Profile
Harry Rusche
Among the Classics
by David Raney
It’s all about teaching for Harry Rusche. He’s a Renaissance scholar and accomplished writing teacher, with influential websites and articles to his credit and decades of service to Emory. But teaching is what drives him.
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Harry Rusche |
It’s not for nothing that Rusche received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987 and has held the Arthur M. Blank Distinguished Teaching Professorship since 1992. He’s always spent much of his energy instilling in undergraduates his love for the art of literature, the craft of writing. And the effects are long-lasting.
Rick Brown took a class from Rusche in the fall of 1962, the first semester that either spent at Emory, and they still keep in touch. Now an attorney and non-profit board chair, Brown started out “premed, but I chose to major in English. He opened new worlds of interest to me and helped unleash communications talents I didn’t know I had.”
“Dr. Rusche is the kind of professor you dream of having as an incoming freshman,” says Andy Shoenig, a senior majoring in German studies and history. “You want someone with a sincere interest in his own passions but also in the passions of his students. And with Blackboard, iMovie, and classroom blogs, he pushes students to collaborate and present their ideas in new ways.”
“By far the best professor I’ve had in college,” agrees senior Jared Thoma. For a final project in Rusche’s poetry seminar, Thoma and Shoenig gathered famous speeches from Shakespeare, Whitman and others and filmed them being declaimed, first in Dead Poets Society mode by game strangers “standing on things,” then by Thoma and Shoenig themselves wearing kilts but no shirts in 30-degree weather, lathered in blue Braveheart war paint.
The aim was “an emotional powerhouse of words,” Shoenig explains. And though “I wasn’t even on camera,” he says, “I knew Dr. Rusche would understand why I had to dress up too. It was poetry.”
So how do you get 18-year-olds excited about poetry and plays—or anything created centuries before YouTube? Good teachers find ways, and the best always look to improve. The method in Rusche’s madness is a combination of oldand new-school, high- and low-tech.
“He provides an environment that embraces creativity,” says Thomson Halley, a nursing student who took a Rusche poetry class in 2005. “Some days we would be reading Longfellow, others we’d be listening to Blackalicious.” A class might equally feature slam poetry and John Ashbery, Andrew Marvell and homemade rap. “He gave us a taste of everything,” Halley says. “I never knew what he had in store, but I was always excited.”
The perpetual new, in the wrong hands, can be a fetish or gimmick. But fresh material for Rusche doesn’t replace the classics; it frames and updates them. So while Hamlet and Macbeth grapple with wickedness, not wikis—computer programs that let students create web pages and cross-link and comment in an expanding conversation—Rusche doesn’t consider the wiki an anachronism in a Shakespeare class. He says wikis can help students think their way through a play’s enduring questions and imagine themselves into the melancholy Dane or the Scot who would be king.
“A lot of it is done in class,” Rusche points out, “writing on a specific question. They’re all reading each other’s work, and discussing it. I never come in and say ‘What do you think about Romeo & Juliet?’ I’ve been thinking about Romeo & Juliet for hours getting ready for class, and they just sat down. I say ‘Go to the computer, answer this question for me.’ It might take five or ten minutes, and it’s well worth it. They have things to say.”
And they say plenty. “The beauty of the wiki is they can go back if they have some confusion,” Rusche says, “and when they want to write more. Some of them revisit their essays seven, eight times.” In his most recent Shakespeare class students did “twenty-nine writing assignments in fourteen weeks, plus a final project. See, they don’t have trouble writing; they have trouble writing what we ask them to write.”
Face time is as important as screen time for Rusche, legendary for his open door and ready ear. “When I always imagined what it would be like to go to college,” says Matt Kappus 05C, “Dr. Rusche was the kind of teacher I imagined: innovative in the classroom but with time for long conversations among dusty books and piles of papers. And of course the latest Mac machine.”
Those machines have proliferated since the cyber-Stone Age of 1989, when Rusche like everyone else had to boot up with two floppy disks. Today he owns half a dozen computers. Rusche was instrumental in instituting both Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and computerassisted instruction (CAI) at Emory, the latter after a stroll across campus with Jim Johnson, then vice provost for information technology. Rusche recalls the conversation: “I said ‘Jim, I want twenty computers in a room, to teach writing.’ He said ‘What’re you going to do with them?’ And I said ‘I don’t know yet—that’s why I want them.’”
It was “a time of real excitement for me,” Rusche says, “as I rethought the ways I had been teaching writing.” A plaque in Callaway 203 now marks where the first shot was fired in Emory’s CAI revolution.
Back to the future: Rusche created, hosts and annotates the research website Shakespeare’s World, as well as a World War I site and a third linking art and poetry. Together they receive thousands of hits every year. “I wanted more of an outreach,” Rusche explains. “At least once a week now I’m in touch with some director, actor, student or researcher with a question.”
Still, before his Shakespeare classes dive into the brave new world of wiki and web, the first thing they do is “read the entire play aloud. And they keep changing parts. Then we start with the oldest productions and move up to today.”
Thus by the end of a term, students will have encountered John Garrick’s legendary eighteenth-century Hamlet, plus Sarah Bernhardt (“They’re always surprised to learn women used to play the role”) and Gielgud and Olivier and Branagh. Possibly, too, Hamlet Goes Business, a 1987 Finnish film, or Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which drops Macbeth into feudal Japan. Maybe a Maori Merchant of Venice.
“What’s interesting to me is not so much what Elizabethans saw in a Shakespeare play but what we see in it,” says Rusche. “What is it about Shakespeare that translates so easily from culture to culture? What makes a director set Macbeth in a Madagascar fishing village?”
He continues to transmit that fascination to undergraduates. And in 2003, to ensure that still more of them thrive here, Rusche established a merit scholarship for rising juniors and seniors lacking financial aid. It’s one more example of putting students first.
“I got into this profession to teach,” Rusche said years ago when offered an administrative position. And he feels exactly the same now. “I love it, I love talking to young people.”