4B
Thursday. December 9,1993
"We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live."
”
- Socrates
THE KNOWLE
CARING ENOUGH...
STEVE GROW, Cedar Falls, Iowa graduate student, has taken several classes from Young.
"There are few issues that come up that he is not prepared to discuss," he said. "And if there are, he cares enough to follow up on them later."
He described Young as uncompromising when it came to the effort he expected from a student.
"You can't come out of a class afraid he's lobbing softballs," Grow said. "I take it as a sim of respect."
Sandra Wick, assistant director of the honors program, said Young inspired students to believe in themselves and their abilities.
"They think, 'Dr. Young thinks I can do it, so I can,'" she said.
Young expects the best from himself, Wick said, but he is always willing to admit his mistakes.
"He's a philosopher without any arrogance, which means he's well aware of his humanity, his humanness," she said.
(Above) Michael Young works for many hours each day in one of his three offices. His office at home is cluttered with everything from tools. He is working on a thesis on Immanuel Kant, a philosopher. (Left) Young thinks about possible alterations for a scholarship application. The about his chances for survival, he is realistically pessimistic about the experimental immunotherapy he is undergoing.
Young teaches his Theory of Knowledge class. His colleagues took over his class for him while he was in the hospital recovering from a tainted batch of white blood cells he received while undergoing immunotherapy.
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a deadly form of skin cancer, had spread to his brain, lungs and arm.
His colleagues called him "the resurrected one," but not because of two brain surgeries, one in July and the other in early September.
They christened him out of relief after he survived an infection caused by a highly experimental cancer therapy, immunotherapy, and a fever that spiked as high as 107 degrees.
On Sept. 17, Young's doctors told his wife that he would not live very long.
"The betting was that I wasn't going to make it through the weekend," Young said. "They had one of the nurses take my wife aside and tell her to prepare for my death."
When he regained consciousness Sept. 21, the director of the KU Honors Center just wanted to get better and go home.
His Theory of Knowledge class would be ready to begin the contemporary articles on empirical knowledge. The Marshall and Rhodes scholarship applicants would be learning if they had received national interviews.
This was the life he always had wanted, with home and family, friends and students in a college community.
"I like my life, very much," he said. "What I want to do most of all is get back to it."
He relies on his life for support and strength.
At age 49, Young was not trying to be a hero. He did not want pity or attention. He just wanted to go back home and enjoy life while there was still time.
A constant exchange of ideas
It is 12:43 on a Tuesday afternoon, and Michael Young does not have much time. He is finishing lecture notes for his Theory of Knowledge class. It begins in 17 minutes.
A sign in German hangs in his Wescoe Hall office. Loosely translated, it means "Do not dump junk," something he claims to have trouble with as he silts through papers on his desk.
A black-and-white picture of himself, his wife, his daughter and his oldest son hangs at eye level. A picture of a vase with flowers has "happy father's day" scrawled near the base and seems to crown his head as it hangs behind him.
He usually spends four to six hours preparing for each day's lecture.
His colleagues helped teach the course while he was in the hospital. A few weeks after the Fall 1993 semester commenced, a golfball-sized tumor was removed in emergency brain surgery.
Young does not look like a man who almost died three months ago. A scar across his forehead and a small bald patch on the back of his head are the only marks of the two surgeries. The September fever spike caused blood clots in his foot. Now he has an excuse to wear Birkenstock sandals all the time.
Because of the pressure caused by the tumor, he had begun to lose control of the right side of his body. Simple math became impossible.
"After the surgery, I asked for paper and pencil and sat there happily doing long division." he said.
The surgery provided instant relief.
As 1 p.m. approaches, he takes the stairs, not the elevator, to class.
in the classroom, the discussion and exchange of ideas intrigue him. For 24 years, he has helped KU students look at life through a philosopher's eyes. Then they critically examine the philosopher's point of view.
This constant exchange of ideas attracted him to teaching philosophy.
"Philosophy consists of a give and take of arguments," he said. "So you can see why I love teaching."
The large, unanswerable questions drew him to his field of study.
"Philosophers deal with questions that are big and very
basic," he said. "Like what the mind is and how it relates to the body. Those are very fundamental questions that have always intrigued me."
A son of a Kmart executive in a Chicago suburb, Young became interested in philosophy during high school. He earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Grinnell College in 1965. He earned his master's degree in 1967 and his doctorate in 1969, both from Yale University.
For 15 years, Young's research interest has been Immanuel Kant's philosophy of mathematics.
In November, he won the Mortar Board Outstanding Educator Award for the second time.
When his oldest son, Jason Young, called from Yale to announce that he also was going to major in philosophy, Young had the same reaction that his parents had more than 25 years earlier.
"The first question that bubbled to my head was 'What are you going to do with it?' Young said.
But Michael Young did not have a career in mind when he decided to major in philosophy.
"At that stage in my life it was like, 'I don't care. It's the only thing that interests me,'" he said.
By the end of the 90-minute class, he has glanced only twice at the notes he spent hours preparing.
Young's freshman year of college opened the academic world to him. He decided never to leave.
As associate dean of liberal arts and sciences, it is important to him that every student receives the same experience that he did.
"I've always felt my college experience was so important to me and so exciting and formative," he said. "I want the same excitement: the same impact for everybody."
And he has worked to improve KU's influence on students
From 1982 to 1985, he served as chair of the committee to reform the general education requirements in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. A year of his life was dedicated to meeting with each department as he worked with
a committee to restructure the bachelors' degree requirements in the college.
Before the restructuring, students could take any of the classes from each department, he said. Prerequisites were not required for upper-level courses, so upper-level courses were taught with the assumption that students were prepared.
"Because every course counted, the departments did have to ask themselves how they were contributing to general education," he said. "Students were taking upper level courses without prerequisites, and the result was kind of dumbing down."
Munro Richardson, a 1992 KU graduate who now working on his master's degree at Harvard University full scholarship, met Young during freshman orientation
Richardson, a first-generation college graduate and Rhodes Scholarship recipient, said he attributed his success to Young, who had helped him with many de sions.
"He was really like a surrogate parent in that cas Richardson said.
Richardson still keeps in touch with Young, who help him with his nomination for the Rhodes and Marsh scholarships for study in Britain.
"It's more than just a job for him." Richardson said. a passion."
The art of fly fishing
It is 1:15 on a Sunday afternoon, and Michael You does not look like a man pressed for time.
He is lounging in a rocking chair in his living room, reinscribing about past fly fishing trips in Colorado and Nsouri with his 20-year-old son, Bryan. a KU junior magna in civil engineering and German
Bryan and Roura Young were married in July 24. after Young's first brain surgery. He attended the wedd in a golf cap and a tuxedo.
Young enjoys spending time outdoors and the taste