TED2007
Bernie Dunlap: The life-long learner
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Wofford College president Bernie Dunlap tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning.
Bernie Dunlap - College president
Bernie Dunlap is a true polymath, whose talents span poetry, opera, ballet, literature and administration. He is the president of South Carolina’s Wofford College. Full bio
Bernie Dunlap is a true polymath, whose talents span poetry, opera, ballet, literature and administration. He is the president of South Carolina’s Wofford College. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:18
"Yo napot, pacak!" Which, as somebody here must surely know,
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means "What's up, guys?" in Magyar,
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that peculiar non-Indo-European language spoken by Hungarians
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for which, given the fact that cognitive diversity is
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at least as threatened as biodiversity on this planet,
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few would have imagined much of a future even a century or two ago.
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But there it is: "Yo napot, pacak!"
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I said somebody here must surely know, because
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despite the fact that there aren't that many Hungarians to begin with,
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and the further fact that, so far as I know, there's not a drop
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of Hungarian blood in my veins, at every critical juncture of my life
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there has been a Hungarian friend or mentor there beside me.
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I even have dreams that take place in landscapes
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I recognize as the landscapes of Hungarian films,
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especially the early movies of Miklos Jancso.
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So, how do I explain this mysterious affinity?
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Maybe it's because my native state of South Carolina,
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which is not much smaller than present-day Hungary,
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once imagined a future for itself as an independent country.
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And as a consequence of that presumption,
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my hometown was burned to the ground by an invading army,
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an experience that has befallen many a Hungarian town and village
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throughout its long and troubled history.
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Or maybe it's because when I was a teenager back in the '50s,
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my uncle Henry -- having denounced the Ku Klux Klan
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and been bombed for his trouble and had crosses burned in his yard,
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living under death threat -- took his wife and children to Massachusetts for safety
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and went back to South Carolina to face down the Klan alone.
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That was a very Hungarian thing to do,
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as anyone will attest who remembers 1956.
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And of course, from time to time Hungarians
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have invented their own equivalent of the Klan.
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Well, it seems to me that this Hungarian presence in my life
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is difficult to account for, but ultimately I ascribe it to an admiration
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for people with a complex moral awareness,
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with a heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado.
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It's not a typical mindset for most Americans,
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but it is perforce typical of virtually all Hungarians.
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So, "Yo napot, pacak!"
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I went back to South Carolina after some 15 years amid the alien corn
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at the tail end of the 1960s,
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with the reckless condescension of that era
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thinking I would save my people.
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Never mind the fact that they were slow to acknowledge they needed saving.
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I labored in that vineyard for a quarter century before
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making my way to a little kingdom of the just in upstate South Carolina,
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a Methodist-affiliated institution of higher learning called Wofford College.
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I knew nothing about Wofford
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and even less about Methodism,
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but I was reassured on the first day that I taught at Wofford College
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to find, among the auditors in my classroom,
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a 90-year-old Hungarian, surrounded by a bevy of middle-aged European women
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who seemed to function as an entourage of Rhinemaidens.
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His name was Sandor Teszler.
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He was a puckish widower whose wife and children were dead
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and whose grandchildren lived far away.
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In appearance, he resembled Mahatma Gandhi,
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minus the loincloth, plus orthopedic boots.
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He had been born in 1903 in the provinces
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of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire,
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in what later would become Yugoslavia.
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He was ostracized as a child, not because he was a Jew --
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his parents weren't very religious anyhow --
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but because he had been born with two club feet,
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a condition which, in those days, required institutionalization
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and a succession of painful operations between the ages of one and 11.
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He went to the commercial business high school as a young man
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in Budapest, and there he was as smart as he was modest
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and he enjoyed a considerable success. And after graduation
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when he went into textile engineering, the success continued.
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He built one plant after another.
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He married and had two sons. He had friends in high places who
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assured him that he was of great value to the economy.
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Once, as he had left instructions to have done,
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he was summoned in the middle of the night by the night watchman at one of his plants.
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The night watchman had caught an employee who was stealing socks --
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it was a hosiery mill, and he simply backed a truck up to the loading dock
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and was shoveling in mountains of socks.
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Mr. Teszler went down to the plant and confronted the thief and said,
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"But why do you steal from me? If you need money you have only to ask."
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The night watchman, seeing how things were going and waxing indignant,
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said, "Well, we're going to call the police, aren't we?"
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But Mr. Teszler answered, "No, that will not be necessary.
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He will not steal from us again."
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Well, maybe he was too trusting, because he stayed where he was
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long after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria
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and even after the arrests and deportations began in Budapest.
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He took the simple precaution of having cyanide capsules placed in lockets
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that could be worn about the necks of himself and his family.
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And then one day, it happened: he and his family were arrested
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and they were taken to a death house on the Danube.
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In those early days of the Final Solution, it was handcrafted brutality;
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people were beaten to death and their bodies tossed into the river.
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But none who entered that death house had ever come out alive.
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And in a twist you would not believe in a Steven Spielberg film --
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the Gauleiter who was overseeing this brutal beating was the very same thief
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who had stolen socks from Mr. Teszler's hosiery mill.
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It was a brutal beating. And midway through that brutality,
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one of Mr. Teszler's sons, Andrew, looked up and said,
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"Is it time to take the capsule now, Papa?"
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And the Gauleiter, who afterwards vanishes from this story,
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leaned down and whispered into Mr. Teszler's ear,
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"No, do not take the capsule. Help is on the way."
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And then resumed the beating.
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But help was on the way, and shortly afterwards
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a car arrived from the Swiss Embassy.
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They were spirited to safety. They were reclassified as Yugoslav citizens
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and they managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers
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for the duration of the War, surviving burnings and bombings
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and, at the end of the War, arrest by the Soviets.
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Probably, Mr. Teszler had gotten some money into Swiss bank accounts
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because he managed to take his family first to Great Britain,
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then to Long Island and then to the center of the textile industry in the American South.
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Which, as chance would have it, was Spartanburg, South Carolina,
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the location of Wofford College.
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And there, Mr. Teszler began all over again and once again achieved immense success,
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especially after he invented the process
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for manufacturing a new fabric called double-knit.
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And then in the late 1950s, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education,
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when the Klan was resurgent all over the South,
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Mr. Teszler said, "I have heard this talk before."
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And he called his top assistant to him and asked,
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"Where would you say, in this region, racism is most virulent?"
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"Well, I don't rightly know, Mr. Teszler. I reckon that would be Kings Mountain."
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"Good. Buy us some land in Kings Mountain
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and announce we are going to build a major plant there."
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The man did as he was told, and shortly afterwards,
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Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain.
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Now, you should know that at that time,
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the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated.
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The white mayor visited Mr. Teszler and said,
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"Mr. Teszler, I trust you’re going to be hiring a lot of white workers."
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Mr. Teszler told him, "You bring me the best workers that you can find,
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and if they are good enough, I will hire them."
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He also received a visit from the leader of the black community,
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a minister, who said, "Mr. Teszler, I sure hope you're going to
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hire some black workers for this new plant of yours."
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He got the same answer: "You bring the best workers that you can find,
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and if they are good enough, I will hire them."
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As it happens, the black minister did his job better than the white mayor,
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but that's neither here or there.
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Mr. Teszler hired 16 men: eight white, eight black.
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They were to be his seed group, his future foremen.
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He had installed the heavy equipment for his new process
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in an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain,
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and for two months these 16 men would live and work together,
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mastering the new process.
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He gathered them together after an initial tour of that facility
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and he asked if there were any questions.
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There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet,
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and then one of the white workers stepped forward and said,
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"Well, yeah. We’ve looked at this place and there's only one place to sleep,
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there's only one place to eat, there's only one bathroom,
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there's only one water fountain. Is this plant going to be integrated or what?"
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Mr. Teszler said, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region
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and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?"
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"No, I reckon I don't."
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And two months later when the main plant opened
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and hundreds of new workers, white and black,
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poured in to see the facility for the first time,
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they were met by the 16 foremen, white and black, standing shoulder to shoulder.
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They toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions, and
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inevitably the same question arose:
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"Is this plant integrated or what?"
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And one of the white foremen stepped forward and said,
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"You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers
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in this industry in this region and this is how we do business.
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Do you have any other questions?"
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And there were none. In one fell swoop,
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Mr. Teszler had integrated the textile industry in that part of the South.
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It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi,
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conducted with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint.
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In his eighties, Mr. Teszler, having retired from the textile industry,
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adopted Wofford College,
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auditing courses every semester,
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and because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved,
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becoming affectionately known as "Opi" -- which is Magyar for grandfather --
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by all and sundry. Before I got there, the library of the college
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had been named for Mr. Teszler, and after I arrived in 1993,
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the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler Professor of the College --
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partly because at that point he had already taken
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all of the courses in the catalog, but mainly because
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he was so conspicuously wiser than any one of us.
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To me, it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit
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of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina
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was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe.
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Wise he was, indeed, but he also had a wonderful sense of humor.
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And once for an interdisciplinary class,
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I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."
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As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild goose chase
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of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden,
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only to find the specter of death waiting for him,
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Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students. And
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as death opened his cloak to embrace the knight
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in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice:
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"Uh oh," he said, "This doesn't look so good." (Laughter)
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But it was music that was his greatest passion, especially opera.
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And on the first occasion that I visited his house, he gave me
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honor of deciding what piece of music we would listen to.
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And I delighted him by rejecting "Cavalleria Rusticana"
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in favor of Bela Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle."
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I love Bartok's music, as did Mr. Teszler,
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and he had virtually every recording of Bartok's music ever issued.
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And it was at his house that I heard for the first time
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Bartok's Third Piano Concerto and learned from
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Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville, North Carolina
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in the last year of the composer's life.
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He was dying of leukemia and he knew it,
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and he dedicated this concerto to his wife,
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Dita, who was herself a concert pianist.
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And into the slow, second movement, marked "adagio religioso,"
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he incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard
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outside his window in what he knew would be his last spring;
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he was imagining a future for her in which he would play no part.
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And clearly this composition is his final statement to her --
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it was first performed after his death --
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and through her to the world.
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And just as clearly, it is saying, "It's okay. It was all so beautiful.
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Whenever you hear this, I will be there."
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It was only after Mr. Teszler's death that I learned
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that the marker on the grave of Bela Bartok in Hartsdale, New York
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was paid for by Sandor Teszler. "Yo napot, Bela!"
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Not long before Mr. Teszler’s own death at the age of 97,
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he heard me hold forth on human iniquity.
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I delivered a lecture in which I described history
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as, on the whole, a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality,
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and Mr. Teszler came up to me afterwards with gentle reproach and said,
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"You know, Doctor, human beings are fundamentally good."
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And I made a vow to myself, then and there,
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that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise
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had reached that conclusion,
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I would not presume to differ until he released me from my vow.
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And now he's dead, so I'm stuck with my vow.
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"Yo napot, Sandor!"
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I thought my skein of Hungarian mentors had come to an end,
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but almost immediately I met Francis Robicsek, a Hungarian doctor --
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actually a heart surgeon in Charlotte, North Carolina, then in his late seventies --
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who had been a pioneer in open-heart surgery,
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and, tinkering away in his garage behind his house,
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had invented many of the devices that are standard parts of those procedures.
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He's also a prodigious art collector, beginning as an intern in Budapest
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by collecting 16th- and 17th-century Dutch art and Hungarian painting,
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and when he came to this country moving on to Spanish colonial art,
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Russian icons and finally Mayan ceramics.
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He's the author of seven books, six of them on Mayan ceramics.
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It was he who broke the Mayan codex, enabling scholars to relate
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the pictographs on Mayan ceramics to the hieroglyphs of the Mayan script.
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On the occasion of my first visit, we toured his house
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and we saw hundreds of works of museum quality,
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and then we paused in front of a closed door and Dr. Robicsek said,
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with obvious pride, "Now for the piece de resistance."
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And he opened the door and we walked into a
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windowless 20-by-20-foot room with shelves from floor to ceiling, and
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crammed on every shelf his collection of Mayan ceramics.
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Now, I know absolutely nothing about Mayan ceramics,
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but I wanted to be as ingratiating as possible so I said,
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"But Dr. Robicsek, this is absolutely dazzling."
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"Yes," he said. "That is what the Louvre said.
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They would not leave me alone until I let them have a piece,
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but it was not a good one." (Laughter)
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Well, it occurred to me that I should invite Dr. Robicsek
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to lecture at Wofford College on -- what else?
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-- Leonardo da Vinci. And further, I should invite him to meet
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my oldest trustee, who had majored in French history at Yale
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some 70-odd years before and, at 89, still ruled the world's
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largest privately owned textile empire with an iron hand.
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His name is Roger Milliken. And Mr. Milliken agreed,
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and Dr. Robicsek agreed. And Dr. Robicsek visited
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and delivered the lecture and it was a dazzling success.
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And afterwards we convened at the President's House with Dr. Robicsek
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on one hand, Mr. Milliken on the other.
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And it was only at that moment, as we were sitting down to dinner,
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that I recognized the enormity of the risk I had created,
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because to bring these two titans, these two masters of the universe
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together -- it was like introducing Mothra to Godzilla over the skyline of Tokyo.
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If they didn't like each other, we could all get trampled to death.
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But they did, they did like each other.
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They got along famously until the very end of the meal,
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and then they got into a furious argument.
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And what they were arguing about was this:
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whether the second Harry Potter movie was as good as the first. (Laughter)
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Mr. Milliken said it was not. Dr. Robicsek disagreed.
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I was still trying to take in the notion that these titans,
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these masters of the universe, in their spare time watch Harry Potter movies,
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when Mr. Milliken thought he would win the argument by saying,
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"You just think it's so good because you didn't read the book."
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And Dr. Robicsek reeled back in his chair, but quickly gathered his wits,
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leaned forward and said, "Well, that is true, but I'll bet you went
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to the movie with a grandchild." "Well, yes, I did," conceded Mr. Milliken.
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"Aha!" said Dr. Robicsek. "I went to the movie all by myself." (Laughter) (Applause)
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And I realized, in this moment of revelation,
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that what these two men were revealing was the secret
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of their extraordinary success, each in his own right.
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And it lay precisely in that insatiable curiosity,
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that irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the subject,
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no matter what the cost,
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even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock
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are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around
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to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 93 years from now.
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"Live each day as if it is your last," said Mahatma Gandhi.
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"Learn as if you'll live forever."
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This is what I'm passionate about. It is precisely this.
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It is this inextinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience,
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no matter how risible, no matter how esoteric,
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no matter how seditious it might seem.
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This defines the imagined futures of our fellow Hungarians --
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Robicsek, Teszler and Bartok -- as it does my own.
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As it does, I suspect, that of everybody here.
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To which I need only add, "Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves."
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This is our task; we know it will be hard.
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"Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves. Yo napot, pacak!" (Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bernie Dunlap - College presidentBernie Dunlap is a true polymath, whose talents span poetry, opera, ballet, literature and administration. He is the president of South Carolina’s Wofford College.
Why you should listen
Bernie Dunlap was a dancer for four years with the Columbia City Ballet, kicking off a life of artistic and cultural exploration. A Rhodes Scholar, he did his PhD in English literature at Harvard, and is now the president of Wofford College, a small liberal arts school in South Carolina. He has taught classes on a wide variety of subjects, from Asian history to creative writing.
He's also a writer-producer for television, and his 19-part series The Renaissance has been adopted for use by more than 100 colleges. He has been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Thailand and a moderator at the Aspen Institute.
Bernie Dunlap | Speaker | TED.com