The People’s Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League

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David Harris’ little round glasses and messy brown curls have a John Lennon quality. It’s easy to imagine him snuggled up to Yoko Ono in a bed or sitting in the grass with a guitar. It’s not so easy to imagine him dressed in fatigues and carrying a gun, but that’s what he did for years.

David, 34, enrolled at Columbia as part of the general studies program in 2001—an auspicious time for a man seeking a quiet life after years in the Israeli army. The events of 9/11 rocked his already fragile worldview, and he sought refuge in Professor Dalton. Perhaps no one has gotten to know the professor in the last few years better than he.

“When I was most depressed,” David says, “Dalton handed me a key to his office and said, ‘Whenever you need, you are welcome here.’”

For hours on end, David sat in the professor’s old wooden chair, looking at the books that gave Dalton solace (Thoreau’s Walden being his favorite). In the process of trying to live, as Dalton preaches and Plato wrote, “the examined life,” David was coming to terms with the fact that he had murdered people when he was in the army.

David never worried that the professor would reject him because of his violent past. “The idea of ‘the journey’ is so critical to Dalton’s teaching, and he helped me understand my experiences in Israel not as an end, but as a beginning,” says David. “He reopened a door inside me.”

This is the key to Dalton’s profound effect: He invites people to become and to value their truest selves. He takes students like David, who have lost their way, and reinforces their inclinations to be good and gentle creatures. He takes folks like Ben and Danny—men who have often felt invisible—and sees their idiosyncratic wisdom. In Dalton’s world, everyone is deserving. Everyone is capable of becoming the person he or she was supposed to be all along.

Today, every seat in the lecture hall is filled. Danny is here, as are Ben, Gale, David, even Sharron, who rarely attends her husband’s lectures. A group of former students has made a banner for Dalton, on which people are writing notes of gratitude. An older man whose suit screams “lawyer” gives the professor a bear hug and hands him a card. Dalton opens it; it plays “Pomp and Circumstance.” The professor laughs. Finally he begins his final lecture.

“I want to defuse your expectations as much as possible. If I had any special revelations since last Tuesday, I would have immediately shared them with you, as I always do.” The crowd chuckles at his humility.

“Today is not special in terms of my revelations, but it’s special in terms of people here I know that I’ll miss, some of whom I value as my closest friends. Jeff,” he says, pointing at the man who gave him the card, “I forgive you for graduating from Harvard Law School.” The crowd laughs, aware of Dalton’s reputation for pressuring his brightest students to become teachers.

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