Ed Black: A Personal Reflection

Ed Black was an extraordinary teacher, scholar, and mentor. No single person has had—indeed continues to have—so indelible an impact on my teaching, graduate and undergraduate, or on my writing. For Ed Black rhetoric, spoken and written, was a performing art, and public speaking—just about the only undergraduate course we TAs taught at the University of Pittsburgh back in 1964—was an activity worthy of intelligent and sustained reflection. Before coming to study with Ed, I had been conflicted about whether to pursue graduate work in divinity, history or, as it was called back then, "Speech." When I first heard Ed effortlessly form words into memorable sentences and observed how he moved and commanded by his mindful presence, I gained a certitude I had not found in my other career options.

Though occasionally austere, Ed was also very personable. As I was about to teach my very first class, Ed happened down the hall by the room in the Cathedral of Learning, where I was nervously waiting for the previous class to leave. In a spirit mixing compassion with glee, Ed glanced at me, sized up my trepidation, came over and said: "Be bold! Anything you could tell them would be news." Out of context his comment may sound dismissive of the students; in context, he gave a TA he scarcely knew a timely jolt of high-voltage reassurance that his resources were more than adequate to the occasion. I have used his rationale for the basic course without alteration for four decades: "The aim of this course is not to make you eloquent but to enable you to get up and give something recognizable as a public speech without embarrassment to yourself or to your ideas."

As a student I cannot say I feared Ed Black, but I did stand in awe of him. He exuded a mystique that set him apart from any teacher I had ever had—and indeed from anyone I have ever known. It was not merely that Black was an intellectual—though he certainly was—it was the way he performed the role. Everything he said seemed saturated with style, and yet the style was always integral to the subject and business at hand. Because of the innovative cast of Black's mind (and owing to the fact that everything he said was news to me), I never failed to leave his presence without finding my perspective altered. These alterations were at once discouraging and encouraging. They were discouraging because they left me little in the way of a stable framework from which to operate and had the additional drawback of leaving me unable to state what I had learned. They were encouraging in that I believed my encounters with him were improving my mind—though I could not say that my early course work provided any evidence. In my first seminar with Black, I got a B. Though I have long since suppressed any memory of my first topics, my general problem, in addition to compensating for a very uneven undergraduate education, was my tendency to write reports rather than analyses.

My big breakthrough came when Black had the generosity to give me an Incomplete in my second seminar with him. Drawing on a good experience I had in an upper-division European history course I had taken at Portland State College, I hit on the idea of writing something on Edmund Burke. The choice seemed happy because at last I had a subject matter. (I have to add that I never had the least sympathy for—and only the slightest comprehension of—Black's desire, expressed repeatedly in my early graduate years, "to write on absolutely nothing." I think, in this regard, that I and John Henry Newman, whom intellectually I met through Black and who became a kind of ghostly mentor to me, were far less spiritual than Ed himself. Compared to him, John Henry Newman, Mike McGee, and John Campbell are equally and indifferently materialists. But I digress.) Beyond its concreteness, Edmund Burke and the French Revolution engaged me as a topic. From both my...