Get Out MUCH?

Each morning, Gurney Professor of English Literature Derek A. Pearsall takes a bus to work. As it winds along Mass. Ave. and through Central Square, Pearsall chats with the people he meets.

"You really see life on the bus," he says from his office on the second floor of the Barker Center. "If you are travelling in a car, you are travelling in your own social capsule."

With his British accent and shaggy gray eyebrows, Pearsall looks like the stereotypical professor of medieval English literature. In other words, he doesn't immediately seem like someone who'd leave the stacks of Widener too often.

But Pearsall says the myth that academicians are detached from everyday life is just that--a myth. He and many professors say they probably interact more with the outside community than most undergraduates do.

This interaction can take a variety of forms, whether it is spending time with family members or volunteering for community organizations. In each case, Faculty say their experiences outside the University have an impact on the scholarship and teaching they do inside it.

"It's the students who don't meet a normal number of people," Pearsall says. "They're the ones who lead a really peculiar life."

DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr. says watching movies helps him in his academic work. Many weekends, he watches four movies--one Friday night, one Saturday afternoon, one Saturday night and another on Sunday. Last weekend, he saw Living Out Loud.

In the theater, Gates says his mind relaxes enough for him to "free associate."

During one movie, he says he was inspired to write The Future of the Race, which he co-authored with Professor of Afro-American Studies Cornel R. West '74.

"The next day I called Professor West," says Gates, who also directs the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. "I'll take inspiration from wherever it comes from."

Somebody's Daddy

Across the board, professors say personal experiences help them contemplate and understand the fields they study.

"I'm somebody's daddy too," Gates says as he gets into a blue Mercedes station wagon parked outside the Barker Center. Before arriving at work, he sometimes drives his daughter to school in the car.

Gates says his daughter likes to listen to hip-hop music as he drives her to kindergarten. As a professor of Afro-American studies, he says it is important to know about black musical expression. But without his daughter, he wouldn't listen to hip-hop because he is "so old."

Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages Peter Machinist '66 also says spending time with his son, who is in seventh grade, keeps him more attuned to popular culture.

Machinist says he sometimes watches television shows such as "Saturday Night Live" or "The Simpsons," or movies such as Lethal Weapon 4 with his son.

"Eventually I will find a way to work [the movie] into the lecture," Machinist says.

From Uganda to Cambridge

According to Beth C. Conlin, program coordinator for Massachusetts Campus Compact, a coalition of colleges that are committed to service-learning, professors who are involved in their communities are better teachers.

Community service experience "grounds the material in reality and results in a more engaged class," she says.

Several Harvard professors, such as Wells Professor of Political Economy Jerry R. Green, are involved in community activities outside of Harvard.

Green says volunteering on the finance committee of a local hospital has made him more aware of how institutions respond to government incentives.

Changes in Medicare recently reduced the government's contribution to teaching hospitals, causing the hospital Green advises to decrease the amount of medical residents it hires, he says.

"The interesting thing for the economist is to see how powerful a seemingly small incentive can be," he adds.

Even if professors' experiences in the community are not as applicable to their academic research as Green's, they may still influence their teaching.

Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology William M. Gelbart says his job as a soccer referee makes him a better instructor to Harvard students.

"Learning to cope with all the bizzareness of coaches and parents...is great crowd-control training for being a lecturer in a larger course," he says.

Likewise, Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser recalls an experience he had when he was working in Uganda that affected his teaching. Hauser, whose wife was pregnant at the time, says one of the native field assistants asked him if his child would be black if she gave birth in Africa.

Hauser says the incident taught him that "people's understandings of the biology of race are not that sophisticated."

As a result of the experience, he says he tries not to make assumptions about what his students know.

A World Apart?

Professors say the degree to which non-academic life affects their work can vary.

In the sciences, for example, knowing about current movies or talking to people on the bus just may not be that useful, some say.

Machinist says some professors deal with material that is so theoretical that they may not use outside experience as much in their academic work.

"Creating sometimes involves shutting out the entire world except the world in which you're creative," he says.

Yet Klein Professor of the Classics Charles P. Segal says that particularly in the humanities, personal experience helps scholars make sense of the works they are studying.

Segal is currently writing a new translation of The Bacchae, a drama by Euripides, which he says deals with timeless human problems.

"When you're studying a past civilization, no matter what works you're working with...you're dealing with basic human experiences," he says.

The Tenure Track

Yet some professors say junior faculty members--who are under more pressure to publish and become involved in Faculty committees--can not afford to spend time on other pursuits.

Green says junior faculty should consider becoming involved with community organizations such as the one he serves on--but they shouldn't focus on it.

"For a new assistant professor this wouldn't be the first thing I would do," he says. "But on the other hand, I wouldn't wait too long either."

Jesse E. Matz, assistant professor of English, says it is difficult for junior faculty to concentrate on non-academic pursuits.

"It can be tough to do things not related to work in the early stages because you have to do a whole lot of work to establish yourself," he says. "There are certain expectations on someone like me to do what is conventional."

Matz adds that a tenured professor like Gates has more flexibility.

"[Gates has] reached that level where there is no distinction between inside and outside," Matz says. "The more important you are, the more liberty you have to integrate your work and your pleasure."

Yet Matz and other junior faculty say they don't understand why academicians are thought of as aloof.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Patricia K. Keel says she's happy with the balance between academics and other aspects of her life.

"I don't think that the pressure to publish is detracting from that balance," she says. "I'm reasonably happy with the balance right now."