Teacher

Jeffrey J. Williams Teacher To anyone who heard him in seminar, at the back of a lecture hall, or on the other side of a restaurant, Michael Sprinker's voice is unforgettable. A baritone with a midwestern nasal tinge that pierced through even a crowded room, his voice carried. During a lecture, he would sometimes subtly raise it, with a concordant raise of his right index finger like a conductor's baton, so you knew where the italics were. An extension of his voice, his laugh was somewhere between a hearty chuckle and a staccato cackle that was unmistakably his own. And Michael had a distinctive manner of speaking. It was both decorous and rude. He spoke with unusually precise enundation, combining an exacting, learned diction with a relish for the profane. An honors philosophy major in college, he ranged effortlessly over the knotty terrain of philosophical concepts from Aristotle to Kant to Derrida, and his phrasing was marked with literary tags, like Dickens' "in short" or Althusser's "in the last instance," and britishisms like "at university." But also an erstwhile fadory worker, he frequently parsed his favorite intensifier, "fucking," into a sentence, and was wont to begin a question, "I hate to put a turd in the punchbowl, but in the third critique Kant actually says ...." One of the distinctive if not peculiar turns of phrase that he used was calling someone "my teacher." He never said "my professor in college" or "my mentor," but pronounced "he was my teacher" with a certain formality . Some of the people that he accorded that status were Erich Heller, from whom he took classes at Northwestern, Paul de Man, with whom he took a 1979 NEH summer seminar, and Edward Said, with whom he took a 1981 NEH. It was a designation that carried his résped not for academic position but for intellectual integrity and force. When I first met him in 1985 (I was a first-year graduate student at Stony Brook), I recognized the cascade of his speaking as that of a working class "lad"—another word he liked to use—who learned many of the words through reading and school, and held onto them with a relish that those to the manor born don't appredate in quite the same way. It is not that he was uncomfortable with the words; rather, it was the payback of a smart working dass lad who has worked harder and thus knows more than anyone else, and who, with a seamless, muscular intelligence, takes possession of them and makes themhis own. There was no falseness in Michael. Although he was a Princetoney graduate (as I liked to call his alma mater, usually rewarded with a cackle), he never forgot, nor desired to forget, where he came from. Rather, he did not let the empyrean heights of academe forget. Michael never abided the discriminations of dass—and for him dass encompassed the other discriminations we experience, whether of race or gender or anything else—as evidenced by the vast range ofstudentshe had, 122 the minnesota review brown or white, men and women, with or without academic pedigree. That, probably more than any other trait, is what made him a great teacher and earned the trust and loyalty of his students. He treated people as he found them, whether the secretary at the Humanities Institute, his unpedigreed students at Stony Brook, or his colleagues. The other side of the coin was that he didn't "have time"—another of his phrases—for academic pieties and intellectual pretenders, and made it dear to them that he didn't. This did not always endear him to his colleagues or to some of those he encountered in the profession at large, and he sometimes aroused as strong antagonism as he did admiration. Michael's primary oliscrimination was who "did the work," and one of his mottos was, "at the end of the day, ifs the work that matters." He had an unabashed respect for the intellectual tradition and reserved a certain decorum for it. One sign of his sense of decorum was that, though he didn't own a suit, he always came to class...