A Dry Wit

Our chosen school is pretty big on tradition. Every year, graduating Febs ski down the Snow Bowl in their gowns. Every year, when springtime hits full bloom the Adirondack chairs come out. Every year, the homecoming football game tailgate blows up, DKE throws a righteous party and everybody wins.

But one of the best traditions of all takes place in the classroom: every year, Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry teaches classrooms full of jaw-dropped students, aweing them with his erudition and the sheer vastness of his intellect. Murray Dry is one of the things that makes Middlebury so special, and it’s worthwhile to think about why his presence is so valuable.

I am currently taking my first Dry course: Modern Political Philosophy. We read Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Locke, Marx – all the goodies. Many of these books I had considered reading in my free time or even attempted to delve into, mostly without success. But reading them in a class with Murray Dry there to dive headfirst into all the intricacies, to untangle all the intellectual knots in their thought and explore the deeper questions they bring to bear is a completely invaluable experience.

The man is a teacher par excellence. He’s been teaching at Middlebury since 1968, and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science since 1994. His curriculum vitae is 15 pages long, for Pete’s sake. Let me put it this way: when my mother came to Middlebury in 1974, Dry was already an institution. She took his class on Constitutional Law and he was the reason she went to law school.

On the first day of class, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had been told by a number of grizzled Dry veterans that I needed to be on my toes: Murray Dry teaches using the Socratic Method. He doesn’t wait for hands – he picks students out of the crowd to call on. Not “what year did Columbus sail the ocean blue” but “Mr. Cunningham, how does Montesquieu’s notion of virtue contrast with that of Machiavelli?”

You better do every page of reading for a Dry class, because if he catches you with your pants down and the reading undone, your shame will be very public and your justice swiftly dealt.

There are classes where kids don’t care about the reading, where not having done the homework is a badge of honor, a designator of too-cool-for-school-ness. None of those classes are taught by Murray Dry.

He yells, screams, laughs uproariously and makes you think. But most importantly, Dry somehow makes you care. It’s not about his formidable resume or his professorial looks (the chalk-stained tweed jacket is exactly how I pictured my college professors looking) – it’s the man’s passion for the material he teaches. He cares so incredibly much about this stuff that it’s plain impossible not to get wrapped up in it yourself. He cares more about Montesquieu than I cared when the Denver Nuggets got knocked out of the playoffs recently and more than a tearful Terrell Owens cared when the press went after Tony Romo, his quarterback.

We have an elderly auditor in our class, Jack Goodman. He has audited Dry classes for 12 years now, and the other day he told me a story that captures the essence of what I’m getting at: last year, he went to Dry’s office a little over an hour before a class and found an unkempt Dry deep in the day’s reading, his desk piled with books underlined in and scribbled on so many times in so many different colors of ink it looked more like a handwritten manuscript than a canon of literature. He was met with a terse reply when he asked how Dry was “can’t talk, I need to prepare for this class.”

After more than 40 years of teaching, reading the same book for the umpteenth time, Murray Dry didn’t have a minute to spare because his priority was preparing for class. Not researching, not private studies, but teaching.

I have had more fun reading Montesquieu with Murray Dry than I have hiking, than I have partying, than I have eating hard-earned Grille food at 1:57 a.m. on a Saturday night. Somehow your pride gets wrapped up in the work, and when Dry asks some absurd question you want to know the answer, you need to, because on some level you know that you’re never going to get as much intellectual stimulation from anything as you’re getting from the Doctor Dry.

We all go to Middlebury. Simply by getting accepted into this stupidly difficult school, we have established that we are go-getters. We solve problems. We accept challenges and we defeat them.

So I say now to every first-year, just as my mother said to me on Day 1: take a Murray Dry course. We came here to learn, so learn from the best.