Saturday, June 14, 2003
The Genius List. #033: Rev. Thomas J. Regan, S.J.
[I'm sure Regan is thrilled to have: "It sucks that he's leaving, because I heard he was going to replace APK* and bring back football. Father Regan cares about the students and interacts with them, and he was genuinely upset at the cutting of football and hockey," said Liz Collins, '05. as the lead reaction quote on his departure/legacy.]
*Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J., Fairfield University President.
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You know what Tom Regan is? Well, I had this guy for Modern Philosphy circa 1994, a course anchored by must-reads like A Sickness Unto Death, The Geneology of Morals, No Exit, and The Trial. Fun stuff. Regan's much more laid-back then a Walter Petry, but still prone to taunt, especially when his film references were largely met with blank stares, the kind of stares you only see on 19-year-olds in a morning class, not so much disinterest and/or hungoverness, but more a blankness unto death. One example I recall is a diatribe after getting no reaction to a riff he did on Shakespearean references in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.
Speaking of films, a standard late-semester wrap-up to this course was a film night at Regan's house, which was on the outskirts of the campus. The film was Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, a nifty existential expose and the subject of a published Regan essay exploring Woody's use of Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's philosophy.
When approaching the house, a memorable scene came into view: Regan, lounging on his porch, gently swirling a snifter of brandy, puffing on his trademark cigar. For a moment, everything seemed to coalesce around this man of the cloth -- the sweetness of smoldering tobacco and the whiff of liquor floating around in the crisp breeze of a New England autumn. It was classic professor imagery, something that seemed to convey "college" in the way of old novels and films.
Regan's dedication to the craft of teaching was a magnificent thing to see three times a week for a semester, and it was in this class that I constructed what, in retrospect, was a kind of primitive, handwritten blog. A percentage (like 30%?) of the final grade was determined by a journal. The content was pretty straighforward - pull some stuff from whatever we were reading that week and just riff on it. Sort it out. Dive in to, say, Sartre's "The Respectful Prostitute" and try to make some sense of it. There was a minimum number of entries that had to be completed each week, and the progress was checked from time to time throughout the semester to make sure people were not just filling pages with Phish guitar tablatures or other errant scribblings.
Needless to say, I dove in pretty hardcore. It didn't really seem like "work" to me, and, when asked by classmates how many entries I had done, I would usually have to subtract at least 15 before answering to avoid being called names. When the muse struck, I would riff. I have this journal somewhere and plan to review it, but I do recall doing an entry in which I somehow linked the antics of the mentally-handicapped son of my dad's cousin to Nietzschean notions of free will (I'm sure this had something to do with the time he rode his Big Wheel onto a N.J. highway, or maybe the time he dumped the contents of a kitchen garbage receptacle on the head of my sister.)
So anyway, when I got this thing back at the various checkpoints, Regan would write a few comments here and there ("an auspicious beginning!"), but it was unclear as to how much of this stuff he was actually reading, although he made it known that the quantity and quality of the entries was a factor in the grading. When I got back the notebook with the final grade, this was clear: the guy devoured it. Comments, exclamation points, corrections, expressions of bafflement, questions, answers, all of it. Nice. The would-be-blogger had an audience, and the question was answered: Tom Regan is an enthusiast.
posted by Linus |
3:38 PM
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