This week marks a milestone for UW-Madison: The retirement of Booth Fowler, chair of Integrated Liberal Studies and professor of political science. Since arriving at Madison in the late 60s, Fowler has built a well-deserved reputation for being one of the foremost — if not the foremost — teachers in this vast institution. He also managed to publish several excellent books and helped forge a new subfield, religion and politics.
Hundreds of students take Fowler’s classes each year, which means legions of Fowler alumni populate the land. In my travels around the country to address alumni groups on Founders’ Day, I never fail to encounter Fowler alums who bombard me with questions about the professor who inspired them to live examined lives and who left the most lasting of impressions.
Their recollections of Fowler and his classes remain remarkably vivid, whether their matriculation took place the previous year or three decades before. And Fowler alums commonly bear the telltale mark of all true Fowler students: The alert, challenging smile of the inquisitive mind.
Of course, students do not have to graduate to appreciate his teaching. Part of the job description in political science seems to be listening to current students praise his courses. One of my favorite pastimes over the years has been to see how long it takes me to tell if a new student acquaintance is a Fowlerite. It’s not a matter of spouting a political line or a particular set of beliefs (more on this later), but rather the quality with which the student addresses vexing legal, political or moral questions. No doubt, like many of my colleagues, I have developed an uncanny sixth sense in detecting Fowlerites as the years have passed.
So what is all the fuss about? In some fundamental sense, Fowler’s pedagogical gifts defy description. There is the standard litany of virtues: Always well prepared, committed, knows his stuff inside-out, sharp as a whip, knows his way around the classroom like it is his oyster.
But Fowler gives his students much more. In his hands, the leading thinkers in the history of political thought come alive and present their ideas in a manner that links the past to the present without detracting from the independent significance of either time. Fowler’s distinctive approach to teaching — which embodies unusual passion, seriousness wedded to inimitable humor and dramatic impersonations — breathes life into the cardinal question of political philosophy: How should we live? And as Fowler teaches, no one has a monopoly on the answer.
Students generally appreciate the significance of this question when it comes to grappling with the pressing controversies of their time, but they are prone to consider the likes of Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Nietzsche to be of merely antiquarian interest. Fowler shatters this complacency by shaking the dust off the past and revealing how the struggles of today are extensions of the struggles of yesterday.
By skillfully bringing philosophers to life in class, Fowler shows us these thinkers were not just purveyors of abstractions, but driven individuals who sometimes courageously dedicated their lives to addressing the crises and important questions of their time with the power of their minds. We begin to see what it means to think seriously about our lives.
Furthermore, the thought of profound, passionate, complex and sometimes-troubled individuals often woos dangers that both fascinate and frighten modern sensibilities. Fowler has never whitewashed the thoughts of the thinkers he presents, honoring Nietzsche’s warning that “in casting out your devil, be careful lest you cast out the best that is in you.”
Finally, the content and form of Fowler’s teaching has been invaluable to the intellectual diversity and freedom of the university. On a campus sometimes prone to ideological consensus, Fowler opened students’ minds to alternative views, including conservatism, religion and radical thought outside the liberal box.
Fowler achieved this quietly subversive feat not by being an ideologue or tilting the other way, but simply by doing what he does best — treating all great thinkers from across the political spectrum with the respect that is their due. He respects students too much to preach. He opens the doors and provides some cover but leaves it up to individual students to decide for themselves their intellectual and ethical destinies. In so doing, Fowler broadens horizons while showing regard for the individual freedom that is a necessary ingredient of intellectual life and moral commitment.
A young writer once asked the great Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz what advice he had for aspiring young writers. “Write against the tides,” Paz replied without hesitation. Fowler’s legacy embraces this admonition in the finest sense. He gave us liberal education at its best. The university will be a different place without him.
Donald A. Downs ([email protected]) is a political science professor. He has been Fowler’s colleague since 1985. He is also a Fowler alum, having taken a class with Fowler way back in 1971-2.