Master Teacher: Columbia’s Carl Hovde, 1926-2009

It was Carl Hovde’s fate to be the calm eye of the ferocious storm that blew through Columbia University in the late Sixties and early Seventies. He was appointed dean of the undergraduate division, Columbia College, only a few weeks after the student protests that paralyzed the school in the spring of 1968, and served in that capacity for the next four years.

I can’t imagine the position being at all congenial to Professor Hovde. Taking the thankless position, I think, involved simply his love of the school.

(When I came to know him, a decade later, he was chair of the college’s English Department. That position was deceptively easy—two decades later, infighting had gotten so bad and embarrassing that the university placed the department under academic receivership. You never know how good you have it until things go to hell in a hurry!)

I think what he really wanted, above all else, was simply to be a great teacher. I—as well as 35 years of other Columbia College students—can attest to the fact that he fulfilled that ambition over and over again. In fact, he was given the school’s “Great Teacher Award” in 1975.

Professor Hovde—who died of lung cancer a week ago yesterday, at age 82—was a case of substance triumphing over style. There were, and undoubtedly have been, many others on the faculty who were louder and more dramatic in style.

Sometimes, it seemed as if that low-pitched voice would be drowned out in our classroom in 602 Hamilton Hall, from the hubbub coming outside the window from the school’s Quadrangle below—especially on a spring day, when, it seemed, everyone wanted to be out on the lawn or steps, tossing a Frisbee or demonstrating about something or other.

But that voice drew you in and repaid in dividends the effort you made in listening hard. Brilliant insights came from him seemingly effortlessly, and his wry sense of humor came through all the more powerfully because of that low-key delivery.

Once, he recalled the time when, fired by enthusiasm over Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, he had determined to join the Merchant Marine. “What led you to want to join up?” he was asked. Upon being told of the novel that produced this action, the crusty recruiter dismissed him with: “Oh, you romantic college boys!”

Now that I think of it, the seeds of several of my blog posts over the past year or so were planted when I took Professor Hovde’s two-semester American Literature class beginning in the fall 30 years ago, including Thoreau (his scholarly specialty) accidentally setting fire to a forest, or Hemingway “liberating” the Ritz Bar in Paris.

He was equally adept at showing the unlikely coincidences of American literature (though Jonathan Edwards and Ben Franklin diverged wildly in their attitudes toward religion, both were born in the same year, in the same colony, and examined the natural world with a close and critical eye) or in looking underneath the surface of a passage. (In Moby Dick, the last action before the Pequod sinks consists of the multicultural crew desperately hammering the American flag into the mast—a metaphor for the possibilities and dangers of the national quest.)

I don’t think we ever spend enough time tipping our hats or acknowledging debts to those who’ve enriched our lives in some way. I hope Professor Hovde’s family, in their sorrow now, take at least some comfort in knowing how much this gentleman and scholar influenced generations of Columbia students such as myself. He was truly one of the gems in its justly famous English Department.