“I don't know what it's like
to be an actor,” says Jim Underwood, the professor of political
science who at ReUnion on Saturday received the faculty
meritorious service award from the Alumni Council. “But I imagine it's a
lot like being a professor.”
“As I imagine the actor does, the professor spends
time thinking about how the next `performance' can be as good
as his last,” he wrote in a forthcoming essay on four-decades
of teaching at Union.
“Both the actor and professor have in their heads
personal standards against which they judge their respective
performances. Of course, they have the knowledge of how their
`audiences' judged them. And I suspect that both feel that in some
sense they are no better than their last performance.”
But, Underwood says, the professor requires more than
the actor: active response from the audience.
And what about those times when the performance falls
flat? Like a good actor, a good professor does not give up.
“I should know; three or four years ago … I stood on my head
and spit nickels for 10 weeks,” Underwood says. “And with
the exception of very few students, nothing came back. I
consider myself lucky that in my fourth decade of teaching, I
rarely encountered such a class.”
Underwood has served in a number of capacities
including dean of faculty from 1988 to 1994, chair of the political
science department from 1978 to 1984, chair of the social
sciences division, and director of the General Education program.
An advisor to a number of students in the College's
internship programs in Washington and Albany, Underwood has
had long-standing friendships with a number of alumni who have
gone on to distinguished careers in law, politics and diplomacy. He
counts a half dozen father-child pairs of students.
He is the co-author Governor Rockefeller in New York: The
Apex of Pragmatic Liberalism in the United
States, and has published articles in Polity
and Congress and the Presidency. In 1971, he
co-authored Science/Technology – Related Activities in the
Government of the State of New York, a study funded by the state
Office of Science and Technology. He has written and lectured
extensively on fomer New York Governor Mario Cuomo.
A graduate of Franklin and Marshall, he received his
M.P.A. and Ph.D. from Syracuse University.
A native of Irwin, Penn., he and his wife, Jean, live
in Niskayuna and Cooperstown.
As for the rewards of teaching, Underwood says
the best ones come in the form of alumni comments. “No
comment was ever received with more pleasant surprise than one
offered by a very good student who had been in the class in which I
`stood on my head and spit nickels' to little effect,” he writes. “When
I bumped into her after summer break, she said simply,
`Professor, every day of the week I wish I were back in your class.'”