Courses tended to have two or three term papers. We also had major exams. Before you were certified for graduation, you had to go through two full days of examinations. It was considerably more austere.
O: So are students less burdened with work today?
Morgan: Oh yes, clearly they are. They're also having more fun in an environment with a lot more choice and an environment that is more comfortable. [When I was an undergraduate], there was a monastic quality to Bowdoin?of course it was all boys back then. When you were up here for two or three or even four weeks without going anywhere in the winter time?there was nothing to do but work.
O: So you guys didn't have much fun?
Morgan: You couldn't come home on a Tuesday and say, 'gee I'm really tired of working and I'd really like a date,' that was just impossible. If you wanted to have fun, there was only one thing to do?get drunk. The only things to do were either work or drink. If we could have looked forward in time to Bowdoin's standard of living today, we would have been astounded.
O: On that note, you speak fondly of whisky in your classes?what is your favorite brand?
Morgan: Cast strength Macallan. Who knows, though. In two months I may have a completely new love. These things come and go.
O: What are your hobbies?
Morgan: I fish. I shoot. I fish on the upper Kennebec between the forks and Jackman. It's an area called the "Enchanted Country."
O: What's your favorite subject or class to teach?
Morgan: I have the most fun with the free speech cases. Free speech problems tend to give us pure issues of democratic theory. If you think seriously about liberty, there is a fundamental contradiction at the base of the idea?yes, there's individual liberty and the absence of constraint, but there is another piece of liberty.
That is to join with others in creating a community that is ordered in a particular way?That's liberty too. That will very quickly run into individual liberty.
O: What brought you into teaching?
Morgan: I was attracted to the academic life, and it was also the case that they were paying us to become college professors. The country was in crisis, we didn't have enough college professors.
I would have had a lot of fun as a lawyer but I wouldn't have been able to spend my time on precisely those legal problems that interest me most. In academic life, you trade income for freedom to concentrate on the things that really interest you.
O: Some on campus know you as the "conservative professor"...
Morgan: Yeah, I'm a right wing ideologue.
O: Do you think the lack of intellectual diversity among faculty on college campuses is problematic? Do you feel it significantly affects a student's education?
Morgan: The lack of intellectual diversity on American campuses... let's think about what's happening to poor Larry Summers at Harvard. Larry Summers, in the world of normal people, is a moderate-centrist kind of guy. Right now, the Harvard faculty is beating up on him like he's some sort of a right-wing monster. And yes, I think that this makes colleges and universities less interesting places?and often times it can make them unpleasant places where there is a dominant opinion that comes to regard itself as unquestionably correct. This can be, especially for younger people coming into the profession, very off-putting indeed.
I don't think there's any great crisis. If you widen the picture, we have a variety of institutions in American life that characterize America's diversity. It's just that colleges and universities tend to have a distorted spectrum. Does that trouble me? Not personally. When you get to be my age, you get troubled by very few things. Is it something we should be conscious of and something we should remedy? Yes, I think it is. That doesn't mean Barry Mills ought to make $20 million available to go and hire right wing professors, but departments, for instance, should feel some obligation to reflect the range of opinion.
Comments
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