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Final Lessons
Jonathon Wells
A Random Meeting
If there’s anything that I’ve learned from my short acquaintance with and study of Professor Ronald Dorr, it’s that clarity of language (and in this case, storytelling) is very important.
I met Dorr at a poetry reading-gone-awry, and we began talking about the university and his time here.
Entering his office that Thursday evening in Case Hall South, the sunlight was shining brightly through his topmost window, which he thankfully covered for my sake (The light glared upon the seat I would soon sit in). I saw many books sitting on the three or four cases to my left and a large desk where two Apple computers stood tall to my right.
I then began asking him about his life.
Bible Beginnings
Dorr, emeritus of MSU’s James Madison College, grew up on a farm in northern Iowa, where he resided with his parents, his twin brother, Don, and three sisters. Though his father only completed eight years of grade school and his mother high school, Dorr’s parents instilled in their family “a curiosity and delight for learning.”
Having received an undergraduate degree in History at Grinnell University in Iowa, Dorr obtained the Grinnell Travel Service Scholarship, in which he stayed in Bogotá, Colombia for 14 months. He taught at a junior college for women and began developing thoughts on what he would later do in life.
“Living in a country where Spanish is the first language, having to speak it myself in every opportunity (except in the classroom where I was teaching in English), reading it in the newspaper – if I listened to the radio or watched television – I got intrigued by language,” Dorr said.
Dorr left Bogotá to pursue a Masters degree in Inter-American history at Columbia University in New York City, though he didn’t receive it until 1966. Dorr signed up for the Peace Corps and was stationed. He taught at two separate colleges in Bogotá.
He eventually stayed in Colombia for a total of three years, teaching, and courting his future wife, Barbra. Dorr’s time there also caused him to turn his back on history, and, in 1966, begin pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
“[Being in Colombia,] I’d realized that family, the church, dancing, the bar, entertainment, were just as important as past politics,” he said.
While Dorr never dreamed that he would be an English teacher, he recalls an early love for literature and rhetoric surrounding the Christian faith. Dorr had always enjoyed the King James Version of the Bible and remembers genuinely listening to the sermons he’d heard in his youth.
“There was something about the Word of God that seemed significant to me,” he said.
He taught in the rhetoric department at the University of Minnesota during his stay and, in 1974, began his employment at the then 12-year-old James Madison College. Dorr now proudly signs his name as “professor of rhetoric.”
Blinding Irony
During our interview, I couldn’t help but notice how many books invaded his office space. I later learned that Dorr has an insatiable love of reading. He told me that in the decade that ended last year, he’s read over 700 books.
With the rigorous writing classes that Dorr taught, the professor must read and correct numerous papers from his pupils. A former student commented that there were often more notes in the margins of her paper than there were words written on the pages themselves. This task, however, has become more difficult for Dorr to accomplish as he begins to lose one of his most valuable tools for teaching – his sight.
Dorr has an incurable eye disease called Keraticonus. This causes one or both eyes to take an irregular, cone-like shapes, resulting in severe distortion of vision.
“The best [optometrist] that I ever had told me, ‘You couldn’t have chosen a worse profession for your eyes,’” Dorr said. The disease began during his time at Columbia University. It makes reading and grading papers more difficult for him, but he’s learned to adapt.
“That’s my vocation. I’m a teacher, I’m a learner, and I’m going to pass that on to people, even though I know deep in my bones a lot of the frustration and ambiguities of teaching.”
The Lessons
Ronald Dorr has many stories that he could tell you about past students and colleagues, too many to put in just one article. But I would be a poor reporter if I failed to emphasize one of the more important lessons that Dorr has lived by since childhood. His siblings, who are scattered throughout the country, could be said to have grasped it as well.
“All of us had, I think, good intellectual potential, but our parents also did some other things [to help us],” Dorr said. “They gave us a sense of vocation. What do I mean by that? I mean this in the religious sense of the term: a calling."
“You were to above all honor God. You were also to think about your talents (what were the gifts that God has given you?) and use them. My dad also, in that regard, taught me not to be threatened by the talents of others.”
Dorr says that the third thing to do is ask yourself what the need is in human society. One of his sisters saw the answer to be medically related and thus became a nurse. She is currently fighting pancreatic cancer.
“You brought those [three] together, and that was an attitude that I took to college, and I think have kept ever since,” he said.
The Legacy
There were always more questions to ask Dorr (which may be why the interview took almost two hours), but I saved one until the end. What did he want his students to leave with? What legacy was Dorr trying to build in his pupils?
He’d answered part of the question a few minutes before I posed it.
“I want students in my courses to think about the fundamental questions: Who am I? To what or to whom should I be committed? How should I live my life? What is love? What’s work for? Where does renewal fit into this?” Dorr said.
But what if there was only one thing you could leave them with? He sat silently for a moment, looking to the side as if there were something important on his desk or on the floor near him. Dorr then paraphrased a quote from the book Preparative by Sir Francis Bacon:
“The world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding, but the understanding is to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world.”
As I thought of the quote and Professor Dorr, I could only hope that such a statement would one day be true about me.
Questions? Comments? Contact Jonathon Wells at wellsjo4@msu.edu
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