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Wednesday, August 21, 1974
University Daily Kansan
Prof Senior Began Hunt for Simple Life as Cowboy
BY KEMPTON LINDQUIST
Kansan Staff Reporter
John Senior, professor of comparative literature, has spent much of his life seeking a simple way of living. His search included the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, Ireland and Wyoming.
"I was looking for some kind of life which I am now absolutely convinced can never be found except in beaven," Senior said recently.
He grew up in the country in Connecticut, but spent every summer from age 15 through 20 in North Dakota working as a cowboy.
"In those days it was the real thing," he said. They had the roundups and the horrors.
He went on cattle drives of more than 60 miles. They often lasted two or three weeks.
After a period in the Army during World War II, Senior was graduated from Columbia University in 1946 with a B.A. degree.
Then he and his new wife Priscilla was
on adventure in the mountains of New
Mexico.
Truman...
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structor at William and Mary College in
original where he taught for 35 years.
He is a Ph.D. in molecular science,
He came to KU in 1948, largely because KU was the only school that would let him teach constitutional law for juniors and seniors. Heller said.
"My stepmother still has a letter I wrote to me, and the teacher will send my books out to Kansas even though it seems such a waste to do it for just 26 months." Heller said. "That was 26 years ago."
He has remained here, Heller said,
because the students at KU have been as
challenging and stimulating as any students
he has met.
His wife was in the first class he taught, Heller said.
"That first class in many ways was very remarkable," he said, "bill Bennett, who is a longtime alumnus of Yale, Jim Bibb, the state budget director, was in class; Stanley Kelley, who was for many years chairman of the politics department at Yale, was it an excellent group of students."
Heller moved to the Chancellor's office in 1966 as associate dean of faculty. He was dean of faculty, which was retitled chancellor for academic affairs, in 1970, from 1967-72. Heller was acting provost of the Lawrence campus in 1967-68 and 1969-70.
Heller is chairman of the board of directors of Benedictine College in Atchison, vice president of the board of directors of Trevor Abbey and a Roy A. Roberts distinguished professor.
They lived in a shack on a mountain, again trying to find a simple life that was
But the New Mexico experience didn't suit Senior.
"The Indians stole the goats. And the winter came along and we almost died. We had to run down from the mountain. Besides that, our first child was going to be born. I ran all the way back east again and got myself a job."
senior got a job at Bard College, Annalise-on-Lake, New York. It was his first job.
Bard was an experimental system, Senior said, with many radical programs and well-established programs.
"At that time I was writing poetry, even novels, he said. "I thought of myself as a
About 1949, while still on the Bard staff,
Senior investigate several Caribbean islands to find where he could live a simple life
He found the easy life, living in grass huts on sandy beaches and eating coconuts and bananas picked from a tree, but it wasn't what he wanted.
"My idea at that time was to find an easy way to do it rather than a hard way," he
Senior said that after two years at Bard, he found it as unsatisfying as the Caribean.
The people at Bard were not really doing
anything in their experimentation, Senior were not looking for a destination.
Senior then began teaching at Cornell University and continued his Ph.D. work at Cornell.
"What I learned at Columbia," he said, was that there was a truth, that there was an academic degree, but I was sure it existed. I got a job teaching at Cornell University and decided to become a very serious academic person." He spent many years during this period studying theology and philosophy.
He spent many years during this period studying far eastern religions and medieval literature.
In 1954, Senior loved for about a year in a small village in western Ireland. He enjoyed the simple life he found in the village, but felt he could not stay, he said.
"I spent a year over there," Senior said, "until what really brought me home was the awareness that even though I could achieve the life that I wanted to live over there, that it would be wrong for me to do that because I think that life is good for everybody.
"I don't think it's right to run off and succeed by yourself. You can go off and do it, but you become some kind of a nut. You can influence anybody else when you do that."
Senior said that after several years of studying Hinduism, Buddhism and many other philoshes, he "had the tremendous experience of getting to the bottom of that
Kansan Staff Photo by DEBBIE GUMP
Former Cowboy John Senior Teaches Literature Class
"I realized that all these ideas and all these experiments of mine really led to something very old and traditional, namely the one that provided little that half of my life," he said.
and discovering that was just another form of trying to find the island paradise.
Next spring, Senior will be on sabbatical leave in France.
Nelick, professor of English, set up the Pearson College Humanities program.
Senior became dissatisfied with the competitive academic world at Cornell, he said, and took a teaching job at the University of Wyoming at Laramie.
He bought a ranch about 10 miles from Laramie.
He said he and his family enjoyed the ranch, but he couldn't teach and maintain it.
He sold the ranch and came to the University of Kansas in 1967 to devote full time to his business.
He said he would study medieval life in a Benedictine monastery that had remained unchanged since A.D. 500 when it was founded.
Five years ago, he and Dennis Quinn,
director of College College, and Franklin
Senior said he had been working for
a book company on a book about "the
restoration of the American West."
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