I believe that a teacher's own energy, dedication, and conviction can be the most effective means of engaging, persuading, and exciting students. I believe that every class, whether a 12-person seminar or a lecture to 500, should be a kind of theater, an intellectual scene more charged, more shapely, and more rewarding than most hours we spend in "real life."

I believe that the surest way to reach an undergraduate is to adopt something of the manner of a loving parent to a near-adult child; to reach a graduate student, the manner of friend to friend. High energy and obvious commitment may excite and engage; but one-to-one relationship can be almost irresistible. In 1956 my English 1A professor at Cal read from my papers in class. Then he asked me to come to his office, so he could go over them with me more closely. Eventually, he took an active personal interest in my whole academic and professional career. He's dead now, but I'm still writing for him, trying to make my words clearer and more honest, as if he were still reading everything I write. If I can convince my students that I care about them and their work, they may go on trying to be better writers (and perhaps better people) too.

If the Berkeley students' protests of the 1960s (and my subsequent experience with Professor Charles Muscatine's Strawberry Creek College) taught me anything, it can be summed up in one phrase: you have to teach the students that are there. You may try to improve your department's admissions process; but you cannot complain, year after year, that the students who turn up in your classes and office hours don't meet some splendid, some classical (perhaps some outdated?) ideal you have inherited or established. They're what you've got, and they need you to help them—whatever their skills, their attitudes, or their qualifications. The world is moving much faster than we teachers sometimes like to admit.

I've never forgotten the example of a wonderful production of Racine's Phedre that Bob Goldsby directed for the University Theater twenty years ago, when I had just begun teaching at Berkeley. I was reviewing such things then, and I was astonished by the finesse and integrity of the production—and even more astonished when Goldsby explained to me that he had refused even to conceive of his production until he had met and taken the measure of his undergraduate cast. He had, for example, a Phedre with a spectacular voice, but virtually no ability to move: so for her (and Racine) he designed scenes that allowed her to sit immobilized on a great throne, weighed down by symbolic, jewel-encrusted robes. You build your production, he patiently explained—as you shape your class—around the students who turn up.

My present situation is just about ideal. I teach what I live, train students to do what I do, talk in the classroom about the things I care about most. I review professional public performances, on deadline, to very high standards—and I encourage my students to do the same. I write biographical "profiles" made out of dozens of interviews, encyclopedic background articles, critical essays in many fields, all intended for publication in good general-circulation periodicals: which is precisely what I am trying to help my graduate students do. I devour every good new example I can find of nonfictional literature. (I sometimes try to write it myself.) In my literature courses, I can share the excitement of my latest discoveries. Every couple of years, I try to shape my own recent interest and research into a book. At the same time, I am sharing my own problems and solutions with graduate students who are trying to put together their theses.

Very few teachers can match their professional work and their classwork as near-perfectly as this. One of the great advantages of Berkeley, I believe, is that so many faculty members are able to lead intellectual lives as unified as mine.