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Athos tries to curb his profanity, but he has no desire at all to curb his feelings. "The student is concerned with feeling—even more than with knowledge and thought," he argues. "Where knowledge is overemphasized, students are merely vessels; then they can open the trap and flush it all into blue books. We have intellectual athletes exercising great muscles in the making of intellectual doilies." This may be "the age of the big cool," says Athos, but the good teacher must "burn hot."
Sparks Fly. Amid the cathedral-spired Gothic-solid buildings at Yale University, Art Historian Vincent Scully Jr., 45, excitedly defines the aim of his teaching as putting "the right word together with the visual fact so that all of a sudden sparks fly and a new skill is born: the ability to see."
Scully's soaring lectures on architecture every year enroll no less than one-fifth of all Yale undergraduates—plus some 100 non-enrolled auditors who may catch him for four years and never hear precisely the same lecture twice. Waiting for the lights to dim for his slides, Scully paces head down like a halfback about to take the field. Then he swings his 10-ft. pointer, whomps the screen as if to destroy a bad building, jabs it like a fencer to stress a point —and buildings take on life. "What does a building want to be?" he will ask. "How does that building want to say hello to you?"
The screen shows Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, a 1930 country home near Paris. "Le Corbusier exposes you up in space. It is as if you were in a ship. It's as if he's saying, 'You can't merge with nature.' You are a man. You want things that nature doesn't want. You would like to live forever, and nature will kill you. So you stand and you look at nature, framed out there on the horizon. You are an urban dweller who is trying to make contact with it, and in a very fundamental sense you can never really do so except on a level of profound melancholy."
Articulate, lyrical, passionate, Scully gets so entranced in lecturing that he once stepped back in the dark, fell four feet to the auditorium floor, leaped back up, still talking. The lectures seem to be spontaneous drama; yet Scully spends a full day planning each of them, selecting as many as 100 slides and changing the course every year because "I'm not the same person I was last year." Frenetic and lonely, Scully's whole life is an explosion. "You ought to hear him give his description of Y. A. Tittle's last year with the Giants," says his colleague Jerry Pollitt. "It's gripping, like Greek tragedy. He comes across like Euripides."
House of Jargon. Professors who profess with the passion of Athos, Scully and the eight others on TIME'S cover are enjoying new glory on nearly every college and university campus in the U.S., as academic administrators react to complaints that they have neglected teaching. To too many youngsters, it appears that those castles of knowledge they thought they were entering have turned out to be cardboard houses built of professorial jargon, Ph.D. pretentiousness, preoccupation with tenure and personal prestige.