Of Transitions and Enduring Gratitutde

Like Skippy-san, a fellow Citadel alumnus, I received the following in an email last night:

Every major on campus had its one course that was the traffic cop course — it determined if you were going to make it or not in that major.  For some it was in their junior year, others it was their senior year .  For pre-med, for example, it was Organic Chemistry; Civil Engineering, it was Soils; History, it was History of England and each was taught by one professor and had been (it seemed) for all eternity.  Other courses you could finagle the schedule and get someone else or if you were really desperate, try summer session.  But these courses – no dice.  You had to pass muster with the boss.  For Political Science majors (ed. of which your humble scribe was one – What, you’re surprised you say?  You wear your sarcasm well we would note...), Professor Larry Moreland’s Constitutional Law was that course, no getting around it.  And for a conservative military college in the heart of the South, in the bastion of the most conservative part of the South, the home and seat of all that is considered tradition and sacred — indeed in a city that is called by its residents the Holy City (ed. that would be Charleston, SC for all you Yankees), to have a course in American Constitutional Law taught by a professor who was known throughout the Corps of Cadets as "Liberal Larry"? Well…

In typical Scribe manner we so very much looked forward to our senior year and our Constitutional Law course because of that…and we were not disappointed.

In that kind of environment it is all too easy to fall into teaching orthodoxy. Prof. Moreland did anything but.   With competing pressures from elsewhere on campus (*cough* Toolshed *cough*) as well as from other faculty the temptations are ripe to go easy with cadets whose natural inclinations by that point are to find the path of least resistance to reach graduation (and anyone who says otherwise is smoking massive quantities of Jamaican).  Prof. Moreland’s classes were anything but the path of least resistance beginning with the infamous weekly quizzes and their notorious "Any, none or all" questions.  A massive weekly reading load of case work set the stage for engaging, nuanced and thoughtful discussion in class.  It was at once aerobics and weightlifting for the mind; a class that forced you to look at problems from differing viewpoints and perspectives and in essence, set the stage for much of the operational analyses that YHS has engaged in over the years since.  

And the "Liberal" moniker?  Defintely not orthodox – but not exactly Berkley either, his intellect was far too disciplined for those environs.  One supposes if one held to a particular viewpoint that was decidedly on the Right, then the Liberal motif was forthcoming – but standby, one could not be a mere "ditto head" and survive in that class.  Positions were called upon to be expounded and defended in civil manner, each was given their say with none of the beating down suffered in this day and age by unpopular thought and voice.  Perhaps too it was the mustache and hair that pressed the boundaries of the college regs for faculty – but no fiercer advocate for cadets could be found among the faculty and the liberal tag was one applied more with fondness than the sneer it seems to garner today.  And as Skippy will attest to, back then, most anyone who dared dip their toe out of the mainstream garnered the liberal tag – why even YHS was considered something of a radical (!)  

So it is with a certain degree of sadness that we note this transition milestone and wish Prof. Moreland fair winds and following seas as he heads off to retirement.  We hope he knows that cadet who sat in the Constitutional Law class some 30 (!?!) years ago remains inspired to this day and that this blog, in part, is fueled by that inspiration. 

And professor — we still have our Constitutional Law texts and they are among the most worn in our library, having been used by a second generation that have pushed their way through school.