Dear Murf,
Well, I got the various letters regarding our upcoming 40th reunion. And so I spent an hour looking at the website this afternoon. It is really hard to conceive that it has been that long. Through the years, I have been back to Watertown for occasional short visits to Taft. Most recently in the spring of 1999. But I have never made it to a Reunion, and it doesn’t look like I will make it to this one either.
I am a Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester (Rochester, New York). Had I been home, I would have made an effort to come to this Reunion. But I am currently on sabbatical leave and spending the time enjoying the delights of California in Santa Barbara. As I am chained to my desk working on two book projects until August, I am not going to be on the East coast in time for the upcoming Taft gathering of our class.
I have spent my adult life working as an educator working both inside and outside University contexts. My academic specialty centers on South Asian religions, particularly Hinduism and medieval Sanskrit texts. Just to give you the very brief autobiography: after Taft, I spent five years completing a B.A. in Philosophy at Yale (graduating with the class of ’71), which included a year studying in Switzerland and Spain. I then spent a number of years studying with a traditional Hindu meditation teacher, before beginning a ten year stint in graduate school in (1975-1985), at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
When I received my Ph.D., I started my first academic job, teaching for twelve years at Michigan State University, (where I achieved the elusive “condition” of tenure, and also spent seven challenging years as Department Chair.) I was then recruited to join the Faculty at the University of Rochester in 1997, where I now very happily teach courses on Hinduism, Buddhism, mysticism, comparative religion, Sanskrit, and many other related themes.
My most enrolled course (in which I have had almost a thousand students in the last seven years) is entitled Death, Dying and Beyond, and uses the metaphor of the Hindu cremation ground to consider these important and daunting themes with students. I have done the usual academic publishing of many articles and monographs. My book, The Triadic Heart of Shiva, published in 1989, continues to sell and be read by interested academics and lay folk. I am attaching a recent snap of me taken last month on a boat ride on the Ganges in Varanasi, India. As one might imagine, I travel to India frequently for my research, which centers on the worship of the Hindu God, Shiva. I was in Varanasi last month just days before the deplorable bombings that happened there. My other area of expertise focuses on the study of Hindu Gurus in America, about which I am currently doing research for a book.
On the personal front, I report that I have been married twice, struck out twice. I have a daughter, Katie, by my second marriage who is now 21. She’s been to India twice already a
Much more to say about myself, of course. But the above probably suffices.
Taft seems like a distant dream. And at the same time, it is stunning for me to realize the continuing impact of those four years on the rest of my life.
At reunion time, I thought I would send in these remarks about myself as I have not been a good contributor to the Alumni magazine notes down through the years. If these notes ever get added to the website or any other appropriate place, I would also like to send my warm regards to all my classmates. In particular, I send warm greetings to Ellis Wasson, and to my fellow Tafties from Venezuela, Lann Jones and Rob Albert! Where are you guys? And what ever happened to Chuck Chadwick?
I have so many memories of Taft escapades. In particular, I remember the telegraph system several of us rigged between our rooms. It was wired directly into a locked drawer of our desks so we could preserve the confidentiality of the very important morse code messages we sent one another through this method. When I visited Taft in 1976, I thought I could still see the wires hanging on the outside of our old room windows of this primitive communication experiment. (A long way from the cell phones of today)....I also remember the wire hanger keys we created to the locks on the doors of our rooms Lower Mid year on the old Kitchen Corridor, (one of the most “luxurious” abodes I have had the pleasure of living in!) Of course, what you don’t see in the Alumni Bulletin are things like how once a month in the mail room there would be a huge stack of brown wrapped magazines which were all the issues of Playboy that our class subscribed to!
So many other Taft memories flood back. We should all write our memoirs some day and recount the fabulous adventures of Taft in the early sixties. At root, what I most remember about Taft is the peculiar combination of exhilaration and sheer terror that saturated every single day there. I wonder if it is still the same for current students....
For anyone who is interested, I am reachable via my email address: rashivam@rochester.rr.com
Thank you for the enthusiastic work you are doing in support of the Reunion. By the way, didn’t we sit in adjacent seats for years at Vespers, Job assembly and the like?....The joys of alphabetized seating at Taft in those days.
with very best wishes to you.
Paul
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Paul E. Muller-Ortega
Professor of Religion, University of Rochester
(until 8/31/2006)
1187 Coast Village Rd., Ste. 1-480
Montecito, CA 93108
PS. As soon as I sent you the last message, I got an email telling me that a short article about myself and my colleague, Douglas Brooks, had just been published in the University of Rochester Alumni magazine and was available on the web. I don’t mean to overwhelm you with stuff about myself!!! But just in case, since Taft is so much on my mind these days, I am sending it to you. Perhaps you can append the link to my letter?
The link to the article is: http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V68N3/feature3.html
One last detail: when I was in graduate school, I discovered that one of the best books on Indian Philosophy (the Encylopedia of Indian Philosophy) had been authored by a Taft graduate, Karl Potter (I believe he graduated in the 40’s). He is a now professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Washington. So I am by no means the only Taft graduate to have entered this rather abstruse field of academic pursuit.
all the best,
Paul
