Asking the Right Questions: Remembering David Montgomery

Extract

David and Marty Montgomery had enormous influence over my life and intellectual work, in ways that I continue to discover on a daily basis. I first heard about David in the early 1980s when I started Yale College because he was well known for being a wonderful lecturer. When I went to college, we were deep in the middle of Reagan's first term as president. Those were conservative times. Many of us undergraduates had no direct memories of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, or the political unrest of the late 1960s and looked forward to becoming lawyers or working on Wall Street. Someone recommended that I take David Montgomery's class because he was a well-known professor. So along with a few hundred of my classmates, I trooped along to the Lindsley-Chit 101 classroom. I do not remember much of those initial lectures, but I do remember how David had great stage presence as he strode around the stage and told us stories about everyday people who fought for workers' rights.