As high school freshmen, we had to eat dinner with the school headmaster for two weeks. The prospect of that half month filled us with utter terror, for the Duke (as we called the headmaster behind his back) exercised our minds with questions like "Muir, should Mickey Mouse be required to have a driver's license?" No matter how meager or mindless our first response, he would challenge it with logic and fact, and off we would go on our excursion towards an answer, lurching from time to time through such philosophical potholes as the limits of law and the purposes of legislatures; reality and imagination; determinism and freedom; and what it means to be human. What he taught us was the manners of human discourse: the courtesies of logic and accuracy, the imperatives of tolerance and suspended disbelief, the decencies of candor and sticking to the subject. By example he demonstrated the forms that individuals use in order to reason together. Sometimes our dinnertime forays into baffling questions turned out inconclusively. We did not always deepen our understanding, or widen our comprehension, or reconcile some confounding contradiction. But we always had intimations of such possibilities. And when our two weeks were done, the final reward was a twinkle in the Duke's eye, signifying the fun he had had, connecting our minds and his in the toils of reason. His delight in our joint effort was the highest praise we adolescents ever had.

When I was older, I went to college and came across Herb Kaufman, a different kind of scholar. Kaufman was a researcher who roamed the world to find what he laughingly called his "subjects": prisoners in jail, sailors on ships, urban dwellers, and forest rangers. He treated them all as his teachers. He sat with them until he understood their moral core. Then he wrote books, believing he was doing little more than chronicling the wisdom of others whom he had grown to love but who were too busy themselves to write down how they had experienced the world. Kaufman maintained that scholarship unassisted by love was insufficient.

To combine reason with love: That was what the Duke and Herb Kaufman thought teaching stood for. "Only connect . . . ," they might have said: connect the well-exercised mind to matters that really matter. That credo they honored devoutly. I have not seen a better.