We all have favorite teachers or professors. Mine died last week. Bill Leverette taught history at Furman for almost 30 years. He was my teacher, mentor, and friend. I learned from him, admired him, loved him. Now I miss him -- greatly.

A native of Nashville and a graduate of Vanderbilt, Bill Leverette was a free-thinking, plain-speaking man who relished how lucky he was to spend most of his adult life doing what he loved: reading, writing, teaching, discussing, and reflecting. He taught not because his students needed him but because he needed his students. That his former students became his closest friends testifies to his success as a professor.

One of Bill's many virtues was his talent for finding hidden abilities in students whose motivation had ebbed or been blunted by less perceptive instructors. And once he found such a germ of ability he would goad and challenge us until it flowered.

By entering Bill's classroom in 1970, I entered his well-furnished mind and benefited from his easily summoned knowledge. His love for language and for learning exercised a seductive charm over me. With each encounter, I collected chips of his brilliance and piled them into my consciousness like a cairn.

Bill took history seriously, and he helped me see its importance as well. He stressed that the past was filled with surprise and unpredictability, populated with hard-pressed people making difficult choices on the basis of inadequate information.

In teaching history, Bill refused to tether himself to the balloons of academic fashion. He disdained the superficial and superfluous, the trendy and ideological. He insisted that we go to the original sources themselves and write our own history.

Bill offered his self to his students as well as his learning. He was a courageous teacher in that he revealed to us exactly how he was thinking, feeling, struggling. He prized intellectual honesty and emotional candor. He told us not simply about the past but about life as he understood it. Along the way he added dashes of irony, wit, humility, and the dignity that comes from facing life's terrible uncertainties.

Bill was an ardently informal person. His casual classroom manner and the engaging idiosyncrasies of his personality drew me into his orbit. On most days he would sit on the front of the desk, his glasses awry as he glanced only occasionally at the bare outline of a lecture scribbled on a yellow legal pad. As he warmed to the subject of the day, he would begin making sweeping, almost manic, gestures with his arms and hands to highlight a point and sustain our attention.
His spontaneous lectures were yeasty and digressive. How bracing it was to be in the company of this teacher for whom scholarship was an heroic enterprise. How beneficial it was to be challenged to become a better writer, a clearer thinker, and a more tenacious defender of one's own values and conclusions.

In the process of teaching us how to think and read, analyze and write, Bill Leverette became an adviser about life, a confidante, a friend. While jealous of his independence, he was liberal with his time, and we were the beneficiaries of his attention.

Bill repeatedly demonstrated that some of the most important teaching occurs outside the classroom and off the campus. He extended us the hospitality of his home as well as his study. His favorite pastime was hiking. A woodland path provided him with a balsam tonic. Nature anchored his outlook and restored his balance; its stillness and solitude helped calm his soul. Even though nature isn't always tranquil, Bill found serenity there: the out-of-doors provided him a respite from urban frazzle and his own demons.

It was while hiking with Bill that I learned to appreciate those inspired moments when he would wax philosophical and help me distinguish between true culture and varnish. Under his tutelage I experienced what a liberal education in its ideal sense can be. Bill Leverette shook me up without disorienting me. In the process, he helped me become a better person as well as a better student. He wanted me not just to learn about history but to be wise, decent, humane, generous and sincere.

How lucky I was to know Bill Leverette. I wish every student could have a teacher and a friend like him. He gave me the great gift of his example, and for that I am eternally grateful.