From Architecture to Academia

From Architecture to Academia: Retiring Professor of Politics Robert Eden Pushes Students to Love Learning

“If you’re scared of putting your foot in the water, it takes a long time to learn how to swim,” retiring Professor of Politics Robert Eden says. “Especially if no one throws you in.”

For Eden, who will retire at the end of August after 29 years at Hillsdale College, education is like the water into which students must either jump or be pushed. He says that the 14 years of his own college education taught him both to jump in himself and to help others love learning and school.

Eden started his undergraduate career in 1960 at Reed College in Oregon, where he says he had the experience of a small liberal arts college like Hillsdale. After two years, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied architecture and taught on the faculty from 1966 to 1967.  

“I wanted to be an architect, so it took me a long time to graduate,” Eden says.

But Eden soon realized that he did not want to be an architect. He attended the University of Chicago for one year, and then Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1974.

“Only when I was teaching in the architecture department did I decide that I didn’t want to be an architect, and that I wanted to go into the study of politics,” he says. “I was profoundly interested in political theory. It took a long time to discover what I really thought.”

After teaching in Canada for 13 years because of the academic depression there, Eden was introduced to Hillsdale College. He was invited to Hillsdale to help run the Center for Constructive Alternatives, but instead took a position in the Politics Department in 1987.

“I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do,” Eden says. “If you find someone who spends 14 years getting an education, you figure that person must either be crazy or completely impractical.”

Fortunately, Eden turned out to be neither of those things. He says that, when he first came to Hillsdale, he was concerned with fundamentals, with students who were both unprepared for college and who were afraid of education.

He says that he considers helping students overcome that fear as one of his greatest academic accomplishments. He did this, for one, by giving vocabulary tests.

“One of the things I worked very hard on for years was getting students to experience what it meant to build your vocabulary slowly,” he says.

Eden was also involved in the implementation of the Constitution core class. His other favorite classes to teach were Literature and Politics and a class on American historian and autobiographer Henry Adams.

Looking back over his 29 years at the College, Eden recalls that one of his favorite moments was when a former student, who was visiting her own child during Parents Weekend, stopped by to see Eden and share a memory.

“There was a former student 20 years later who remembered my classes and who liked them a lot,” Eden says. “That’s a real joy.”


Printed in the Spring 2016 Alumni Magazine