A Professor's Modest Dream

My undergraduate alma mater, the University of Michigan, holds an annual summer event up here in northern Michigan, generally highlighting an achievement of somebody affiliated with the university.  This year it was an interview with Hendrik Meijer, the CEO of the Meijer super-grocery store chain, but also something of a scholar, who just published a biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg. (Michael Barr, long-time Michigan law professor and recently appointed dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, ably conducted the interview.)

But I digress slightly.  Absolutely my favorite course at Michigan was the fall 1973 edition of "Introduction to Film," taught by Professor Frank Beaver (left), only three years out from having received his Ph.D.  I remember that course chapter and verse, from conceptual montage to the shocking "gun" scene in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery to the assessment of that neat new film, American Graffiti, to Professor Beaver's admiration of Haskell Wechsler's Medium Cool. (I wrote my paper for the course on Deliverance.)

A couple years ago, I recognized Professor Beaver at one of these events, introduced myself, and began spouting back to him chunks of lectures he had delivered more than forty years before.  Since then we catch up annually, as we did last night, on new movies.  Professor Beaver still writes on film for Michigan Today, the alumni publication.

I think I took his course in his fourth year of teaching.  I "accosted" him roughly forty years later.  Because of my late entry into academia, the equivalent for me would be a former student approaching me in roughly 2051, when I will be a spry 97 years old.  I can only hope.