Professor Out of Step

He looked like a rather ordinary figure--short, bespectacled, with graying hair and mustache--and he acted as though this were just another day, just another lecture. Five minutes late, he strode into Room 569 of New York University's Waverly Building and confronted the two dozen students of "The Philosophy of History and Culture." First, "to clean up some housekeeping," there would be an exam after the holidays, and "I don't want to hear just what you know but why you know it. And I always tell my students that if they write just one brilliant sentence on an exam, he or she will get an A--but I am the sole judge of that sentence."

The acerbity, the energy, the passionate demand that his students reach out further to excel--all these were characteristic of one of the nation's most distinguished teachers, Sidney Hook. And it was not an ordinary day at all. Hook had just turned 70 and, after 45 years, he was teaching his last class. For the occasion, he said he would break one of his rules and try to explain his own philosophy. "Though there is no substitute for intelligence, it is not enough," said Hook. "There are human beings who have intelligence but do not have the moral courage to act on it. On the other hand, moral courage without intelligence is dangerous. It leads to fanaticism. Education should develop both intelligence and courage."

That envoi was typical of the man who once told a friend, "I've had a wonderful week; I've had a fight every day." Born to poverty in Brooklyn, educated under John Dewey at Columbia, Hook was one of the first college teachers to give an analytic course on Marxism, and his left-wing activities duly brought demands for his dismissal. Over the years he wrote and edited some 35 books (The Hero in History, Education for Modern Man), and he always relished a good argument--particularly an argument against dogmatism or dictatorship. In the mid-1930s, he helped organize the militant left-wing American Workers Party, but also spoke out against Stalinism as well as Fascism. After World War II, he joined in founding the anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom, but also in denouncing Senator Joseph McCarthy. More conservative in recent years, he has been an outspoken critic of student radicals ("gravediggers of academic freedom") and of any quota system in academic appointments ("a manifestation of racism"). Says he: "I've always been out of step, a premature Marxist, a premature anti-Communist." His students best remember him as a teacher who, as one of them put it, "pounds, pounds, pounds away at us." Says another: "Sure, we have class discussions, but you really have to think before you speak or he'll knock you down in one second."

When Hook's last class ended, there were champagne toasts and talk of the future. He plans to write five more books, on politics, education, philosophy, and the tragic sense of life--and on his own life, to be entitled, naturally, Out of Step. In addition, said Hook, "I will be chopping wood and carrying manure for my wife's garden." Beyond that? At one point during his lecture, he held out a clenched fist and asked his students: "If I had within my hand the date at which you would die, how many of you would like to know it? Only a foolish person would want to know, because he would die a thousand times in expectation of that date."

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