Hoosier Humanist

When Associate Professor W. J. Bate came to Harvard in 1935, he faced two very pressing problems: how to get through his freshman year without any money, and how to attend classes while working his way through college. Since the country was still in the Depression, Bate had to balance what is now considered a full work week with his desire to get the best education he could at Harvard.

Graduated in 1939 with a summa cum laude, he obtained his Ph.D. three years later. But it was not until 1946 that the period he characterizes as "the years of struggle" came to an end. With his appointment as Assistant Professor of English, Bate could begin to forget his seventy-hour-a-week, twelve-cents-an-hour summers.

Now lecturing in the spring term of English 10, Bate, together with Professor Baker, has done much of the organizational work for that basic course. His unusual speaking style, punctuated by rapid gestures and witticisms, is delivered while he stalks about his platform. Aside from English 10, Bate's primary teaching interest is literary criticism, which he attempts to relate to basic human interests, and also the field of eighteenth century literature.

Concentrating especially on the great prose writers of the later eighteenth century, Johnson and Edmund Burke, Bate obviously reacts against what he calls Boswell's "one-sided, tavern room portrait of Johnson." Currently preparing his own book on Johnson, Bate's critical approach follows the line of his subject. "Johnson found it impossible," Bate states, "to criticize justly any literary work without keeping the basic needs and desires of man constantly in mind.

Although Harvard occupied most of his time, Bate tried his hand at dairy farming in the years following the war. Commenting on this venture, he laments, "After a year, the cows began to die more and more rapidly; in fact, all the livestock was sick. The barn floor began to crumble, and the whole thing became a bottomless pit which nothing could fill." He now compromises with a small cabin in the New Hampshire woods. And a few times a year he is lured to a local movie, but returns each time reassured that he can do without the film industry.

The men working with him in the English department have a great respect for Bate which is not entirely academic. Says one of the English tutors, 'With his keen, very enthusiastic opinions on many authors and problems in the whole field of English, I am always surprised by his readiness to listen to the most absurd idea. Even when that idea is pressed in heated discussion, Bate will not lose his temper, as subjective as he may feel about the given subject."

Even though he has lost to a great extent his undergraduate awe of Harvard, Bate still feels a healthy respect for the University, and cannot quite reconcile himself to his position. For some years, he admits, he felt like Huckleberry Finn at the mansion of the Widow Douglas, afraid that anything he touched or tried would bring a reprimand from authority.

But the feeling never goes too deep, for no interest of his life has even approached his work at Harvard. And ultimately, as he says, "Harvard offers an unparalleled home to anyone concerned with the development of human nature through and with the aid of intelligence. Development by definition means 'variety of achievement' And the greatness of Harvard is to be found in an ideal of development that is sufficiently flexible and large-minded to prize the variety and individuality of the human spirit."