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Phil Haslanger: Prof's 'secret' making dreams come true

Phil Haslanger  —  8/20/2008 10:27 am

Randy Pausch, a brilliant 47-year-old computer science professor who died last month from cancer, achieved spectacular fame in the nine months before his death with a lecture at his university that turned into an Internet sensation and a bestselling book.

Like Pausch, who earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University before becoming a professor there, Earl Madary was an alumnus of the college where he ultimately became a professor -- Viterbo University in La Crosse. Like Pausch, he died in his 40s of cancer. Like Pausch, he had a huge impact on his students and on the institution of higher learning where he taught. Unlike Pausch, he is not a nationally known figure.

Both Pausch and Madary left behind powerful lessons about the critical importance of teachers in shaping our world. So in this season when the pace is picking up for the opening of another school year, go back with me for a moment to two college commencement ceremonies last May.

At Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, the audience cheered as Randy Pausch came to the podium. He had given what became known as "The Last Lecture" the previous September and it had become a phenomenon on YouTube (now having garnered some 6.2 million views). He was supposed to be dead by this May 18 commencement ceremony, but he had outlived his prognosis. He looked older, weaker, but had lost none of his feisty spirit as he offered the charge to the graduates.

"We don't beat the reaper by living longer," Pausch said in response to those who were amazed that he seemed to be outrunning the grim reaper. "We beat the reaper by living well and living fully."

Both Pausch and Madary did that, and their joy for life is part of what made their teaching so all-encompassing for their students. They not only taught academics. They taught life.

Madary did not make it to the Viterbo commencement last May 10, but his spirit pervaded the convention center in downtown La Crosse. My son was one of the graduates and he, like so many in the room that day, had been profoundly affected by Madary's life and death. One of the speakers started crying as he invoked the young professor's memory.

For Madary, death from cancer came at age 42 last Dec. 16. He was the chair of the religious studies and philosophy departments at Viterbo, a musician, a teacher who would sit in a canoe on the water to give his lectures on environmental spirituality.

"He's able to see potential in people long before any of us see it in ourselves," Emily Dykman, a former student who now teaches at Viterbo, told the La Crosse Tribune on the day after Madary died.

Pausch put it a little differently, but it really was in the same zone. "It's a thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams," Pausch said, "but as you get older, you find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun."

That really is the essence of teaching. Seeing the potential in others and then helping them achieve their dreams.

Pausch spent a lot of time in his lecture and in his book on his own childhood dreams and how he had achieved them. The achievement was not always literal.

He never got to be Capt. Kirk of "Star Trek," for instance, but he worked with his students in his virtual reality lab at Carnegie Mellon to build a world that was like the bridge of Kirk's Starship Enterprise. That was because William Shatner, the actor who played Kirk, visited the lab when Pausch was writing a book on how the science of "Star Trek" foreshadowed some of today's technology. So Pausch got to meet Captain Kirk and got to "be" him by living out the lessons in leadership he had absorbed by watching his hero guide the starship's crew.

As much fun as Pausch had with his own dreams, though, you can see him light up during his lecture as he talks about the dreams of his students and how he helped them achieve those dreams.

Madary also talked about that in a lecture he gave in May 2006 after he had been named teacher of the year at Viterbo.

"I wonder if you know how much we care about you and your learning," Madary wondered aloud to the students listening to his lecture. "How our hearts break when you are lost and how much joy we feel for you at your success."

And Madary knew well the dreams he and so many other teachers carry into the classroom.

He put it this way: "A dream was born in us that a well crafted sentence and reasoned argument could cause the mob to drop their stones ... that songs must be sung in the dark to remember light ... that great stories are told and danced to help us become human."

Madary went on to talk about the dream "that we must be with those who suffer and journey with them wherever their pain may take them that we could travel over the wastelands of despair and war and finally become the great city on the hill that this republic will one day be worthy of the dreams that gave it form and being."

And then he drew on his own religious values to invoke the dream "that every human person is by some unimaginable grace the living image of an infinite love that is God and therefore no human is ever unnatural or disordered in very essence that we might find in the end the power to forgive and more miraculously allow ourselves to be forgiven."

The voices of Randy Pausch and Earl Madary will not be heard in the classrooms of Carnegie Mellon and Viterbo this fall, but their spirit will live on in so many other teachers who embrace the joy of life, the thrill of their own dreams and the satisfaction of helping others.

Phil Haslanger is a minister in the United Church of Christ who writes this column every other week as well as a blog on the Cap Times Web site.

Phil Haslanger  —  8/20/2008 10:27 am