‘Dead Poets’ Role Model Loses His Job

You could call it life imitating art imitating life, or the revenge of Robin Williams’ ghosts.

The actor’s old prep school wrestling coach and history teacher, who apparently served as a model for the inspiring but unorthodox instructor Williams portrayed in “Dead Poets Society,” has not been rehired after 28 years on the job.

Like his cinematic counterpart, who was fired for repeatedly disregarding convention at the fictional Welton Academy, John Campbell says his sin, metaphorically speaking, was failing to keep his classroom chairs in a row at Detroit Country Day School.

“I’ve never followed the textbook,” Campbell, 55, said Tuesday. “During tests we sing ‘Yellow Submarine.’ Private schools are a corporate business, and I don’t fit the corporate profile.”

An official at the prestigious co-ed school in the suburb of Birmingham would say only that Campbell’s contract wasn’t being renewed because of unspecified longstanding “concerns.”

“John Campbell has been on probation for several years, has been aware of the school’s concerns and has not satisfactorily demonstrated a willingness to adhere to all the academic and professional standards of the school,” said a written statement attributed to headmaster Gerald T. Hansen.

Campbell said he couldn’t remember all the school’s complaints, but he said one was that he was “disheveled,” to which he confessed. He said he was also accused of not being hard enough on students. And he said he complained a lot about teachers’ fringe benefits.

“Over the years, I’ve pissed absolutely everybody off,” he said jovially. “But I’ve never been caught having a drink before class, I’ve never done it to the headmaster’s wife in front of a student assembly and I’ve never laid a hand on a female student.”

If he ever laid a hand on a male student, it was only in his former capacity as varsity wrestling coach, he added. Williams was one of his wrestlers and “a very decent 112-pounder,” Campbell added.

Williams, who grew up in Birmingham, attended Detroit Country Day through his junior year, until his family moved to California. His mother said leaving what was then a strict, conservative boys’ school was a turning point in Williams’ life.

In the 1989 movie, Williams plays an eccentric and exuberant young English teacher named John Keating who disrupts the routine at his stuffy private boys’ school, challenging students to defy convention and act on their dreams. Keating is eventually fired.

The movie was written by Tom Schulman, who has said he based the Keating character partly on a Hollywood acting coach. Williams has said he interpreted the character as a blend of various instructors he’d known, especially Campbell.

“That’s where I get my sometimes cynical view of history,” Williams told the Detroit News when the movie came out. “It was a peeling back of the illusion to reveal the gruesome facts. Basically, (Campbell) said that history would make an incredible comedy except that a lot of people died.”

Williams couldn’t be reached for comment. But a former classmate, prominent Detroit lawyer Geoffrey Fiegel, said: “I wouldn’t put one iota of confidence in anything that school said.”

Fiegel, 40, who says he was the first student kicked out of Country Day for having long hair, recalls Campbell as “an extremely inspiring and bright teacher and a hard-nosed coach, but in my experience he was not a nonconformist. Maybe he’s changed. Any thinking person would rebel at that school.”

Laura Green, 15, who studied government and economics under Campbell, said he reminded her of the teacher in the movie: “He didn’t follow the book. He made what he was teaching seem more real. Sometimes we seemed far ahead of other classes that were using the book. He’s just real nice and funny. I think Country Day lost a really good teacher.”