The Resources of Gaiety: A Professor's Retrospective

Abstract

In September 1934, Edgar Z. Friedenberg entered Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, as a 13-year-old freshman: the first formal school he had ever attended. This article analyzes the ways in which his lifelong attraction and affection for young men determined his decision to become a university professor and his progress through an academic career ending, as Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Canada, where he taught for 16 years until his retirement in 1986. This is not a memoir and therefore not a coming-out story, but a discussion of the way his feelings for his students affected his perception of the society in which he was obliged to prepare them to function. Such antagonism as he aroused in administrators stemmed, apparently, not from the fear that he might create a scandal but rather that his nurturance was softening the guys up, spoiling them as potential competitors; and marring their prospects of individual competitive success.