One of a kind: Professor Robert Pack can't get enough of his job
By: Luke Johnson/Montana Kaimin
One of the University of Montana's brightest, most charismatic educators is also one of its best kept secrets. Professor Robert Pack's students tend to like it that way.
"I'm from Seattle and I had second thoughts about coming to this school ... But Bob defines why I'm here," says Pack protégé JessAnn Smith. "He's the little gem you find in a small place like this. The diamond in the rough."
Pack, who will celebrate his 75th birthday in May, is now in his sixth year of teaching English and honors college courses at UM. This is his 49th year of teaching at the college level.
"Next year will be a big year for me," Pack beams. "And I want a big party." Pack says that he probably won't call it quits after 50 years of teaching, but will instead start working on the next 50. And why wouldn't he? Throughout all of his years of teaching he has never once taken a sick day.
"Every morning I open the New York Times to the obituary section," Pack
jokes. "If I'm not in there then I must be alive, so I must be due in the classroom."
Pack refuses to miss class because he takes so much away from his interaction with students. He says that the biggest thrills of his life come from students' responses to his unique teaching method.
"I've always enjoyed teaching class," Pack says. "For me, it will always be fun and stimulating. And after a good class discussion, I always feel exhilarated."
A class instructed by Pack is a kind of community monologue, guided, but not dictated by its leader. Rather, he thrives off of and seeks out the involvement of every student in the room. He sets the thought process in motion and then calls on each of his pupils to build up its momentum. Except just when the student thinks that Pack is going to provide final analysis of the argument, he steps aside and leaves what one might now call his "peers" to decide for themselves.
"Every time he has a conversation, he's not just giving a lesson, he's reliving the joy and euphoria of discovery himself," Smith says.
Although Smith says her views sometimes clash with Pack's, she feels through his prompting, she learns more about herself.
"He makes me think in ways that challenge my own internal beliefs," Smith says. "If my mind is a rubber band, then he's stretched it twice as far as its ever been stretched."
At the front of his classroom, the diminutive Pack often hunches over in his chair, almost into a ball, causing his physical appearance to be all the more unobtrusive. Yet the sound of Pack's powerful, built-in-The-Bronx, voice betrays his stature. His s's seem to hiss. When Pack says the word 'Shakespeare' it sounds almost like "Sshhakesspea."
In fact, upon first impression Pack's words may seem to carry that brazen New York attitude of nonchalance. But this feeling, too, will quickly be betrayed by Pack's speech, as his bold and boisterous conversational points nearly always melt away into tender, vulnerable ones.
"He's got that East Coast attitude, that sort of in-your-face way about him," says former Pack student Bridget Riley. "But yet he's also one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. He has got so much stored away in that head of his and is always more than happy to share it."
Robert Pack was born in New York City in 1929. He grew up in The Bronx, where his father worked as both an assemblyman and a New York state senator, serving much of his time in office under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Pack fondly remembers the day his father brought him before the New York Senate when he was 13 years old.
"He took me to a session of the Senate and he arranged for me to sit up on the podium with the chair," says Pack.
Pack used the Chairman's gavel to call the senators to order and to his surprise, the Senate was discussing an anti-vivisection bill, a topic he felt strongly about. Pack leaned over to the chair of the Senate and begged to address the Senate on the subject.
"I made a great impassioned plea that we should be kind and loving to animals and I got thunderous applause from the whole house," Pack says with a laugh.
"It was the culmination of my political life, so I'll always remember that.
His father Walter, died at just 46 when Pack was 16. Pack's family moved to a different neighborhood after his father's death and he began attending a prestigious private school called Fielston School. For Pack, it was a time of both great joy and sadness.
"[Fielston] was a wonderful, wonderful school," Pack said. "I have some
glorious memories, athletic achievements, the baseball field and the football field and it was a happy time for me, in terms of school. But it was a horrid time for the family, because my father had died and we were on our own without our father."
Pack loved sports growing up, a love that continues today. He was the captain of his school's baseball team and played both ways for the football team. He still gets together every now and then with his old friends from the football team to "share those glorious and heroic stories."
His school's football cheer went: Strong as an eagle, fierce as a vulture. Rah! Rah! Rah! Ethical Culture!
"That gives you an idea of the kind of school we were," says Pack. "One of the things that it stressed was service and caring for others. And I think part of my attitude towards being a teacher, is that a teacher is there first of all to help young people and to care about them. I think that attitude was formed back there and became a permanent part of my character."
After high school, Pack moved on to get his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth, where he got to know poet Robert Frost on a personal level.
"I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and Frost just came around regularly for visits," Pack said. "He would sit down and have little informal chats, mainly with the creative writers. He liked meeting with the young writers. I immediately just kind of hit it off with him and so I did have some personal conversations with him."
Pack remembers a fellow student question Frost on his poems.
"Someone in my presence asked Frost, very skeptically, 'Is there really anything behind these poems? What I like about them is that they just are what they are,'" Pack remembers. "And Frost says, 'My poems, they're tricky. Very tricky. You've got to look behind what I say.'"
Pack went on to graduate school at Columbia. While working on his degree, Pack began his career teaching at the New School in New York, where he taught for two years. He took a year off of teaching after being chosen for a Fullbright fellowship in Italy, where he published his first book of poetry,
"The Irony of Joy."
After his fellowship, he accepted an offer to teach at Bartnet College where he stayed until 1963. He married his wife, Patty, in 1961. In 1964 Robert and Patty both accepted teaching posts at Middlebury College, where Robert would teach for 34 years and build a name for himself as a keen writer and professor.
"He's a great teacher, a kind of legendary teacher here," says longtime
friend and Middlebury professor Stanley Bates. "People heard about his
reputation and fought hard to get in his classes."
At Middlebury, Pack was named the director of the esteemed Bread Loaf Writers Conference, which he ran for 22 years. Pack considers leading the conference, which paired youthful and senior writers, to be one of his most considerable accomplishments.
As the Packs grew closer to retirement age, their eldest son, Cale, moved to Montana and began trying to persuade them to move out as well.
"So finally, we bought some land up in Condon, the mountains," Pack says. "And we thought that we would build a summer cabin and just come out here summers and for some crazy reason when we were about to make those life arrangements, we decided, what the hell? Let's just come out here and do something entirely new. New place, new people."
After the move in 1998, Pack began teaching at the University of Montana under the assumption that he would work only part-time, which he did for two years.
"Being in effect on retirement, or teaching part-time ? whatever you want to call it ? for two painful years seemed to be long in enough for me, so I decided I needed to go back to full-time," Pack says.
He has been back on the grind teaching full-time ever since.
Pack says that he draws a lot of his strength to teach and write from Patty.
"The richest thing that happens in our lifetime comes from intimate
relationships with others," Pack says. "My marriage to me is the perfect example of that."
He and his wife have three children and anxiously await grandchildren.
"I'm extremely eager," he says with a smile. "I have some genes of my own that I am very pleased with that did not get passed to my children and I'm hoping that they will appear in the grandchildren. One of them is my opera loving gene, which I hope will show up in the grandchild, and the other is the being a fan of the Boston Red Sox gene. That's an important one."
Patty says she spends most of her time these days gardening, taking care of the couple's cats and helping her husband work on his books.
Over the years, Pack has penned 18 volumes of poetry. He was recently
described as "one of America's most distinguished poets," by renowned writer and critic Mark Strand. His latest volume, "Elk in Winter," will hit bookstores soon. He has also written four books of literary critique and has two more books that he says are very close to being completed.
"Recently, he's been on this amazing prolific period," Patty says. "These ideas keep coming to him quickly."
One of the books Pack is almost done with is a collection of monologues that stand alone, spoken by made-up characters, that Pack bounces ideas off with Patty. The other book he's working on deals with Pack's favorite figure by far, Shakespeare. The book will examine whether or not Shakespeare's characters can break free of their own biological natures and also the need of his characters to question who will tell their story at the end of the play.
Patty says that her husband spends most of his time in his study, listening to classical music, reading one of the countless books that line his walls from ceiling to floor, or working in front of his computer.
"We have eight cats," Patty says. "One of them, Java, is his muse. She sits with him on his computer while he writes. She's a constant companion."
Pack says he is tickled with his new home in the mountains and his new life in Montana.
"I love Montana," Pack says. "I love teaching out here. I've been delighted with my colleagues, with my students."
In the classroom, Pack often strays from the straight line many professors seem to live by.
"One thing I like about him is that he doesn't just stick to the subject,"
says Pack student Dan Berkner. "He's not afraid to let the discussion take natural deviations ... He's always trying to make that connection between the text and the world outside the text."
Pack is never more than a step or two away from quoting Frost or Wordsworth, or alluding to the genius of Mozart.
"I think Shakespeare was above and beyond everybody else," Pack says. "His psychological understanding of human nature is unsurpassed by everyone else and the mythic structure and design of the plays is also so expressive and powerful that when you put that together, you have someone who expresses most powerfully the human condition."
Pack also tends to hit on the same broad subjects. He practically begs
students to try to understand their unconscious minds, to deal with the
darker side of humanity, to understand sexuality.
He is celebrated for bringing science, whether it be physics, astrophysics, biology or evolution into the English classroom.
Pack likes to shake up his students, loves to play the devil's advocate.
"Sometimes I'll say something and it's not quite right," he says. "And the student temptation is to take it because the teacher is an authority. So a little suspicion of authority is a good thing for students to cultivate."
Although Pack is so intelligent that he could easily blow some of his
students out of the water or ridicule them if they come up with a wrong
answer, he never does.
"Students are young people, they're vulnerable," he says. "And you're here to help them and not to put them down. I know professors who bully their students or humiliate them, or discourage them from speaking. I think that is horrible. I'm really revolted by that kind of teaching. It's our job to encourage, support and to bring out in the student whatever talents are in there already. And I really take teaching to be a holy activity. You've just, you just have to care about young people."
Pack cares about young people and young people certainly care about him. Outside of his office door, students are more often than not lined up one or two deep.
On this day he speaks with a student he has known for a few years. They converse about her poetry and she returns some books. Next in line is a student in Pack's freshman lecture class, who is noticeably nervous about her first one-on-one meeting with the professor.
She is struggling with an assignment for Pack's class, which was to create an imaginary dialogue between Job and Abraham. As with all of his students, Pack went out of his way to make her feel comfortable. Eventually Pack has her acting the part of Abraham, while he plays Job.
"I haven't had many small classes with her yet, but this is a kind of breakthrough," Pack says after she leaves. "Did you notice? "Very somber look when she came in, a great big smile on her way out. See, that's wonderful."
How does it feel for Pack to know that so many students love and care about him?
"It feels wonderful," Pack says. "There is no better feeling, no better feeling. I mean it feels good enough to make life meaningful for me."
Tears begin to take shape his eyes, as a broad smile sweeps across his face. A man of profound words is left speechless.
"This makes me happy," he finally adds.
And there's the little boy! He's never far from the surface. He's in that smile. In those simple words.
There's the captain of the baseball team. The kid who played both ways on the championship football team. The feisty, bright little kid from The Bronx. The kid who learned to care for others and never stopped. His body may fade, but his spark never will.
He remains young, alive by teaching the young about life.
Tamaracks
A poem by Robert Pack
Now comes the turning of the tamaracks,
The only evergreen to lose its needle-leaves,
From yellow-gold to gold to golden bronze
And their reflections which the lake retrieves.
And I am wondering if pleasure from the past,
Which soon of course these sights will be,
Brings sadness in the knowledge that they're gone
Or restoration in their memory.
Do I see what is there as there? Or is
My sense of modulating light so strong
That gold already now seems bronze,
And even naming bronze as bronze seems wrong.
Yet there they are, I see them in their glow;
I see them doubled in the lake
As if my eyes, unlike my shifting mind,
Are of this world and won't make the mistake
Of losing touch with happiness
By asking of trees what they cannot give ?
Gold meaning or gold permanence ?
But only live as ghostly colors live.
