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When he hits Darwin and mutations, Miner yanks at his front teeth. "The saber-toothed tiger," he says, "was noted for its eyeteeth. They grew and grew, giving the tiger a tremendous bite. They could just WHANG on that prey." He claps his hands together. "But this mutation kept recurring and the eyeteeth grew longer and longer, till they came down like this"—he drapes his forefingers down over his lower jaw—"and then what happened? They couldn't get a bite. So now there are no more saber-toothed tigers."
Miner gets a kick out of such lectures, but confesses that he prefers to teach a colloquium around a table where "fellows are not looking at the backs of one another's necks." He seeks "an electric exchange" with students, is "tremendously pleased" when invited to a student dinner or fraternity house. His loftiest aim for his C.C. course, in fact, is to furnish ideas for the kids to kick around in bull sessions. "The bull session is a very important aspect of education," he contends. As the hours grow late, students "express what they are really thinking about—they educate each other."
Miner gets grateful letters from former students and, though an erratic typist, pecks out warm answers. He says he is amazed and happy when some company president, for example, quotes something Miner said that changed his outlook on life—"but of course I never remember saying it at all."
Renaissance Man. Boyish enthusiasm sits poorly on a professor, but an urgency and eagerness that transcend enthusiasm can be gripping. At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, English Professor Osborne Bennett ("O.B.") Hardison Jr., 37, wears scuffed shoes, drooping socks and chalk-streaked jacket, goes everywhere accompanied by a kindly dog named Poppo, and makes literature an urgent affair. O.B. revels in Joyce, turns Kant dramatic, convulses his class by acting out John Donne's poem The Flea. Hummingly in tune with the student wave length, he translates the oracle's prediction in Arcadia ("An uncouth love which Nature hateth most") as meaning that, "put bluntly, the king's youngest daughter will become a lesbian." With a lyrical voice and a surging style, he also conveys his conviction that literature is "exciting, beautiful, profoundly moving."
Hardison, says Neil Forsyth, a graduate student from Britain, "understands more of Aristotelian thought than anybody who taught me Aristotle at Cambridge." When one of Hardison's lectures on Milton and the Puritan period ended, Forsyth adds, "I wanted to stand up and cheer." Hardison admits to having some off days when "you wonder whether you are professing anything except ignorance. Sometimes I tell my best jokes and get nothing but lumpish faces staring back."