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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN
Williams College professor Mark Taylor rides a motorcycle and is as well- versed in Madonna and U2 as he is in Kierkegaard and Hegel. He is the author of obscure treatises with titles such as "Non-Negative Negative A//theology," yet the 50-year-old religion professor can out- cybertalk just about any twenty-something hacker. He attracts a fanatically devoted following to courses such as "Imagologies," "Cyberscapes" and "Psychology of Religion," yet he has a long-standing reputation on the Williams College campus as one of the sternest taskmasters and toughest graders.
At Williams, they like to talk of the ideal college as "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." Substitute the seminar table or the computer terminal for the log, and Taylor may well be a 21st-century version of his namesake, at least according to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, located in Princeton, N.J., which recently named Taylor the 1995-96 Liberal Arts Professor of the Year.
"Mark is able on the one hand to touch upon very complex philosophical issues, some of which have occupied thinkers for the last 200 years, and then to connect them to very current concerns about contemporary culture with electronic sensibilities," said Bernard Tschumi, dean of the School of Architecture at Columbia University, where Taylor was a visiting professor in 1994.
In 1992, Taylor developed and taught the first "global seminar," a course that used teleconferencing technology and E-mail to connect students from Williams and the University of Helsinki in Finland. Taylor has also worked with Williams students to create "Cybercollege," a text-based virtual environment that allows students, alumni, academicians and experts worldwide to interact in real-time exchanges over the Internet.
While specializing in religion, Taylor - the son of two high school teachers in Westfield, N.J. - regularly teaches courses in philosophy, literary criticism, art and architecture. The author of 14 books, he has been at Williams since 1973. He chaired the department of religion in 1990 and 1993; was director of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences from 1987 to 1990; and chaired the history of ideas program from 1978 to 1983. His wife, Dinny, is head of administrative computing at Williams; their two children, Aaron and Kirsten, are off at graduate school and college, respectively.
"Mark enlists his students in a common pilgrimage," said John Chandler, former Williams College president and a former colleague of Taylor's in the religion department. "He takes them seriously and treats them as capable of grappling with the important questions as colleagues," said Chandler in a recent phone interview from his office at Academic Search in Washington, D.C., where he is now a senior consultant.
Chandler's comments are echoed by current and former students of Taylor's.
"He's very exceptional and very generous," said Jacob Snyder, a Williams senior and religion major from Allentown, Penn. "I don't think I've ever seen him not give his all to every student, religion major or not."
"Mark manages to bring out the best in students by making them do work that they never thought they could do," said Clifford Ruprecht, class of '86, from his home in Philadelphia.
Taylor is fully aware of the aura he projects as a teacher who both challenges and intimidates. "My insistence on challenging and pushing the students is an expression of my respect for them," he said recently. "I will never place any higher demands on my students than I place on myself. I always say to them that I'll make matters tough, but no tougher than life itself."
Taylor speaks highly of his students. "I'm often asked why I stay at Williams as long as I have," he said. "There are many reasons. Williams has been very supportive of the kind of interdisciplinary work that I do. And the students are very bright, very creative, in many ways more interesting than many graduate students. They don't know as much but very often they're smarter. My only regret is I very often wish I could have them another two or three years."
In fact, Taylor often does keep in close touch with former students, "an indication of how seriously he takes them," said Chandler. "He doesn't regard his friendship and his obligations ceasing when they cease being his students in a formal way. That seems to me to be the mark of all serious intellectuals."
Clifford Ruprecht is a former student of Taylor's who went on to earn a doctorate in religion. "He really stayed in touch, kept an eye on what I was doing, and remained helpful to me," said Ruprecht. "While I was doing my dissertation he took on the role as a DE FACTO dissertation advisor just from pure love and dedication to his role as a teacher, with no institutional role at all."
Other students spoke of how Taylor is always redesigning and reinventing his courses, using them, in a sense, as vehicles for his own intellectual pursuits.
Last month, for example, Taylor took a class of students to Las Vegas to get a firsthand look at the place where he says "the virtual becomes real and the real becomes virtual."
"You can't understand America today without understanding Las Vegas," said Taylor. While there, his students fanned out with notebooks, cameras and video recorders and documented the city and the region in all its glamour, beauty and sleaze, visiting its casinos, bordellos, nuclear test sites and desert surroundings.
Once the students returned to Williamstown, they began work on creating a CD-ROM about Las Vegas. The class will also set up a site on the World Wide Web which will include video images and written text based on their findings.
What does all this have to do with religion?
"One can establish a certain line of connection between the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts and the city in the desert in Nevada," said Taylor. "Americans have always been obsessed with making something out of nothing, with establishing a city on a hill in a wilderness....For many people, Vegas functions as a certain kind of dreamland."
Through all the talk of "absences" and "disappearances" and "hypertexts" in his conversation that betray the influence of deconstruction _ a school of literary criticism influenced by Jacques Derrida - on Taylor, one also detects a solid grounding in every-day reality.
"He is really a very down-to-earth guy," said Ruprecht. "His mind is always going, but he's very personable. "I've heard Mark described as 'a quintessential American.' He's always in blue jeans. There's a real individualistic dimension to him, a kind of ruggedness to his persona that people associate with an American identity. He rides motorcycles. He's got that sort of American rebel, individualist identity.
"He's also a really thoughtful, reflective guy, and that impressed me when I saw him with his kids. That was another thing that really struck me. He's a very thoughtful kind of family man."
(This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Feb. 3, 1996.)
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