Last April, Marlon Ross visited his alma mater to help celebrate the inauguration of Southwestern's 14th President, Jake B. Schrum. As a part of the week of activities, Ross delivered the Claud Howard and Elizabeth A. Crawford Lecture, "The Black Man Problem: Manly Tactics of Racial Trespassing in Jim Crow America."

"Returning to Southwestern for a visit after 20 years was a great pleasure, if somewhat disorienting. In many ways, SU is a different place from when I was there as a skinny kid. It has grown in enrollment, in campus development, and in spirit. The student body is not only larger but much more diverse now, one of the most refreshing surprises, and a great improvement.

"In other ways, SU remains the same. The intimate faculty-student interaction, the sense of the Texas hill country around the corner and the big sky above, the feeling of students both cloistered from the larger world and at the same time pushed into it — all resonated as familiar aspects of the place."

Ross is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American & African Studies. He recently moved from a faculty position at the University of Michigan. "It was very hard to leave Michigan and the city of Ann Arbor, both for which I have great fondness, but I felt that it was time for a change, and Virginia seemed to offer some interesting opportunities and challenges."

His current research involves a book project focused on "how African American manhood has been imaged, imagined, fictionalized, polemicized, politicized, and institutionalized as a central organizing identity of American culture and history from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth." As he is nearing the end of the project, he has already begun work on another book about our culture's views about fame and notoriety and what determines each.

After completing a B.A. in English at Southwestern, he received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He says that his professors at SU still influence the way he approaches teaching and learning.

"From my teachers at Southwestern I have learned to see the classroom as an ongoing experiment where change, surprises, and reversals of meaning can take place. I can no more control every response, just as I cannot control all of the accidents of living, nor should I desire to. Different students learn in different ways, and it's important to present materials from different perspectives.

"I found myself ruminating on questions asked long ago by one of my SU teachers, and I realized that learning requires sometimes a very long incubation before it is birthed into knowledge. The most important thing is for me to keep a passionate curiosity, open to seeing old things in new ways, and open to hearing anew the same ideas from different students from year to year. This is difficult, especially when one has taught the same course many times. It is absolutely essential though. I have especially learned this from my SU teachers in literature, history, and philosophy. No matter how large my class, I try to simulate the intimacy of the typical Southwestern classroom."