Up Close With Robert Coles

That angry crowd some 30 years ago, and the six-year-old Ruby Bridges at the center of it, inspired a personal odyssey. For Robert Coles '50, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities, the civil rights movement introduced a moment of social reflection that continues still.

"This was the beginning of school desegregation in the South," Coles says. "I witnessed it, and I was horrified. That was the beginning of all my work."

This work, which Coles describes as his "intellectual wanderings," is a vast, multifaceted mosaic--a panorama embracing the realms of clinical research, social science fieldwork, writing and teaching.

But Coles did not plan his life to turn out this way: he describes his travels as as matter of "luck and chance."

If the Air Force had not stationed him in Mississippi, Coles would never have stumbled upon the angry mob in front of the Frantz School. If he had not met doctor-poet William Carlos Williams during his undergraduate years at Harvard, he would not have considered going to medical school. And if his parents had not read short stories and novels to one another while he was a child, Coles would not have developed a lifelong love of literature.

What those novelists write," he says, "about the ironies, the fatefulness, the chance, the circumstances that determine life, I believe it. I've lived some of it out."

Moral Reflection

Coles's field work began while he was a resident in pediatrics and child psychology during the last polio epidemic, before the development of the Salk vaccine. "It was then that I really got interested in what happens to children under stress," he says. "I was stunned by the moral reflection that I heard from these kids because a lot of them were facing paralysis and even death."

Coles's work with these children was his first effort at clinical research. This research was interrupted by his service in the military as the head of an airforce psychiatric hospital in Biloxi, Miss.

"The next thing I knew," Coles says, "I saw this little child going through a different kind of stress--social and racial stress. I was aghast, but I also was tremendously interested in finding out what was going to happen."

Coles spent six years in the South working through the civil rights movement to initiate school desegregation. The result of his efforts was the first volume in his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Children of Crisis" series, A Study of Courage and Fear.

"I never thought I would write any books," Coles says, with a laugh. "But then I must have gotten an infectious disease."

Since then, Coles has written more than 50 books on such diverse topics as the Catholic workers' movement, a community of elders in New Mexico, and the moral, political and social lives of children. He has also written two volumes of poetry, which have received critical acclaim.

Coles was profoundly influenced as an undergraduate by Williams, and it has often been said that he continued the Williams legacy.

Moreover, his experiences travelling around the globe, from Belfast to Soweto to Albuquerque, have given Coles what he describes as a "wisdom." Speaking of the people he describes in his work The Old Ones of New Mexico, Coles recalls, "Many times my wife and I would sit with some of these elders in those small villages and think to ourselves, Lord if we could only have some of their thoughtfulness and goodhumor and stoic endurance and decency, then we'd be doing well."

Teacher, Scholar

But aside from his prolific writing and extensive field research, it is Coles's role as an acclaimed teacher that has marked him as a prominent and dynamic figure on the Harvard faculty.

Coles credits psychoanalyst Erik Erikson for inspiring him to become a teacher. After returning to Boston from Mississippi, Coles became a section leader for Erikson, who was then teaching at the College.

"This was the beginning of my teaching career," Coles says. "I've never left teaching since then, other than to do fieldwork."

Coles describes himself as being almost in equal parts both a teacher and a student. Coles says that he is interested in the very different ways that students throughout the University respond to similar texts. "Teaching has been part of not only my intellectual life, but also my spiritual life," he says. "These distinct viewpoints have taught me a lot about the meaning of any particular novel, that the meaning has to do not only with the novel itself, but also the reader."

In his three courses this semester--General Education 105, a freshman seminar, and a medical school conference course -- Coles's students all read and discuss the short stories of Raymond Carver.

"When I teach Raymond Carver's stories to College students, Medical School students or Business School students, the subject matter remains the same, but the audience, the students, the assumptions, and the aspirations of the students vary."

"The text takes on a different light, depending on where it's taught."

It is these differences, these variations in interpretations, that deeply interest Coles. "These variations bring together my interests as a teacher and my interests as a reader. They remind me as a reader that there are other readers who may have a different take on the reading I'm doing," he says.

Another technique that Coles brings to his teaching is what he describes as his version of "interdisciplinary" learning: using literature together with art as a vehicle for social reflection. In both his freshman seminar and General Education course, for example, Coles juxtaposes Edward Hopper's paintings with Carver's short stories.

"The Hopper street scenes and the people who he gives us in his paintings are ordinary American people struggling with the complexities of human life: the strains, the opportunities, the difficulties," Coles explains. "This is the same life that Carver evokes in his fiction."

Aside from his teaching at the University, Coles takes the same "interdisciplinary" approach to the fourth graders he teaches at the Martin Luther King Jr. School in Cambridge. In what he calls an "informal art seminar," Coles shows slides of Picassos, Renoirs and Hoppers to his students and discusses with them their reactions to the art.

"I use drawings and paintings and slides to get them to imagine stories connected to the pictures, and I get them to write what they have imagined," Coles says.

For Coles, teaching is an integral part of his life because it nurtures the other aspects of his multi-faceted career. "There is a constant nourishing going on between the experiences of students and my fieldwork. I learn from the students about their own lives, and in a sense I learn about America."

Currently, Coles is developing a course that would use community service to explore intellectual and moral reflection.

But it is exactly his approach toward teaching and learning as a reflective effort that has brought some criticism from students in his classes here. According to some students, lectures seem directed toward eliciting feelings of guilt and sections descend to the level of group therapy sessions.

In the face of this criticism, Coles says that the feelings of guilt that students experience is in large part due to the difficult questions that the reading brings up.

"This course takes emotions seriously, emotions generated by short stories and novels and emotions experienced by the students and the teachers reading the short stories and novels," Coles says of General Education 105.

"It is not a course in psychology or psychiatry," he says. "We don't mean to turn this into group therapy, but we certainly are anxious to respond to the heart and soul of the reading, as well as to respond intellectually in an intellectually and analytically. We aim to connect stories, novels, and poems to the human experience."

"I think we need to make a distinction here that Emerson once made, which is to ask how we use learning in such a way that it informs the moral, emotional and spiritual texture of our lives," Coles says.

"If to ask this question is to make us all feel a little uncomfortable, and if that's what's meant by guilt, then guilt in that sense is just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is a course that is trying hard through literature to connect us to our lived lives, to connect our intellectual life to our everyday experience," he continues.

Reconciliation

For a man who has spent much of his life among those in poverty, who stresses the virtues of community service and the sharing of wealth among the less fortunate, the question often arises how Coles reconciles his personal life of relative privilege with his work as a social crusader.

"It's been a life-long struggle," Coles says, describing his comfortable upbringing. "I don't know how you resolve a question like this. My feeling is that we owe it to others that more of us can have this kind of privileged life."

Through his experiences with Dorothy Day, the journalist and social reformer, Coles says, he realized that acknowledging the existence of poverty does not necessitate living a life of poverty. "I don't think I'm going to help poor people by becoming poor myself," he says.

"It does make me uncomfortable at times to work, say, in Roxbury or with migrant farm workers, and then to come back to a comfortable house in Concord," Coles says.

"But I don't know how to resolve this other than to try to tell the world about what I've seen and hope that such telling will make a social, political, and cultural difference."

"If one is a hypocrite for having been brought up in a comfortable life and not abandoning it to poverty, then I suppose I'd be called a hypocrite," Coles says. "But I don't really think that's what we're all about. I think what we're trying to do is to share the benefits of this country with more and more people who live in it."

According to Coles, the question of privilege and of relative privilege is a recurring problem on the Harvard landscape. "Smugness and self-importance is not totally absent from the Harvard scene," he says. "It can be found among some of us who point our fingers at other students accusing them of lacking this quality or that quality in the moral or psychological life."

"With that caveat in mind," Coles says, "I have to remind myself of the irony in life, that sometimes one can find arrogance among those who criticize others for being arrogant."

'Legacy'

In describing the legacy of his writing, teaching, and research, Coles is hesitant.

"I think the word 'legacy' is too important," Coles says. "What I've tried to do is to place myself as a seeing and listening observer in the midst of a range of children living a range of different kinds of lives."

"And then, I've tried to carry back to the world of readers, through my books, what I've seen and heard," he says.

But in summing up the various aspects of his life, Coles describes himself in clearer terms. "I am a loner and a wanderer, both within the University and in life," Coles says. "There is a wandering, loner quality to me. I'm not a member of a department, and I spend my time with students, rather than with faculty."

"This is a failing of sorts," Coles says. "But whatever it is, it's the way I've lived."