Among the hundreds of pieces of mail awaiting my return was an announcement of the retirement of Dr. Bill Hunt from the University of Minnesota, Morris.
Dr. Hunt taught me how to think about politics in a meaningful way. His introduction to political science class, State and the Modern World, radically shaped my thinking. That class, and his other political theory classes, taught me how to build the right framework for evaluating the most complex and important questions.
He is an outstanding facilitator and he led classes of 10 or 60 with seemingly equal ease. To his classes I always looked forward, and rarely skipped because my time there was often the day's highlight. The discussions begun in class would often continue for hours, sometimes days. Ever mindful that philosophical discussions can easily dissolve into abstracts and semantics, Dr. Hunt consistently and contentiously brought the topics back to real world politics. And despite the unavoidable -- and, in fact, essential -- controversy of the subjects, debates in Dr. Hunt's class never devolved into the personal bickering which so mars other political science classes.
Dr. Hunt encouraged respect of ideas and of sound thinking. To him, more important than the conclusion was to reach it through reason.
His retirement is well-deserved but a major loss to UMM. I hope his successor can inspire and incite as much in future students as Dr. Hunt did in me. But that is indeed a high bar to pass.
