Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [10]
Football became less important to me as I realized I was never going to be an all-American player. My career as a pianist now over, I began to think more about writing. There were two professors who interested me.
One was Porter Perrin, who was writing a book called Writer’s Guide and Index to English. He became the closest thing I had to a friend on the faculty. The other was a Quaker iconoclast, Kenneth Boulding, who taught economics for the university and pacifism for his own satisfaction at night in meetings with students at his home. I don’t know firsthand that he was brilliant; but it is an adjective that almost everyone used in referring to him.
When the college opened after preseason football, I had classes with both men. Boulding stammered badly and even though you knew it shouldn’t have, it influenced the way you thought about him. During a class lecture, you were driven to pay careful attention because of the difficulty of following his broken speech. He was always surprising us, too. He’d be expounding some theory of economics that we barely understood when suddenly he’d drop in some mildly witty or unexpected remark. The class would erupt in raucous laughter, more from the sense of relief the class felt when Boulding got it out than by the humorous content of it.
When Boulding posted a notice on the bulletin board about a meeting of all those opposed to our entry into the war, I took that second opportunity to separate myself from the other football players and started going to his meetings. For some reason opposing the war seemed like an intellectual stand to take. It still seemed that way to Vietnam protesters. It was almost like not watching television now. There’s a whole subculture in America of people who are proud of themselves for not watching television. They take every opportunity to tell anyone they can get to listen. I suffered something like that syndrome in opposing the war.
Boulding was a good teacher. The best teachers are not the ones who know most about the subject. The best teachers are the ones who are most interested in something—anything, and not necessarily the subject they teach. Boulding was consumed with the idea of pacifism and I’ve often thought of him as a good example of how little it matters that a college teacher is professing theories that are counter to popular and acceptable ideas of economics, religion, race, or government. His students were constantly propagandized by him but they ended up sorting things out for themselves. Being exposed to a communist professor in the 1930s didn’t make communists of many students. Being exposed to the pacifist ideas of Kenneth Boulding didn’t do his students any harm although if the parents of many of my classmates had sat in on some of those evening sessions in Boulding’s home, they might have been reluctant to pay the next tuition bill to Colgate.
Quakers, like Christian Scientists, are frequently such decent, gentle, and seemingly reasonable people that they are not often considered to be religious fanatics. But they are generally more zealous than other Christians—most of whom, God knows, are zealous enough. The further a religion is from mainstream, the more devoted its followers are likely to be to it, and Quakers are down a long little rivulet.
Boulding may have been an economics genius, but he was definitely a religious nut. I was caught up with some of his ideas before I knew that and became convinced of the truth of one of his statements I’ve since seen attributed to both Plato and Benjamin Franklin: “Any peace is better than any war.” I liked that a lot.
It was Boulding’s contention that the conflict in Europe was none of the United States’ business and even if it had been, war was an immoral way to pursue interests. The argument made sense to me, which gives you some idea how sensible I was when I was twenty.
On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland to begin World War II, I was in Hamilton where I’d arrived three weeks before classes began for football practice under the legendary head