What great teaching is.

What Great Teaching Is

JOHN C. ADAMS, late professor of European history at Dartmouth College, did not publish much. He wrote a few articles, and just one--fascinating--book: Flight in Winter, the story of the bitter retreat of the Serbian army through the mountains of Albania in the winter of 1915. But his lectures were Events. Students often asked him to hold them on big weekends, like Winter Carnival, so they could bring their dates. His lecture on the beginning of the First World War riveted a hall of two hundred irreverent undergraduates, leaving them silent and in awe. In 1966, Esquire magazine recognized him as Dartmouth's champion teacher, one of the ten best in the nation.

But J. C. Adams was no mere classroom entertainer. He hacked a way through the brambles of diplomatic history, through the wars and treaties and evanescent foreign ministers, out into the light of causality, of insight into why the things that shaped our world happened as they did. Facts were the starting point, and woe betide the student who misspelled the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji. But the facts led onward to understanding, to trails of logic and causation, to how the fatal decisions in St. Petersburg and Vienna in the summer of 1914 were shaped by the Crimean War and the Bosnian annexation crisis. He gave his students what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefuhl for diplomacy, an ability to sense how it worked. The gift itself is rare; the ability to transmit it to others was perhaps uniquely his.

I did not know J. C. Adams well. I think no student did. After I had graduated and he had retired, we met for lunch at the Hanover Inn whenever I was in town. He was no less reserved, or less brilliant, there than in his lectures. No student would ever have thought of calling him by his first name. He was always Professor Adams. But those same students he held always at arm's length were what he lived for.

With his death, something is lost to us, for a while, which we will not find again here.