No matter how long I’ve been out of college, I always think back to it in the fall. If anything, I do it more now than I used to. It’s a special time, and you don’t realize how special until it’s been a long while ago. As someone who went to school when in-state tuition was in the hundreds of dollars per semester, I guess it’s been long enough for me to testify to that.
One of the things I think about is the debt of gratitude I owe to some of the professors I had. Picking a favorite isn’t easy. One contender would be Professor Heilig in political science, who laid out the standards she expected us to meet in our essays: “Patriotism doesn’t impress me. Anti-patriotism impresses me even less.”
But if I have to single out one, it’d be Professor Sutton, who taught History of Illinois. The phrase “a gentleman and a scholar” was made for him. You couldn’t miss his kindness and decency as well as his knowledge of and love for his field. He was also heavily involved in Christian campus activities, though I didn’t know it at the time, since I wasn’t. I can’t say how many lives he touched, but when he died a few years ago, I got an idea when I went to the funeral home for his visitation. The line of people was probably well over a hundred, of all ages.
Who were your favorite professors, and why?
