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Man & Myth at Yale
Through the eyes of a student, sometimes a teacher is more than a teacher.
by Molly Worthen '03
January/February 2006
Molly Worthen '03 is a graduate student in religious studies at Yale. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming biography of Charles Hill, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost.
Professor Hill found my first paper lacking. “At times, you almost begin to analyze the text,” he wrote, “only to invariably wander off into pretentious displays of pseudo-psychological erudition. C-.” It was my first grade at Yale, and I deserved it. The assignment was to write about Herodotus, and I guessed from the faces of my classmates that I had not been alone in mangling the father of history with nervous overreaching. Something about Professor Hill made us wildly anxious to prove ourselves, evidently to the point of self-ruin. I could not pinpoint what we found so intimidating. As yet, we didn’t know enough about Charles Hill to be awed by his résumé. We had no idea that he had been a Foreign Service officer for most of his life, not an academic; that he had been one of the most influential “advisers to the prince” in recent diplomatic history, counseling Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali; that his notebooks from the Shultz days helped break open the Iran-Contra investigation.
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Whenever any of us spoke, Professor Hill made a tiny mark on his notepad. |
Our ignorance was for the best. His presence, his hold on the class, was enough to make us freeze in our seats. The room snapped silent at nine o'clock when Professor Hill walked in. He wore a stone-colored suit, and he did not speak or look at us until he had taken his seat at the head of the table and pulled his yellow legal pad from his backpack. The backpack, please note, was made of dignified brown leather and detracted only slightly from the overall gravity of his image.
He sat leaning close to the table, his back straight and motionless as a marble figure tipping imperceptibly from its column. He always began class with a quiet voice, his elbows resting upon the table in perfect 45-degree angles. He held this position for the entire hour, save an infrequent nod or a reach for the notepad. There was never a pen or paper clip in his hand. Professor Hill did not fiddle.
He called on us by our last names, and whenever any of us spoke, he made a tiny mark on his notepad, as if he were an Olympic figure-skating judge. None of us ever knew whether those marks portended good or ill. Within minutes we did not trust ourselves to think or speak. We had to, however, for Professor Hill assigned one of us to lead the discussion each day. Over the course of the semester some of my classmates came to class unprepared. When they turned red and stuttered that they had forgotten it was their turn to lead, Professor Hill stared at them, silent, waiting to see what they would do. Most composed themselves and found something to say, eventually. The rest of the class took the lesson to heart. Some of us learned to stay up late, crafting the following day’s “spontaneous” insights in our notebooks, to be referenced surreptitiously whenever we raised our hands.
Our other teachers were not like this. They wore blue jeans to class and were lenient with those who wanted to chew on a granola bar or show up in sweatpants, but the discussions they led were often fraught with droning and self-importance. Almost no one in Professor Hill’s class talked too much or wandered off the subject. This was a result of the self-discipline that comes when your instructor is stiff and serious-voiced, when every clearing of his throat sounds like the strike of the hour. A classmate, Sky Schouten '03, remembered that “every class with him felt like a political summit meeting. You had to come prepared—every seminar I knew I’d see him, I tucked in my shirt and shaved. That was how he made you feel, that this was a serious enterprise … and you owed it to the founding fathers who wrote these books.”
Professor Hill has always taught like a diplomat, not an academic.
He is not loquacious. His students never write long-winded seminar papers. He assigns Herculean tasks of distillation, essay prompts that require them to sweep and analyze Virgil or Machiavelli in a paper the length of an office memo. He is known for striding over to the chalkboard to scratch out three words and a triangle and pronounce, “That is Thomas Hobbes,” or reduce The Peloponnesian War to a six-part logic chain. Everything to its category, teaches Professor Hill, and in due course the world and its history are bound according to War, Empire, Culture, Language, Revolution, and other hopelessly broad slices of human experience. The view is captivating. Occasionally he teases the class with a brief anecdote about his shuttle diplomacy in Israel, or negotiations with the Soviets, but only enough to transfix students with his worldly experience and authority—never fully explain it. To me, Professor Hill was a mystery begging to be cracked.
At Yale, Hill has been unusual from the start. While his colleagues prefer to teach packed lecture halls and graduate seminars, when he began teaching at Yale full-time in 1997 Hill found a place in the Directed Studies first-year humanities program, among roomsful of impressionable freshmen. He teaches more widely now, but the freshmen are the core of his following.
They are awed by Yale, intimidated by their professors, and thrilled that one would take an interest in them. By the time the term is over, many of his freshmen are composing tentative e-mails to ask Hill to be their academic adviser. When he writes back saying “it would be an honor to work with you”—for he never turns anyone down—they are giddy.
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We wanted life advice, and for once we found a professor who would tell us what we ought to do. |
My classmates and I trudged up the three flights of stairs to his office for more than an opinion on our rough drafts. We wanted life advice, and for once we found a professor who would tell us what we ought to do. After a few conversations with Professor Hill, a student named Ewan MacDougall was convinced to join the Marines: “I saw [the Marine representative] in the rotunda one day and called Hill for advice on it, and he made a series of predictions about the Marine training that summer, and they all came true.” Hill told Ewan that the Marines would push him until he thought he would break. He would learn to be a leader, and he would learn how to yell—when he got home in the fall, his father wouldn’t recognize him. “I laughed at the time,” Ewan said. “But he was right on, in every regard.”
Any professor who encourages his students to join the military and work for Halliburton will not find many allies among the liberal Yale faculty. Professor Hill has few. Most of his colleagues respect his intellect, but they are uneasy about his influence here. That influence has grown in recent years. Increasing numbers of students flock to his office hoping for unambiguous counsel, a foolproof grand strategy. For it does seem that he has mapped out a life plan for each of them. Somewhere, whether amid the pages of Professor Hill’s countless notepads or in the back of his mind, there are records and predictions begun with the first eviscerations penned in red ink on his students' papers freshman year, continued all the way through the job interviews and senior essays.
There is another class that Professor Hill teaches.
Despite whispers of words like “elitist,” “conservative,” and “cult”—words considered synonyms by many at Yale—The Grand Strategy seminar, only a few years old, has become one of the university’s marquee classes. Grand Strategy, like Professor Hill, has its own myth. The liberals on campus call the class Grand Fascism. They are kidding, but only in part. Many Yale students and faculty are suspicious of the program. Students awed or repelled by Grand Strategy are the same ones who are awed or repelled by Professor Hill, and for the same reasons: the aura of power, the whiff of elitism, the promise of an answer to life’s messiest questions.
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Every year over a hundred undergraduate and graduate students apply for some 20 slots. |
Every year over a hundred undergraduate and graduate students apply for some 20 slots. For the lucky few who are admitted, Hill and his colleagues John Gaddis and Paul Kennedy collaborate on a yearlong curriculum that combines study of the classic texts of strategic thought with real-world practice. Students spend the spring semester reading everything from Sun Tzu and Thucydides to Winston Churchill and Henry Kissinger. After a summer internship spent learning about grand strategy abroad, in business, or elsewhere outside the classroom, they return for the fall to plan complex “policy briefs” on vast subjects like Culture, Technology, or the Environment. In the interest of producing graduates with enough mettle to brief the White House someday, the professors and students do their best to tear apart their peers' presentations.
The course is intended to train generalists who can grasp the broad picture without glossing over details and who are brave enough to tackle uncomfortable questions of power, war, and human life. The syllabus is predicated upon the belief that there are foundational ideas by which the world’s great leaders have governed states and led armies to battle, and that these ideas remain relevant today. It is an ambitious goal, perhaps overreaching. It runs against almost everything else that Yale students learn in their narrowly focused history courses and political science programs based upon rational-choice theory’s forecasts of logical human behavior. Whether or not the students agree with the claims of Grand Strategy, they are forced to consider what they believe about right and wrong, and the way history operates.
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The rumors Hill’s students whisper during lecture are, for the most part, true. |
As I researched Hill’s biography, interviewing him for several hours each week and wading through over 20,000 pages of notes he took over the years, I learned that he knew whence he spoke. For more than 30 years, Professor Hill worked in the back corridors of the State Department, a silent yet tirelessly effective officer whose name made few newspaper headlines but remains attached to many of the watersheds in twentieth-century American diplomatic history. The rumors his students whisper during lecture are, for the most part, true.
In 1985, when the first hints had begun trickling into the State Department that things in the Soviet Union were changing, Hill spent a long flight to Moscow furiously writing and rewriting talking points the Secretary of State would use in a meeting with Gorbachev. Hill refigured the arguments nearly 20 times before Shultz was satisfied, “draft after draft all the way across the Atlantic.” He ended up with a series of talking points that presented, he concluded in his notebook, not “a call for freedom that would lose govt [government] control over people but increase [people's] allegiance to the govt.” The conversation on human rights that resulted was the “longest ever,” Hill noted. Normally the Soviets refused to tolerate any prodding on human rights and shut down the conversation immediately. Contrary to what the State Department’s Sovietologists predicted, Gorbachev agreed with much of what Shultz had to say. It was a critical first engagement in the series of exchanges that led to the 1986 Reykjavik summit, in which the Soviets for the first time expressed a willingness to make concessions to the American position on nuclear weapons and the terrain of American-Soviet relations was forever changed.
During the 1985 hostage crisis of Trans World Airlines flight 847, the Reagan administration’s first hostage crisis with American victims on board, Shultz asked Hill to open a back channel to Israel. The hijackers had chosen a plane full of mostly American passengers as retribution for Washington’s support of Israel’s war effort, and they demanded the release of Shia Muslims captured by Israeli forces during the invasion of Lebanon. Hill’s secret conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, kept the official positions of the two countries in alignment and stopped Israel’s public offers to comply with the terrorists' demands, which would certainly have emboldened them further. Meanwhile, a deal was quietly struck—via the Syrian government—for release of the hostages.
These were only two of many stories of Hill’s quiet influence that I uncovered. He has become something of a mascot for the Grand Strategy class. His life has been an insider’s view of foreign policy crises at points around the world as well as within the highest ranks of our own government. It is a chronicle of choices made between life’s incompatibilities: cultural and intellectual, personal and professional. But most importantly, it is the test of a grand strategy. Hill teaches his students that the virtuous, the wise, and the brave among them must take note of life’s details but always reside in the realm of ideas. Each should aspire to be a person on whom nothing is lost, without ever getting lost himself or herself. Such a philosophy is bewitching in the classroom, but the real test of a grand strategy is not the final exam at the end of the semester. The test is what happens when that grand strategy is lived.
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“Someone heard Hill has a secure phone in his office so he can call Washington.” |
During office hours, the time when professors are supposed to put their feet up on their desks and students are supposed to strike up casual conversation, the Charles Hill myth persists. He does not invite banter or personal confidences. He rarely engages in small talk, and then only with reluctance and artlessness. When the phone rings while Hill is meeting with a student, he never suggests that they continue the conversation another day. But he will pick up the phone and talk or, more commonly, listen and scribble for five or ten minutes, while the student pretends to read the titles of the books on the shelves, stares at her watch, and wonders whether she missed some cue to leave. If she packs up her books and rises for the door, he will often wave her back to her seat. In part Hill does this because it is efficient; few of his phone calls are long. And in part, although he would never admit this, allowing a student to eavesdrop on his conversations with George Shultz or people from the vice president’s office is not bad for his reputation around campus. Aaron O'Connell '02MA, a skeptical graduate student, related one rumor he'd heard: “Someone once said—and this story is emblematic even if it’s false—that he heard Hill has a secure phone in his office so he can call Washington. He said that Hill picked up the phone and said, 'Hill here, go ahead.' It evokes the image of Batman picking up the Batphone. That’s part of the seduction.”
By now Hill is mostly retired from active duty, but Washington is often on the other end of those clipped telephone conversations we are permitted to overhear in his office. The same force of mind and power of expression that propelled him through the ranks of the Foreign Service have made Professor Hill one of the most effective and provocative instructors at Yale University. Some students treat his words as Gospel; others accuse him of brainwashing.
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Hill teaches by verdict, not by question, and the lessons are difficult to dispute. |
He teaches by verdict, not by question, and the lessons are difficult to dispute. Carolyne Davidson '03LLM is a graduate student who argued with him regularly. “He rarely frames an idea as his opinion—always as the given truth,” she said. “This is his diplomatic style. After all, if you were presenting a memo to Kissinger, you wouldn’t want him to have to think about it. You'd want him to take it as truth. But it’s hard to launch into a debate after that.”
Hill does not hesitate. He always knows. He considers it his duty to redeem those misguided minds that disagree with him, and the cold simplicity of his arguments seduces us. Professor Hill is a teacher, a role model, and a counselor for many of my classmates. But to others, he is a sermonizer and an influence to be avoided. Students like Dan Kurtz-Phelan '03, who enrolled in Hill’s yearlong international studies lecture course but dropped it after a semester, worry that his teaching style prevents them from figuring things out on their own. “Many of his students are willing to be spoon-fed, and that terrifies me a little.”
Once upon a time, I was one of those willing students. Toward the end of that first semester freshman year, I wrote on the inside cover of my notebook, “Charles Hill is God.” The evidence is still there, in red marker, all capital letters. I am embarrassed by it now, but I can’t bring myself to rip off the cover or cross out the words. That would be like tearing up my third-grade school photograph, that awful picture featuring the floppy unicorn sweater and buckteeth—a mortifying moment in my personal history, but a necessary one.
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Hill’s teaching style dazzles and offends in the same way that religious indoctrination does. |
It was of some comfort to learn that I wasn’t alone. Hill’s teaching style dazzles and offends in the same way that religious indoctrination does. Other professors have a powerful presence at the lectern, but “with Hill it’s different,” said Lindsay Hayden '06, who studied literature with him. “Some people can’t stand him and his views. Others won’t hear a word against him. It’s scary. It’s like a religion.” A classmate of Lindsay named Amia Srinivasan '07 said that her boyfriend “worships Professor Hill,” although her own opinion was ambivalent. “It’s like I’m an atheist and he’s a believer,” she said. She told me they tried not to talk about Hill’s class too much because they ended up only fighting.
Weeks later, at the semester’s end, I ran into Amia on the street and she grabbed me by the arm. “I’ve converted! I believe!” she cried.
Her boyfriend stood beside her like a proud godfather.
Hill’s students sense that they must work to earn admission into the small circle that has his respect: the few who “get it.” His pedagogy is Puritan, fashioned around an enlightened elect. Outsiders are damned to the darkness of ignorance. There is no middle ground. And there is nothing more powerful—or more dangerous—than true belief.  |
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