The People’s Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League

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When no one responds, he goes on, “My proposal is that, following the example of Ben and Gale, all of you others who have come”—motioning to the Harlem crew spread out in the back rows—“who have led the cause, that we now turn Columbia into a community college. I’m aware that this will be dismissed as absurd, but I want to tell the president that this is what I propose as a test of how far we value”—and this word he spits out—“diversity on this campus.”

He goes on to explore Plato’s idea of noninjury as the utmost moral virtue and waxes poetic about interconnection and the pursuit of truth in lieu of feigning possession of it. And finally he ends, “We don’t need more intelligence. God knows we’ve got enough on this campus. What we need is more compassion.”

As the class packs up, M.L., a young taxi driver with tiny dreads and a swoon-inducing smile, catches Danny’s eye and says jokingly, “Back to the plantation.”

Wiry and determined, Sharron Dalton is marching all over her husband’s hurricane of an office, wearing a Mao cap she has just found in the clutter and talking about him as if he isn’t there. “He just can’t seem to part with so many of these books. He can’t come to terms with the fact that we’re leaving,” she says. The Daltons will be moving to St. Croix, an island in the Caribbean, where one of their sons has relocated his family—including Dalton’s two young granddaughters.

“Yes, yes, we’re really leaving,” Dalton mumbles as he sorts through books, reading their back covers instead of throwing them into one of the three piles: Harlem, hurricane victims, or trash.

If you ask the professor why he’s retiring, you’ll get different answers. Sometimes he says that he just wants to spend more time with his beloved grandchildren—that he wants to make scrambled eggs with them, dance with them, and be there to answer their amazing questions.

Sometimes he says it’s his health. After he recovered from prostate cancer a couple of years ago, Sharron, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University who is also retiring, insisted that he slow down and pull back from his students—especially from the exhausting community forum.

Dalton is not good with boundaries, though. He sees them as diametrically opposed to the ideal student-teacher relationship, modeled after Socrates and Plato. Human nature is not fundamentally selfish or violent, Dalton argues passionately day in and day out; it is good and loving. All failures of humanity—war, greed, disconnection—are failures of our education system.

For the past 15 years or so, the students who make Dalton feel effective as a teacher—who allow him to, as his favorite E.M. Forster quotation advises, “Only connect”—are often those who aren’t even supposed to be in his classroom.

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