Michael P. Lambert II ’68, M’69
By Michael P. Lambert II ’68, M’69
Now living in Virginia, Indiana native Michael Lambert is a Distance Education Accrediting Commission executive director emeritus and a 1998 recipient of IUP’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Here, he shares his most memorable lecture from his time at IUP.
One lecture from my college days at IUP in the mid-1960s stands out above all others. It is one that I will never forget. In fact, some 60 years later, I can still recite every word of it!
As an English major at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I had the distinct honor of being taught by an outstanding group of English professors who, in my opinion, could hold their own with any English faculty in the country.
I can assert this with some humble authority, since I labored in the vineyards of higher education accreditation for four decades, 20 years of which were as the executive director of a federally recognized accrediting body. In my career in accreditation, I participated in over 500 on-site accreditation evaluations.
It was a privilege to be able to learn from these accomplished IUP faculty men and women, although, at the time, I did not fully realize just what a terrific bargain I was getting for the minuscule tuition being charged then.
I studied such courses as Shakespeare, Faulkner, Greek Mythology, Poetry, and the full gamut of topics comprising the complete Western Civilization Canon.
But one English course above all others stands out in my memory.
It was a course on John Milton, focusing exclusively on Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost.
Paradise Lost, as every English major knows, is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet. The first version, published in 1667, consisted of 10 books with over 10,000 lines of verse.
One of the more famous lines in the poem is, “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
The professor who taught the course was Maurice Rider. He was known nationally for his best-selling travel book, This Blessed Plot, This England, which traced the locations mentioned in famous English works of literature to the area of England that the work related, e.g., Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, one of the most visited tourist buildings in England. You can still acquire a copy of this delightful book from Amazon.
At the time I studied under Dr. Rider, I believe he was in his 70s. He had a huge mane of pure white hair and a massive, Prussian-style bushy moustache.
He was charming and gentlemanly, an old-school professor who loved teaching Milton with a fire in his eyes. Not every student shared his enthusiasm for the poet.
His lectures tended to induce sleep on warm afternoons, as he would read aloud lines of the poem and then expostulate on their meaning.
Lines from Milton, like this one, would often lead to a rhapsodic soliloquy of a half hour:
“A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
I had no idea what was about to happen on the day of the most memorable lecture of my 22 years of formal education, including lectures I had heard at other higher education institutions, such as the University of Cambridge in England.
It was one of the first warm days of spring in early May. Winters in western Pennsylvania could hang on until mid-April in those days.
But this particular spring day promised to reach the 80s. The sun shone merrily in a clear, Carolina blue sky. The birds were in full-throated mating calls. The fresh smell of fauna and flora filled the classroom as all the windows were cast wide open. Our classroom was on the first floor of the now-torn-down Leonard Hall, facing the Oak Grove.
The class size was small, as there were only 12 students brave enough to tackle a tough course like Milton. We were squeezed into our elementary school-sized desks, awaiting Professor Rider. It was, for some, like awaiting the arrival of a dentist who was going to be doing a root canal on you!
The good doctor strode into the classroom with his massive load of textbooks under one arm. He looked across the front of the classroom at the open window.
Then came the best lecture that I have ever heard in my life:
“Class dismissed. The hawthorns are in bloom.”