While Ronald Herzman, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Emeritus, retired from SUNY Geneseo in 2018 after serving on the faculty for nearly half a century it does not mean he is no longer teaching.
“I came to the college in 1969, and I’m still teaching even though I’m retired because the combination of students and my colleagues made the College wonderful place for me to have a career,” said Herzman, who will be teaching a course titled “Poetry and Cosmology in the Middle Ages” during the coming 2023-24 academic year.
Together with his wife, Ellen, Herzman supports the Ronald Herzman Study Abroad Endowment Fund, which was established in 2018 to enable Geneseo students who otherwise could not afford to have an international academic experience.
“The truth is that SUNY is a terribly underfunded system, and I think that in terms of what Geneseo offers students, it’s a great bang for the buck and it always has been,” said Herzman. “I hope that we can support the sorts of programs that often get cut when the budget is tight, as it always is. I like the place enormously, it’s been very, very good to me, so giving back just seems like a logical thing to do.”
Herzman is among the world’s most respected scholars of the Italian poet, writer and philosopher Dante Alighieri and has authored a number of books, including “The Medieval World View: An Introduction,” which he co-authored with William R. Cook, Distinguished Teaching Professor of History Emeritus. The book has been in use in classrooms worldwide for nearly 40 years. He also has authored 50 articles for academic journals, made countless presentations and served three years as chair of the College’s English department. He and Cook developed an “Age of Dante” course they team taught at Geneseo and abroad for 40 years.
For the past eight years, Herzman has served as director of education and outreach for the Dante Society of America, one of the oldest academic societies in North America. In this role, Herzman speaks to non-academic audiences, and often shares two anecdotes about how reading Dante can impact someone.
“I had a student in my Dante class several years ago, who sort of wandered in because he heard it was a good class, but he was headed to law school,” Herzman recalls. “About halfway through the class, he came into my office and he said, ‘Dante is the smartest person I’ve ever encountered. I’m going to continue to do this,’ and he went on and got a PhD in medieval studies.”
During the 1980s, Herzman and Cook even taught a course on Dante at the Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison where about 70 percent of the inmates have committed a violent crime and as much as 30 percent have taken a life. On one occasion Herzman noticed an inmate standing by a water fountain during a final exam.
“I walked over and he looked up from the water fountain and said, ‘When I read this stuff, it’s like I’m out of here,’” Herzman recalled. “Dante appeals to the head and the heart together better than anybody else that I’ve come across.”
One of the most rewarding aspects of his academic career, Herzman said, has been witnessing how much he has influenced students, particularly those who ended pursuing academic careers themselves, including at the College.
“I’m very fortunate in that a great number of my close friends turn out to be former students of mine, and that’s extraordinarily rewarding,” he said. “It’s really quite wonderful to learn from them or to collaborate with them in one way or another. For that I consider myself very lucky.”
