“If I were to die, I want to have taught that day”

Five Years without Walter

Walter E. Williams passed away five years ago today. There will undoubtedly be many tributes to him, expressing how great he was as an economist and colleague, but I want to talk about Walter the teacher. I was his student in his Fall 2010 Microeconomics I course in the PhD program at GMU. He had many jokes that he used to say (for example, “the E stands for ‘Excellence’”) and clever ways to communicate with his students. Two personal favorites, paraphrased:

“One night, I came home from the bar very, very late and found Mrs. Williams still awake in the living room. When I walked in, she said, ‘Oh Walter, I was worried sick about you!’

What’s wrong with this picture?”

After letting us spend several minutes, guessing silly things like, “your wife loves you?” and “your wife should have realized that you had a black belt in karate and beat Wilt Chamberlin in basketball, what would anyone be able to do to you?” he sheepishly grinned and said:

“No no no, it means I didn’t have enough life insurance. If what I’m teaching you is correct, my wife should be indifferent to whether I come home that night or not. So the next day, I increased my life insurance coverage.”

Then he’d ask, “how would I know if I increased it too much? She’d be upset when I came home!”

The second has to be the story about how much he loved his wife and marginal analysis.

One night, as I was heading out the door to go to the bar with some friends, my wife accused me of loving them more than I loved her. Nonsense, I told her. In absolute terms, I love you more than anything in this world. But at the margin, my love, tonight I prefer to be with them.

Walter’s impact on me is enduring, both professionally and physically. Professionally, he instilled in me both an appreciation for economics done right and the difference between education and proselytization. Walter suffered no fools and was demanding in his grading and in his writing. You were not going to get any leeway for using the wrong word and pleas of, “but this says the same thing!” would absolutely fall on deaf ears. You were expected to know your stuff and to know how to communicate it well.

He also instilled in me the importance of how one conducts themself in the classroom. Professors are there to educate, not to proselytize or indoctrinate. Walter took great care to never use any type of normative language, keeping everything positive. “Will minimum wage legislation lead to disemployment effects, yes or no?” is a scientific, and positive question. “Should we raise the minimum wage or not” is fundamentally different question because it involves evaluating trade-offs and is inherently value-laden/normative. You can use positive analysis to inform your normative conclusions, sure, but the two are fundamentally different. Testing students on the latter is indoctrination. Testing them on the former is education. Walter instilled in all of his students the importance of never indoctrinating students.

For him, this was incredibly impressive. He was (obviously) a prolific writer, so his normative stances on so many issues were easy enough to find. And plenty of people who were not enrolled at GMU would sit in on his classes, hoping to learn why the democrats were wrong… or something. They’d ask questions about Walter’s stance on some policy and he’d just reply, “You can look that up on your own time, Mr. Whatever. We’re here to learn economics, not talk politics.”

Physically, Walter is the man who designed the tattoo on my right bicep. After passing my microeconomics prelim exam after my first year of grad school, I was ecstatic. I went straight to Walter’s office and asked him if he would draw one of the economics graphs from the exam for me. He looked confused and said, “Mr. Hebert, as you demonstrated, you are more than capable of drawing that picture yourself.” But when I told him that I wanted to get it as a tattoo and that it would be a tremendous honor if he would draw it himself, he chuckled. “In all my years, nobody has asked me to design a tattoo for them. Can I bring it to you tomorrow? I want to make sure I draw it well.”

The next day, Walter brought me a lovely note, commending me on my performance in my first year of classes, and such. Included was the graph from the exam. I immediately went to the tattoo parlor and had them put it on my arm. Regrettably, I lost the note that he wrote me when the house I was renting flooded, but the tattoo lives on.

Finally, I’ll tell one last story about the kind of man Walter was. At a 2003 toast held in his honor (despite his protest), Walter quipped, “if I should ever die, I want to have taught that day.” Not long after he finished teaching for the night, Walter passed away, sitting in his car in the parking deck at GMU.

Walter was an amazing professor, an amazing thinker, and an amazing man. I am so glad that I went to GMU for graduate school, got to take a course from him, and got to spend four years interacting with him. I benefit tremendously from him to this day, both in terms of the values he instilled in me, but also by referencing his articles. Any time I want to write about something, one of my first searches is “Walter Williams topic” to see what he may have written on the subject and how he approached it. Invariably, I find several articles, all of which are inspiring both for the analysis and their clarity. I have a long way to go until I can approach the talents of Walter. I doubt I will ever get there. But if I can be even a fraction of him, I’ll count that as a success.

Thank you, Walter. You were most certainly “Excellent.”