Bill Cole's Song and Dance

By Laura Ingraham | Friday, April 21, 2006

Originally Published January 17, 1983.

Class was supposed to begin at 2 p.m. Nearly 150 students crowded in the seats and aisles of 54 Hopkins Center. They awaited the master. But the master was in no hurry. Nothing worries Bill Cole. Not students, not regulations, not teaching. Nothing.

Of course, Professor Cole was late to class. He is Chairman of the Music Department, and tenured; no one keeps his timetable. Cole sauntered down to center stage. “Lotta people in this class, man,” he surmised. “A lot of athletes, aren’t there?” People laughed.

Welcome to Music 2, renowned to be the most outrageous gut course on campus, home of the thicknecks.Professor Cole knows why they signed up, but it is hard to tell if he cares. He is a lean, scruffy fellow, “looks like a used Brillo pad,” in the words of one student. Cole began by trying to write the name of the course, “American Music in an Oral Tradition,” on the blackboard. But he forgot the title, and had to consult the book of Officers, Regulations, and Courses (ORC).

Out of the blue, Cole said, “Hey, I know a lot of you are racist or sexist or out to lunch. But that’s your problem, not mine.” And he began to pace around the room. During class time, Cole intermittently leaves the classroom. Sometimes he occupies the students by playing a record. As many as ten minutes may pass before Cole returns to class. A goodly number of Cole’s students are black. Some allege that these are “affirmative action” kids looking for a course they can handle. The main reason seems to be that Cole makes an extra effort to amuse black students. In doing this, he has the whole class rolling on the floor.

Cole devotes at least half his lecture to the “race question,” even though this is mostly irrelevant to the course. In his second class he told about competing for a “token” position as a bank teller. When he got the job, the vice president threw a note pad at him with a dark ink spot in the center. Cole said, “That’s a little black spot.” And the VP said, “And that’s how inconspicuous you better be around here.”

Music 2 is about Afro-American, Native American, and Anglo-American music handed down orally over the generations. It is rich, folksong music: Jayne Cortez, Blind Willie Johnson, Sara Cleveland, and so on.

The syllabus for Music 2 is three lines long. The requirements are: attendance, handing in a journal twice during the term, and a final “listening exam.” The Music 2 journal need not be about music at all. It could be about horseback riding. Or a trip to Malaca. The main object, Cole stresses, is to “think deeply for twenty minutes before writing.” The final listening exam is an exam involving twenty-four pieces of music. Students must memorize them, and be able to identify both the piece and musician.

Last year, Cole employed a unique testing system for the final exam. Cole played a song and identified it. Students who felt he identified it correctly were told to stand up. Those who were right left the room and signed out: they got an A. The rest of the class listened to the second selection, competing for an A minus. And so on.

Professor Cole has some illuminating advice for students in his course. On the first day he handed out “Standard rules for the student” of Music 2. These include:

“Read little, think deeply—and much. Avoid acquiring the grasshopper mind... Avoid mental indigestion at all costs. It is not to be cured merely by going to the Drug Store... If you must lie, lie to others; they will find you out and know you for the fool that you are. . . . Remember at all times: Nothing belongs to you except your mind has had a hand in its formulation. The moral is obvious: Ensure by every means at your disposal, that your mind is actively functioning on oiled wheels, and that it functions as your servant and not your enslaver. “

This pop philosophy is supplemented by Cole’s classroom rantings. Often students find this befuddling; some just laugh it off.

For example, on the first day of class, Cole elaborately praised the man who threatened to blow up the Washington Monument. “He had a lot of guts,” Cole said. “And look what they did to him: They blew his head off.”

“Only one newsman—Bill Moyers—said anything positive about the cat. He was questioning all the stuff that the Congressmen feed you” about nuclear war, Cole said.

On the second day of class, Cole told students his own life story. A Pittsburgh native, he suffered the discrimination prevalent before the civil rights movement. The neighborhood swimming pool let no blacks in. College aid was scarce in general, but nonexistent for black students.

Cole attended the University of Pittsburgh. After a month, he says, he realized he was “totally, I mean totally, unprepared.” He failed Chemistry, Biology, and other courses, and was put on academic probation. It took him ten years to graduate.

It was Cole’s tremendous interest in music that sustained him. “Music saved me,” he admitted to the class. He got As and Bs in Music courses, and today he plays numerous instruments and shares with the class songs from the early 1900s that his mother sang to him.

Cole also performs professionally, playing the musette for a lively group called “Wind and Thunder.” The group has played at the Collis Center.

Bill Cole is not, by a long shot, your typical Ivy League professor or department head. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that; in fact, it can jazz things up quite a bit.

But Cole should be careful about making gratuitous racial allusions in class. He should also cultivate a more serious attitude toward reading and scholarship. That would make Music 2 more than amusing—it would make it a course.

Bill Cole's Song and Dance

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