As I prepare to go back to school for the first time since the 1990s – like Oasis, I have returned – I want to take a moment to acknowledge the recent passing of someone from my first student experience.
As an undergraduate in the 1990s, I had the honour of having Peter Reddaway for a professor of international affairs, focused on the post-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which was of course the subject of my first degree and first career.
Teaching was Professor Reddaway’s last career, and the only one I knew him for: which is to say, as an ever-so English scholarly gentleman, meek, unfussed and unflappable. His obituaries (here, here, and here) tell the story of his far more adventurous early life and career, working behind the Iron Curtain with Soviet dissidents, for which he was ultimately expelled and declared persona non grata.
The same deep moral convictions which caused him to risk life and limb later caused him to co-found Index on Censorship, an organisation whose delightful staff I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with many times.
I don’t think those convictions were obvious to me, as an undergraduate just getting through my day-to-day life. That’s because Professor Reddaway didn’t wear his convictions on his sleeves (and my god did that man have a particularly questionable choice of suit). He didn’t have tattoos or t-shirts or laptop stickers. His office didn’t have banners or pamphlets. You’d never see him at a protest rally. His convictions came from somewhere deep and quiet, and motivated every action he ever took. He was his convictions.
As a professor, Professor Reddaway’s teaching style perfectly met my best learning style. He was the kind of teacher who would assign shedloads of reading materials in advance, requiring many trips to the library stacks to dig through all sorts of rabbit holes. He would then conduct the class as a gently challenging discussion about what we had read. He was constructively provocative, as good professors should be, always nudging you to gain full mastery of what you had read. He knew that words are never what is merely said on a page: he wanted you to read between the lines, and understand the full political, historical, and social context that had shaped every word.
In short, he was training us to enter the real world, and do our jobs as we needed to do them. Over twenty-five years later, the subject material I work with has changed unrecognisably, but that foundation still stands.
After learning of his passing, I pulled out my coffee-stained course materials from the mouldy binder where they’ve been since the turn of the millennium. I thought that his idea of a final exam would make an amusing exercise for some of my readers, especially since what is old is new again. Click for full size.
For what it’s worth I got an A-, as it should be: yes, you’re good, but always there’s one little thing you could have done better.
We did not keep in touch, nor would he have remembered me – I was, after all, just a mousy undergraduate Scully clone, the same as several hundred other young women on campus. My class contributions were no better or worse than anyone else’s.
But when I was reading that final exam again, noting which questions he had asked as well as how he had formed them, I couldn’t help but smile and think to myself:
“oh. That’s where I get it from.”
Cheers, Peter.
