Tom Van Nortwick

Partial Transcript: Interviewer: Please give me your name and tell me a few words that you expect. Give me a few words about your educational experience and how it's prepared you for your life beyond the classroom. My name is Shannon Wargo and today is November 4, 2019.

Tom: My name is Thomas Van Nortwick and I am emeritus professor of classics at Oberlin College. I actually have been thinking about the topic of education and how it relates to me. It seems to me that it may be that my remarks are somewhat more autobiographical than perhaps what you were looking for but that's the way I think about those things.

Segment Synopsis: Tom states where he works and that he's been thinking about education lately.

Keywords: Autobiographical; Education; Thomas Van Nortwick

Partial Transcript: I was born in Geneva, Illinois, which is near Chicago in 1946. I was born into what I now understand to have been a pretty well to do family, although when I was a kid I had no idea what the nature of our resources was really, just looked to me like I was like the other kids. I learned later in my life that both my mother and father were from wealthy families. That had some impacts on their own behaviors and their own lives which is not relevant for now I don't think. I was a good student in grade school, I got good grades. I got in trouble from time to time, I was kind of a smarty pants, but I did well. Up until eighth grade when my grades began to plummet. In retrospect, it seems clear to me now that there were things happening at home, crises happening at home that I was frightened by that I didn't know how to react to that had a negative impact on my work as a student. I don't want to go into detail here but I'll tell you that I came from an alcoholic family ,from a dysfunctional family. I am a child of alcoholics and that endows me of a certain responses or it can, that are not very health. So, anyway, I became a very mediocre student in eighth grade. My parents were by now divorced, but they both decided that I should go away to private school.

Segment Synopsis: Tom talks about his childhood and family life before high school

Keywords: Divorced; Family; Geneva; Grades; Private School

Subjects: Early Childhood; Family Life; Grades

Partial Transcript: So, I really didn't know anything about private school or what that entailed, but I went along with it. I got sent to a school in Connecticut called Kent, which is a prep school. I went there after eighth grade, although I did eighth grade over again because my grades were so dismal that the only way they'd let me in is if I did eighth grade again. And in fact the only reason I got in, I'm pretty sure, was because my uncle was on the alumi counsel, he had been a big star back in the day. He was my mother's brother. But what that meant was when I arrived I was very anxious and very frightened that I was going to screw up and be a bad student and disgrace the family and so forth. And so I was quite nervous. I was in a small class, forty-eight guys, it was all boys then. The first, and in some ways most influential classes of my life occurred in that very first semester at Kent. I was required to take a course called general studies with a man named William Armstrong who was a kind of legendary teacher and taught at Kent for over fifty years. The whole course was to about learning how to study. Learning good study habits. I had no good study habits, I assure you. Mr. Armstrong had written a book about this called, Study is Hard Work. All we had to do that fall semester was to memorize these sort of precepts about how to be a good student and recite them back in class and give them back on tests. I for some reason, Bill caught my attention and I suddenly decided that I wanted to please him and be a good student, but I wasn't at all sure I could. Well, as it turns out, I was good at memorizing and reciting and doing all those sorts of things. I discovered that I had great reserves of self-discipline that I didn't know that I had. So I started to have some success. This was exhilarating to me because one of the things that happens to you when you're in a dysfunctional family, and I hope you don't know about this, is that you're never quite sure where you stand. You don't know if you do something whether that's going to be applauded or people or going to be angry, or in many cases there's going to be indifference. So the notion of developing a sense from how I was doing as a child was very blurry for me when I went to Kent. The great thing about the school is and when I told my friends later in life they were horrified to hear this, but the great thing about the school is it's extraordinarily regimented. It wasn't a military school or anything, but our time was spoken for from 6:30 in the morning to 9:30 at night. We had to turn the light out at 9:30, up until we were juniors and then I think it was 10:30 and seniors it was midnight. In between it was classes, it was sports, it was a job, everybody had to do a job, go to chapel, and so on. So suddenly my life was very highly structured. External structure. It turns out that I loved it. If I like the structure then I also like the fact that it was extremely predictable, input and outcome, I might say. So I knew if I did this, I would get that. I did something good, I'd get this reward, if I did something bad, I'd get this punishment. It seemed to me at the time that it was all rather impersonally operated. It was all men. All my teachers were men. So, it seemed to me that it was sort of clear cut, if I do these things then I will be judged a success and life will be good and I will be well. In so far as I even thought about such terms. And I did do well. I did do well at Kent. I was at the top of my class academically, I was class officer, I was a captain of sports. I was a prefect, which is kind of like an officer of the senior class. I ran a dormitory, I did all those things you're supposed to do to be a successful student there. It really was a huge change in my life, when I graduated I went to Stanford.

Segment Synopsis: Tom talks about what private school was like. How he enjoyed the school and liked structure it brought to his life.

Keywords: Kent; Learning; Nervous; Regimented Schedule; Studying; Teacher

Subjects: Academic life; Private School; Teacher

Partial Transcript: My first year at Stanford I did well academically, mostly I think, because the excellent AP courses that I took at Kent my senior year carried me through the first year. It wasn't as if I didn't study, I did, but I did pretty well and I didn't really have to really kill myself. But then second year things started going downhill very rapidly. Stanford was on quarters then, probably still is, so far, winter, spring, and then you were off in the summer usually. By the end of winter quarter, I was not only not doing well academically, I was pretty depressed. I look back on it now and I think the reason was, there was a big reason for it, was number one, all that structure was gone. And I had to make my own structure and I had to make my own decisions about these things and I wasn't really used to it. And number two, my step-father and my mother got separated in the summer before my second year and I think that was very upsetting to me. It's hard for me to tell from this distance, but it seemed to me that in some ways what happened to me in the second year at Stanford is sort of what happened to me in eighth grade. Things in the family overwhelmed me and I did poorly.

Segment Synopsis: Tom talks about his first and second years at Stanford and mentions that life during his second year was similar to what was happening when he was in eighth grade.

Keywords: Academics; Divorce; Stanford

Subjects: Life at Stanford; Mental health

Partial Transcript: A friend of mine said, "let's go to the Stanford in England program". Stanford had these wonderful oversees programs you could go for two quarters and you had Stanford professors in England, France, Italy. So we decided to go to England. That started in June of my sophomore year so I took the spring quarter off and worked in Palo Alto raking traps in the golf course. I went to England and it was an entirely new group of people, I only knew one or two people before I went. That experience of being there completely changed my life. I had never, I think, been to an art museum in my life before I went there. I never really had what I would call any intellectual interest. I was not interested in culture, any of those things. I was kind of a barbarian I think in some ways although I was kind of externally successful, but kind of empty inside. All of a sudden we started going to these museums and we started seeing Europe and we got to go to Europe two or three times. It was just extraordinary for me, I was so excited all the time. I got to know the professors in our group. I had never even talked to a professor before except for about five minutes or something. I got to know these people pretty well, we went out to meals things like that. And I began to see that spending your life as a teacher and being interested in intellectual things could be really wonderful because I had really admired these people and they were really kind to me too in various ways. But I had no notion of being a teacher or anything like that. And then a friend of mine who was on the program with me, someone that I got to know actually after I got there, a woman. Turned to me one time and said have you ever thought about being a teacher? And I said no. Why would I be a teacher? Well, I think you'd either be a really good teacher or a really bad teacher, that was her remark. So, this kind of fifty-fifty encouragement there.

Segment Synopsis: Went to Stanford for college and then studied abroad. His experience in England is what influenced him to want to go into teaching.

Keywords: England; Europe; Professors; Teacher; intellectual interest

Partial Transcript: And but it stuck in my mind and when I got back to Stanford in Janurary ‘68 I decided that I would think about being a little more serious about academics. I thought I would be a history major at Stanford. It turned out that history majors at Stanford sat in huge lecture courses with very famous professors, write down what they say in their lectures, leave and come back and write it down on the exam and that’s your course. Very little discussion, in fact no discussion in the classes themselves, and that was kind of the style then and I didn’t think there could be anything. And when I went to England, I got to know these people who were professors who turned out to be really interesting people and so I decided to try harder to be a better student and the thing I thought I might do is I would start taking latin again. So I had taken five years of latin in prep-school mostly because I didn’t want to take science - I kept trying to dodge courses I didn’t want to take - you guys wouldn’t understand that with your skills, but believe me I have always been afraid of science courses. So I took latin through prep-school and did well in it, but I didn’t really care about it particularly. So my freshman year I took two quarters of latin in order to get out of, to fulfill a requirement that said that you either had to do a language or math, and I was scared of math so I took two more quarters of latin. But when I was done that was that I said no more latin for me and I went on to doing these history courses and so on. But then I came back from England I thought, if I want to talk to professors, I’m going to have to get in smaller classes, and certainly latin classes are going to be smaller. So I went up to the classic department and the secretary was done there and I told her I want to talk to somebody about studying latin and she said “I think Mr. Malore is upstairs.” And this is a man whose name is Ronald Malore who was then a young professor at Stanford of ancient history and went on to be a very illustrious professor at actually UCLA. And I went up there and he was, seemed to be a cool, young guy and I realize now that Ron was probably only in his early thirties then and he had come to the dormitory my freshman year where we ate, and talked to us and just seemed to be a very hip guy. So I went in to him and said “Well Mr. Malore, I don’t know if you remember me” well miraculously he did remember me and I said “well I thought maybe it’s possible that I could perhaps study latin again” and he looked at me and said “Right, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re a history major right?” I said “Yeah.” “Well now you’re going to be an ancient history major and I’m going get you out of this requirement and this requirement and that requirement and he’s going down right now the page in the history catalog and instead you’ll take private readings with me. You’ll start taking latin, you’ll take greek in your senior year and then you’ll apply to graduate school and become a college professor,” he said, “It’s great. There are all of these jobs, anywhere you want, so on and so forth.” And I was agape at this whole thing and said, “Ok.” and that’s what I did. And I immediately made myself into an insufferable thing, I just studied nonstop for the rest of my time at Stanford. I had also fallen in love and met my first wife in England and she always told me me if work hard and everything you can go to graduate and everything. I did, I worked hard and had some success in classics courses, latin courses and greek courses, it was just a year and a half. And then it came time to apply to graduate school, I didn’t know anything about that and I went for some consultation with Ron and he said, “well why don’t you try, these courses, these places” and so I did. And I wrote up and can remember writing up my essay because you always have to have this essay about why is it that you want to get a PhD in classics and so on. And I didn’t really know because I couldn’t say, ‘well Mr. Malore said I should.’ So I made up some things, I don’t know what they were.

Segment Synopsis: Tom discusses his education as an undergraduate at Stanford University after returning from study abroad in England.

Keywords: Academics; Ancient History; Education; History; Stanford

Subjects: Ancient History; England; Ronald Malore; Stanford

Partial Transcript: And in the spring of 1969, to my astonishment, I got a letter from Yale saying “we’re giving you a fellowship, you can go do classics at Yale.” And I was just so excited I ran back to the classics department and Ron Malore was coming down the stairs and I said, “Mr. Malore! Mr. Malore! I got into Yale with a fellowship!” And he looked at me and he said, “You did?” And I said, “Well yeah, I did!” He said, “Boy, I was pretty straightforward in my letters of recommendation.” So apparently he didn’t write me a rave, I don’t know, but, anyways, somehow they took me. So then I went to Yale, I was at Yale for three years and that was about the hardest I’ve ever worked in my whole life, it was just unbelievably difficult because most people when they go to graduate school in classics have like three or four years of one language and two or three of the other. I had a year and a half of college Latin and one year of Greek so I was just woefully behind and I think that Yale took me because they had a famous ancient historian transferring from Cornell to Yale the year I arrived, and they thought, “Let’s get this guy a student,” and they thought I could be this guy’s student and his name is Donald Kagan. So I stayed in summer school and I didn’t graduate until the end of the summer, partly because I didn’t want to be drafted. In the time I was there, once you set foot out of college, the draft board is right on you and that was the Vietnam war so I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. So I married in August. I studied Greek over the summer to catch up a little bit, and the guy I was studying with said, “I think you should read some Homer, here,” and he gave me a book and he said, “read this book.” I had one year of greek and said ok and I started to read it. And all the time I’m thinking I’m going to be an ancient historian. Now this means I’m going to be doing history, I’m going to be interested in Thucydides and Herodotus and Plutarch - these are Greek historians - certainly not Homer. But I started reading the Iliad, Homer’s Iliad, and it turned out, I absolutely loved it. I didn’t read very much that summer, I did my best, but by the time I got to Yale in that fall I had decided that I didn’t want to be an ancient historian, I wanted to do just classical literature. But I didn’t exactly tell anybody at Yale that, so what happened is I just didn’t sign up for any ancient history possibilities, and kept taking literature classes. And they didn’t notice for some reason, I’m not quite sure why, and so went on it but it was very hard for me. And I made it through exams and so on, but the man who was kind of my primary defender, my supporter, there was killed in a motorcycle accident at the end of my second year, and, which was hard for me, it was very difficult. And so I stayed another year, but I could see the handwriting was on the wall that I was considered to be among the worst students in the class and when it came time to recommend people for jobs and so on, my name was not going to come up on the top of the list. And I was feeling disappointed and I never liked New Haven as a matter of fact, and I wanted to transfer. It was lucky that Stanford let me transfer back and get me a good fellowship and I finished in two more years there and then came to Oberlin in 1974.

Segment Synopsis: Graduate school experience at Yale

Keywords: Ancient History; Classics; Homer; Iliad; Stanford; Yale

Subjects: Classics; Donald Kagan; Homer; Iliad; Ron Malore; Stanford; Yale

Partial Transcript: I came into a department with two other guys, Nathan Greenberg and James Helm both of whom I’m sorry to say have passed away as of now, but who couldn’t be more wonderful mentors and supporters. And because of my challenges in getting along with my father, I was always looking for father figures and mentors and so on and these guys just filled the bill brilliantly. And gave me a lot of support and helped me to learn how to be a teacher and do other things that professors do and so on, but my life otherwise was quite unhappy. I was extremely anxious, my marriage wasn’t going well and my wife was unhappy in Oberlin. And so there was this strange dichotomy between my life at home and my personal relationships and my work because I loved teaching at Oberlin. I’d always loved teaching at Oberlin, I loved my colleagues, I loved the students, it was just marvelous and I looked forward to getting into work every day, it was just great. It left this problem in me in a way because I kept putting off what was making me unhappy by burying myself in my work, I’ve gotta get tenure, I’ve gotta write these articles, I’ve gotta learn how to teach and so on. And if I can just do that, I can be happy after that. So I kept going and I was able to do enough work to get tenure in 1980 and then once I got tenure I had another crash.

Segment Synopsis: Early work at Oberlin College.

Keywords: Classics; Oberlin; Tenure

Subjects: Classics; James Helm; Nathan Greenberg; Oberlin

Partial Transcript: Tom: I felt completely adrift. I didn't know what, still I knew I loved my work. But I couldn't figure out why my marriage was disintegrating, I couldn't figure out why I was so lonely and I really was kind of a miserable guy I have to tell ya. And um, what happened was it kind of all came to a head in 1982. I got divorced in 1984. And I started addressing in desperation the conditions at home. The family conditions dysfunctional stuff thatI began to see was kind of the root cause of why I could not achieve a successful personal life. In a certain sense why I could not grow up. Is how I would put it. So, I started to investigate these things in various ways like therapy and it made a huge difference. I met my second wife. It is a very happy relationship.I got remmaried in 87

Segment Synopsis: Tom could not figure out why he was succeeding in his work life, yet failing in his personal life. He tried many different coping mechanisms to try and understand what could be done to improve his situation.

Keywords: education; integration; personal life; professional life

Subjects: personal life; work life

Partial Transcript: And, what I started doing in 1985, I started investigating the possibility of writing autobiographical essays about classical literature. I thought to myself if I'm so happy as a teacher, why am I so unhappy in other ways. If I claim to love this stuff, why do I love it. What is about it that I love, I set a goal for myself and I began to write these things. And they were published in literary magazines they weren't published in classical journals so professional classists tend not to see them. But, I found it extraordinarily rewarding.

Segment Synopsis: Tom began to write autobiographical essays about classical literature to help him through his tough time. He did this for his own enjoyment, not for publication.

Keywords: happy; literature; unhappy

Subjects: autobiographical essays; happier

Partial Transcript: I began to see that by thinking about the Iliad the Odyssey and Oedipus rex and so on, I could also use them to reflect on my own life and write about them. In a certain sense the role of education and the relationship to well-being turned around radically during those years because before I was running away from these feelings that upset me and burying myself in my work and taking what satisfaction I could from my professional successes and taking that as a kind of sign that I was a successful person. Though it was pretty clear to me on the inside I wasn't. Then when I began to address these challenges that I had starting back in childhood and all the bad habits I learned from being in a family like that. I discovered that I could make other choices and found it extraordinarily liberating. And then working with these essays and also taking it a little bit into my teaching. I never talked about my life in class, I thought that was probably something that was a bit of a burden to students. But, I thought about it all the time when I was teaching. And I developed an entirely new relationship to the material that I spent my entire life studying and it became a resource for me to learn not only how to move forward but to be able to reflect in an intelligent way to what had happened to me. So in a certain sense education played two separate roles in my sense of well being one was a sense of refuge and a way to avoid confronting certain things. And then as a resource as investigating things that I felt I should know about my life and relationship to others, and my goals and what I wanted in life. What would it mean to be well? I only began to get a handle on that until I was forty. So then I taught until 2016, I found my work wonderfully rewarding, I continue to find it rewarding. Writing my professional life was more integrated with that and supported rather than it being something I had rot avoid and run away from.



Nichole Geist: This is Nichole Geist continuing the interview. I believe you've answered most of our questions I would continue on to question 4.

Segment Synopsis: Tom chose specific classical literature books to read and analyze and relate to his own life. This was a type of coping mechanism he used to understand himself better. He also used this method to better understand the literature. He mentioned that the key to all knowledge is self knowledge.

Keywords: education; professional successes; relationships; well-being

Subjects: personal development; success

Partial Transcript: Nichole: For you what has made life worth living? And in what was has your education helped you along the way, either to discover what matters or to navigate toward it and how so?

Tom: I think I just said that didn't I? I mean I don't mind talking more about it. I think that I began my life thinking that education is instrumental in a sense that if I do well in education I can get things that I want. If I can just do this I can be happy. If your in school, there are already these checkpoints to accomplish. As an undergrad and grad student, I hope to be successfull in my courses and if I was successful in my course then I could try to make that the basis of my feelings and self esteem. Eventually that didn't work. Eventually my troubles and difficulties overwhelmed me. In some ways it was the manifestation of the inability to answer those questions you just asked. What was well being? what did I want? IF I could just get what I want I will be happy. But I discovered that as soon as I got the thing that I wanted, I didn't care about it anymore and had to find something else that I wanted. It was always about something outside of me. I only really began to find a way to think about self fulfillment after I achieved some level of self knowledge and self awareness. One of the things that is standard part of the Greek civilization, the key to all knowledge is self knowledge. You can't know things in a deep way until you know yourself. I had no idea who I was until my late 30s. At first I thought education was helping me to achieve well being, but in fact it was only to a limited degree. It was only when I was able to face things about myself that had nothing to do with classes and to accept my short comings and not beat myself up for it. Only after that, I could engage with the material I teach in a meaningful way. So for me self knowledge came first, then I was able to achieve greater levels of self knowledge through work. But I had to do the other work first before I would be able to get any satisfaction.

Segment Synopsis: Tom goes into detail about knowing himself before he can understand his study fully. He says that he didn't really know himself until his 30's. He talked about how his struggles stemmed from him his inability to answer the question that we had posed earlier.

Keywords: accomplishments; checkpoints; satisfaction; self-knowledge

Subjects: Greek civilization; navigate; satisfaction

Partial Transcript: Nichole: Okay we are going to rap up our interview. Just last few comments after everything we have discussed today I am sure we only hit on a few ways your education has shaped your life. Who would you have been without the education you think? And is there anything that you would like to talk about that we have not touched on?

Tom: I will just tell one little anecdote in my earlier life that when I was in prep school, I was living with my mother and my step father that is when I wasn't in school. My father had remarried and was living in Arizona. And the end of my sophomore year, he wrote that Betty and I, his wife's name was Betty, would like you to come live with us. And go to school in Arizona. They have good high schools here and I think you will be fine. And, that was a very attractive offer to me because things at home were very scattered and scary. And so, I took counsel with someone at Kent who was the Chaplin and I gave him my dilemma, should I stay with my mother or live with my father. He said well, I believe you should go live with your father. So I decided I would go live with my father. I had a plane ticket, but the night before I was supposed to leave my mother, who had been previously very stoic, broke down. And I realize now when I think to myself that I was at a fork in the road. If I would have gone to my fathers I would have been a very different person. I would probably not have been forced to think about school as much, I probably would have been happier in that there would not have been as much stress at home, but I probably would not have had an academic career. I don't think I would have ben a teacher. And, one of the things I would like to say is that in spite of all the things that happened to me, that if that meant I did not get to where I am today, I would not change a thing. In a certain sense, that fork in the road actually happened to me and now I look back and I am very happy that I made the decisions that I did.

Nichole: Thank you so much for interviewing with us today.

Segment Synopsis: This is the end of the interview where Tom pitches the idea of a fork in the road. He says that his was when his father asked him to live with him and his step mother. He ended up not going through with it and says that if he would have went with his father, he would have been a very different man.

Keywords: choices; education; father; home life; miscellaneous

Subjects: wrap-up