A college senior’s experience in an upper-division seminar in sociology depends primarily on one factor: the professor. I had the best.

I had never had an instructor like Professor Dukes. On the surface, he often didn’t seem to teach. If he came into the classroom and found the students immersed in conversation, he might listen in for a while, then gradually enter into the conversation himself and steer it in a direction relevant to the broader aims of the course. His breezy style created an atmosphere where all his students felt themselves participants, rather than pupils, and for years after graduation I found my thoughts drifting back to sociology and Richard Dukes.

But one class in particular has stuck in my memory. That was the day Professor Dukes came into the room with a board game tucked under…