Dr. Michael J. Kerlin, 1936-2007

It sometimes take a while for news to reach me from Philadelphia, where I attended and graduated from La Salle University. Late last week, I saw the news that one of my professors had died back in November. Dr. Michael Kerlin was Chair of the Philosophy Department at La Salle for 28 years. He had suffered from leukemia for the past couple years, and died November 23, the day after Thanksgiving.

I had the privelege of knowing Dr. Kerlin on two levels - I was in his Honors Philsophy of Western Civilzation course for both semesters of my freshman year, and he was also my adviser as a philosophy major. Put simply, he was one of the best teachers I have ever had - and I have had a lot of teachers. He made philosophy fun and enjoyable and taught us much from his own great store of wisdom and knowledge. He was a perpetual student himself, receiving an MBA later in life so that he would know what business students were learning when he taught them business ethics courses, and he tried to learn a new language every year - the year I had him in class, he was learning Arabic. They say that he had a copy of "Teach Yourself New Testament Greek" with him in the hospital as he was dying.

When I became a teacher (albeit on the high school level), I tried to recall all the great teachers I had over the years to see what I could learn from them in my own teaching. From Dr. Kerlin I learned many things:

- First of all, love your students. Dr. Kerlin truly cared about our learning, but he also cared about us as people. As with many of the professors at La Salle, he had our class to his home for dinner at the end of the school year. We knew our professors as people, not just as teachers.

- The best way to learn is through discussion. Dr. Kerlin was a master at leading discussions, and that is how we spent the entirety of our class periods.

- The second best way to learn is through writing. We would write a paper a week, crticially analyzing the philsopher we were studying that week.

- The best teacher is also a great student - as I said above, Dr. Kerlin never stopped learning, even to his death bed. And, even though he was a Philosophy professor, he did not limit his reading and learning to his own discipline.

- A good teacher is creative. It would take pages to list the many creative ways Dr. Kerlin helped us learn philosophy. The most memorable was putting on a mock trial of whether or not the native Americans should be forced to be baptized when the Spanish missionaries first came to this hemisphere. Based on the real controversy of Bartolome de las Casas and Juan de Sepulveda, the witnesses in the case were all the great philosophers of history whom we had studied over the course of the semester. But there was so much more ...

For me, what made La Salle such a great university was the dedication of the professors to teaching and to their students. Dr. Kerlin exemplified all that is great about the school, and about teachers in general. May he rest in peace!

Here is a picture from my college graduation. Dr. Kerlin is on the left of the picture, and on the right is Dr. Marc Moreau, the current chair of La Salle's Philosophy Department.