An Interview with Prof. Robert Ganz, who delivers an honorary ‘Last Lecture’ Friday

Prof. Ganz enjoying time outside of the English Department

I’m retiring, as it happens, at a stage in my life when I’ve been particularly enjoying teaching and preparing for my classes. Thanks to humanities department, I’ve been able, during the past twenty or so years, to teach a lot of new-to-me works spread out over the whole gamut of the Western canon. I’ve not been confined to works by English speakers nor, for that matter, just to literary works. I will also miss the opportunity to consult with my colleagues on matters of mutual interest. I hope that the humanities program will be revived. It’s been the case for some time now that these courses have only been taught when I or someone else has persuaded a dean to let us do so. These humanities courses have always been over-subscribed and I have found the students to be for the most part very enthusiastic.

Students now are different from the ones I started with in the early sixties. In those days they were better prepared. I could count on them to have read certain things in advance of coming into my course. But today’s students are still card-carrying members of homo sapiens; hence have the same intellectual curiosity that I have and the same sense of likeness and of how to use it.

I’ve had wonderful students including Ann Romines, Patti Griffith and Faye Moskowitz, who are now members of our department. Others who have gone into the profession include Al Nielsen and Richard Flynn. Patrick Prentice, who was in my first class at GW, has gone on to success as a film-maker with more than three hundred works to his credit. Another early student, the late Sarah Jewler, ran New York Magazine. Still another, early student was Judith Hermanson Ogilvie, who has had a career in foreign affairs and has just been appointed by Northern Illinois University as the founding director of a center for non-profits which draws on “real world ” experience and offers an interdisciplinary degree. My apologies to those other equally worthy former students whom I have failed to mention during this off-the-top-of-my-head improvisation.

I’m only retiring because, at going-on 86, I think I should be setting my own lands in order outside of academia before I lose the capacity to do that. Recently, I’ve been concentrating my focus on the last slightly more than two centuries and taken that to be one period. Perhaps my favorite of all periods is the Baroque, though I have no special expertise in it. But it’s certainly been a wonderful couple of decades of self-education, aided and abetted by the opportunity to pursue this activity in close collaboration with others: my students.