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I took a critical theory class with Marc Blanchard in the spring of 2005—my first year as a grad student at Davis. I can say that I have never experienced anything like working with Marc. It is hard to capture what went on in that class—and others I took with him in the years that followed (one always studied with Marc, never from), but I know that who I am as a scholar, a teacher, and as a thinker is indelibly marked by having a chance to work with him.

I laughed to myself when reading something my colleague, Sarah Juliet Lauro, had written in the first few days after Marc’s death. It was about a twenty minute conversation in Marc’s class (our class, he would insist) on the word “field”—it must have been about four years ago when this discussion took place, but I remember it quite vividly and it was one of the first things I thought of in thinking back on my work with Marc. No one taught the importance of etymology and the depth of wisdom contained in the O.E.D. as well as Marc Blanchard. “The O.E.D.—that’s my bible,” I remember him saying. This stuck with me.

“What is a field?” Marc asks, and we all try to offer our very learned, theoretical, “sophisticated” answers. And what does Marc say: “no, no, no a field is where you keep the cows”….Marc had a way of pulling us out of a fog of jargon and “graduate-school-speak” and actually getting us to do something so rare as thinking. The case in point being that this discussion about the word “field” became so fascinating that it stuck with both Sarah and I to this day—even though I am certain we never discussed it until these reflections and it was one of the first moments I thought of in trying to convey the experience of being a student in Marc’s classes.

Marc questioned the cult of the individual—and not merely by speaking or writing about the importance of collectivity, but he taught us to work, think, and speak collectively. This is one of the many gifts that he gave us—one that stays, that marks, that shifts one’s thinking, writing, teaching. An inescapable gift.

Syllabus? What? No syllabus could be found in Marc’s graduate classes as we never knew where our discussions might lead us. Can you imagine the lesson in thinking, in questioning, in what a seminar or education really is, that one learns in that one moment when the unassuming grad student who is new to Marc’s classes raises a tentative hand and asks “where is the syllabus?” That was always a great moment. When I think about myself as a teacher I am embarrassed by how much I admire Marc’s teaching style and how little I incorporate it into my own. The way Marc stepped out of what was expected in the classroom—not merely for the sake of shock or blind-rebellion, but as an intelligent resistance to solidified, regurgitative scholarship at the level of practice—offers us an immense challenge to live up to as thinkers and as teachers.

Once I heard a fellow grad student say “Blanchard, oh I dropped his class because he was too political.” Well, this comment came as no surprise to me. I think Marc would be happy to be known as “too political”—His classroom was often overtly “political” in his examples of the University of California/Bechtel/Los Alamos contract placing us in “the belly of the beast” on the UC campus, along with his work on the militarization of the University, or analysis of the media representation of a local Chevron oil spill which causes us to weep for injured birds while ignoring the Richmond ghettos. Certainly his theories that race, gender, and animal rights debates often mask THE debate over class, might be called “too political” by some, but I would insist that Marc’s teaching style is far more revolutionary, far more incendiary, and “political” than any subject matter ever addressed in his seminars.

In a seminar years after I had first studied with Marc, once, out of the blue in mid-sentence he broke off from his point, looked right at me and said “Are you happy? What’s going on with you?” After my utter shock—Professors in seminars are supposed to pose interesting questions, throw out theoretical conundrums, offer thoughtful reflections—but interrupt class for some personal comment on a grad student’s mental state—who does that? That is one Pandora’s box most professors know better than to even get near. But Marc’s response to my bewildered look was: “Let’s have coffee.” It personalized a rather impersonal system—and a few days later I found myself sitting across from this brilliant man who could reflect on any subject in staggering depth and detail—but we were talking about me and my future and my experiences in grad school. He talked about his daughter, and his divorce, and his experiences living and teaching abroad and didn’t just give me some quotations from a book. He really just sat down and talked to me. Again: Who does that? At everyone’s passing they will say “how unique” “how special” “how one of a kind.” And I want to say that here. But I think it is the last thing Marc would think—the least important thing to be. I don’t know. I took two or three seminars with Marc, saw him here and there at lectures over the last few years. I didn’t know him all that well. But just from the little part of him that I knew, his ways of thinking and being feel so much a part of my own ways—I can only imagine the influence and effect he had on countless other students, colleagues, friends, and family who had more years to share with him.