Columbia University

Columbia University is the setting for William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s move from itinerant academic celebrity to an unusually secure professorship—and for the classroom breakdown that threatens his ability to teach. Its luxury and professional prestige provide a striking contrast to the vulnerability he experiences before his students: at Columbia, the celebrated scholar can find himself unable to say a word, then later recover his voice by beginning a lecture in the hallway.

Appointment and Setting

Not long after his son’s first dog was buried, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. received an offer of a full professorship from Columbia University and accepted it. He was already a famous scholar, but had grown weary of the distinguished visiting-professor appointments that had shaped his son’s childhood and early adolescence. The Columbia offer promised a more settled life, something his wife had been urging him to seek.

The appointment was lavish by the standards of the late 1960s. Columbia offered him a luxurious apartment within easy walking distance of campus and subsidized part of its cost; his salary was described as unheard of for the period. His responsibilities were correspondingly light in the classroom. He was the nominal editor of a prestigious scholarly magazine and directed a special library collection, while a research assistant handled many of his duties, including grading the papers for his single undergraduate class each year. Devereaux graded the small graduate seminar himself, though the account leaves uncertain how closely he read those papers.

Columbia had recruited a scholar with five distinguished books of literary criticism, including one on politics and the novel that became widely visible as a fashionable work even among people who had not found time to read it. His real institutional task was to continue producing books of that kind, acknowledge the university’s support, and ensure that later editions of earlier books identified his prestigious Columbia chair. The arrangement made the sudden failure of his teaching all the more jarring: he had arrived with status and resources, but could not reliably perform even the limited classroom work expected of him.

The Classroom Breakdown

In September, at his first class, Devereaux read the student names from the roster and opened his mouth to give a lecture he had delivered many times before. His mind went blank. The account distinguishes this from forgetting the material: he knew what he intended to say, but could not produce a pertinent syllable. Panic drove him into the hallway for water, where the lecture returned intact. He wrote its opening sentences on a brown paper towel from a men’s-room dispenser as a precaution, then returned to the classroom. But the words on the towel seemed scrambled; even the letters stopped making sense to him. He had to plead illness, cancel class, and ask the students to return on Thursday.

The difficulty persisted through the rest of September and most of October. Devereaux began writing out every lecture in advance, but the same failure followed the roll call. When it came, he handed the lectern to his research assistant, who read the prepared lecture while Devereaux waited outside, sick with fear and humiliation. Listening from the hall, he heard the assistant’s wavering delivery and skewed emphasis. The episode taught him, more acutely than before, that delivering information was not the same as teaching it: removed from his own authoritative presence, even his most prized observations seemed less profound. He considered resigning and could imagine explaining the problem to the dean; it was the students, not the dean, to whom he could no longer speak.

The Hallway as a Threshold

Devereaux’s first success came when he stopped at the threshold rather than trying to begin from behind the lectern. Entering class from the hallway, he started speaking before crossing into the room and continued as he went in. The lecture concerned Charles Dickens, whom he disliked for sentimentality and a lack of dramatic subtlety. His coolly urbane attack gathered force as he spoke in his own strong voice. Then, in an unplanned burst of theatricality, he read Jo’s death scene from Bleak House to comic effect. The class ended up on the floor laughing, rose, and gave him a standing ovation.

The next class showed that the recovery was not simply a permanent return to normal. Halfway through roll call, Devereaux felt dread returning. He excused himself in the middle of the M’s, went into the hall, began his David Copperfield lecture there, and crossed back into the room mid-sentence. He spoke about Dickens’s treatment of poor children and the blacking factory, keeping his gaze on a point high in the seminar-room windows rather than on the students’ expectant faces. Inwardly, he marveled that the remedy might be so simple: he needed not to take roll or look directly at the class.

Institutional and Narrative Significance

The department’s reaction makes Columbia more than a prestigious backdrop. News of the Bleak House lecture travelled through a department whose patience had begun to wear thin. Its members had imagined they were hiring a cleanup hitter, yet had discovered that the famous scholar seemed unable to teach at all. The account presents the standing ovation as a reversal in their judgment, but the renewed fear during the next roll call keeps that reversal from becoming a tidy cure.

The son’s newspaper account also shapes the meaning of the episode. After readers asked for more stories about his father, he resumes the story of Devereaux’s life, changing the emphasis from a dead dog and a son’s recollection to a father’s professional crisis and recovery. The column ends by presenting the problem as evidence that complex difficulties may have simple solutions if people remain open-minded. That reassuring conclusion sits beside the less easily resolved details: Devereaux’s panic, the humiliating weeks in which his assistant spoke for him, and the fact that the change depended on how he entered a room and where he directed his gaze. Columbia is therefore both the place of his prestigious new beginning and the stage on which the limits of prestige become visible.