My freshman year at Berkeley coincided with a unique and tumultuous period of social change. The Third World Strike, the conflict over People's Park, U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, the killings at Kent State—as these events unfolded, I found myself bewildered and confused. Nothing in my personal or academic experience had prepared me to make sense of the social upheaval around me.

While the classroom could not insulate itself from the turmoil, it provided me with a crucial space to reflect on the social issues that seemed so pressing. I found professors who could compellingly integrate course themes with issues being raised in the streets. They sought to move beyond the rhetoric generated in the heat of controversy, to examine the historical roots of issues, the competing ways of seeing things, and the structural consequence of various actions.

In this setting, I learned the enormous power of ideas in helping individuals to comprehend, organize, and act in the world. This dramatic lesson inspired me to pursue an academic career, and it has shaped my goal in teaching. I want students to cultivate a "quality of mind," as C. Wright Mills put it in The Sociological Imagination , "to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world," and, in so doing, understand and relate their personal troubles to the structural transformations around them.

To this end, I encourage students to engage in critical thinking—to unearth, thoroughly examine, and challenge some of the commonsense assumptions they have about history and politics, and to view issues from competing perspectives.

Another important objective is to persuasively convey the importance of history to students. I want students to know historical "facts," but I do not want them to view history as a dry, lifeless chronology of wars, important documents, and "great men." I want them to view history as the dynamic unfolding of broad political, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped, and in turn been shaped by, individuals.

Even the best academic plan can, of course, be easily subverted. To be a successful teacher, one needs to display passion and enthusiasm for the material, and to pay attention to the manner in which that material is delivered.

"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both," C. Wright Mills observed. It was this connection that inspired my academic pursuits and continues to serve as a lesson I seek to instill in students. To this day, there is nothing more gratifying than to see in students that spark of discovery and excitement which glowed within me when I became aware of self, society, and the intimate link between the two.