The People’s Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League

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“I knew he was preaching something that my people needed to hear,” Ben explains. He and his wife, Gale Armstead—a Harlem astrologer—started bringing folks with them. They recruited high school dropouts, alternative healers, and aspiring actresses and convinced them to make the trek to Barnard College. Ben used course packets to lure folks up the hill with the promise of a first-rate education. Handing one over with a smirk to a passerby, Ben would shout, “This thing should cost you $4,000 and I’m givin’ it to ya for free!”

Ben and Gale often lingered after class to introduce the professor to their newest recruits and to ask him questions about the day’s lectures—whether they were on Machiavelli, Martin Luther, or Malcolm X. Ben, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a short time before coming to Harlem and vowing to never “work in the white community” again, wasn’t deferential with the professor, instead challenging him.

He was especially eager to convince Dalton to incorporate astrological charts into his lectures. He and Gale even went so far as to supply them, noting that some of the most famous political philosophers were born under Taurus. “A coincidence?” Ben asks, eyebrows raised and a playful smile on his face. “I think not.”

Professor Dalton hears them out—“just like a Pisces,” Ben says—but remains unconvinced. He believes the answer to the world’s ills lies not in the alignment of the moon, sun, and stars, but between a dedicated teacher and a willing student. He believes that Mahatma Gandhi, the nonviolent radical who advocated social change through daily, hourly, minute-by-minute acts of integrity and kindness, got it right when he left his suit and law degree behind to be of and among the people. Dalton has made an effort every day of his 38 years of teaching at Barnard to follow Gandhi’s advice and “be the change you wish to see in the world.” It hasn’t always been easy.

Administrators have not always looked favorably on Professor Dalton’s theory of education. After they discovered that he was allowing a group of undocumented students to slip into his lectures semester after semester, he was asked to reconsider his open classroom policy, gently reminded that Columbia University has a formal auditing program and that students pay upwards of $50,000 a year.

The professor smiled and replied without pause, “These are my friends. You wouldn’t tell any other professor that he couldn’t invite his friends to sit in on his class.”

The administration compromised, inviting the professor to hold a weekly evening seminar for the public in the fall of 2004. Though Dalton already had a full course load and a few nagging health issues, he eagerly agreed, inviting his “friends” to a community forum on nonviolence.

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