From Dorm Room to Academic Center Stage

Aside from the dozen scholarly tomes he’s written, another thing brings USC professor Stephen Toulmin distinction in academia: where he lives.

In a dorm. At age 74.

What’s more, the British-born philosopher and historian has a dining hall set aside one evening a week so he and fellow dorm residents can dine and chat in the intimate style of his days at Cambridge.

It’s not all highbrow talk over the spinach linguine. At the last dinner, he stood up to announce an upcoming whale watching trip.

The gray-bearded professor’s latest distinction, though, has nothing to do with eating or living in a dorm. On Tuesday, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced that he will deliver its 26th annual Jefferson Lecture next month--the federal government’s highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

In giving the March 26 speech at the Kennedy Center in Washington, which carries a $10,000 honorarium, Toulmin will follow such previous lecturers as novelist Toni Morrison, architectural historian Vincent Scully and poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

The lectures, which honor intellectual and civic virtues exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, often are published as books. “Prof. Toulmin stands out as an interdisciplinary thinker with a passion for placing contemporary issues in broad historical perspective,” said Sheldon Hackney, the endowment’s chairman.

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Indeed, Toulmin is hard to pigeonhole in an age of scholarly specialization. His wife, Donna, a lawyer and USC lecturer, teases him about being an “intellectual buccaneer.”

He has influenced an array of fields.

“He wrote books on rhetoric that defined the discipline,” said Saul Morson, a Northwestern University Russian literature professor and former colleague. “Some of his histories of science are still widely read 45 years after he wrote them. His is the sort of name that academics from 20 disciplines would know and respect.”

Toulmin is perhaps best known as a champion of practical philosophy, nudging scholars to move from abstract theories to public debates over environmental and nuclear policy and medical ethics. “It is time for philosophers to come out of their self-imposed isolation and reenter the collective world of practical life and shared human problems,” he once wrote.

Writing on the historical philosophy of science, he has urged scientists to keep in mind the human impact of their research. And he recently has focused on intellectual and cultural diversity.

In his book “Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity,” he argues that modern thought based on the rigidity of the Age of Reason might do well to adopt more “intellectual modesty, uncertainty and toleration” found in the writings of 16th century humanists such as Shakespeare and Michel de Montaigne.

Along those lines, his Jefferson lecture will focus on the “importance of dissent,” and how thinking broadly on questions of the day reinforces the understanding that others are entitled to their own point of view.

Trained as a physicist, Toulmin returned to Cambridge after World War II to earn a doctorate in philosophy. In the past 48 years, he has taught at Oxford, Leeds, Brandeis, Michigan State, the University of Chicago and Northwestern.

Reaching an age when many of his contemporaries retired, Toulmin showed no interest in becoming professor emeritus. “The word emeritus means worn out, if you look up the word in a Latin dictionary,” he said. “I’m not quite there yet.”

So when Northwestern retired him at 70, he accepted an appointment to USC’s Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies.

He and his wife also decided to move into a rent-free, two-bedroom faculty “master” apartment in a dorm at North College, amid 550 students. Only a dozen of USC’s 2,500 full-time faculty live in student housing.

For three years now, the Toulmins have good-naturedly accepted the ear-splitting stereos, middle-of-the-night fire alarms and other disquieting aspects of dorm life.

During final exam week, they turn their apartment into a “rescue mission,” offering coffee, cookies and pizza to stressed neighbors from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.

“We get 100 to 200 students a night,” Donna Toulmin said. “We started it because we didn’t want them walking up Figueroa looking for a cup of coffee in the middle of the night.”

The Wednesday night dinners, in contrast, are designed to pull students out of their scattered, fast-food lives, the professor said, and savor the experience of living on campus.

When acquaintance Stephen Jay Gould lectured on campus, Toulmin brought the famous paleontologist to the dorm for a more intimate mixer with students. They have had similar mixers with authors Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel.

“Students get only part of their education from formal classwork,” Toulmin said. “The rest comes from the friendships and relationships they form. If they live in a community where they’re in touch with faculty and interacting with one another, then their college experience is going to be that much richer.”

Late last semester, life in the dorm became unsettled when someone scrawled a swastika on the door of a Jewish student. Toulmin and student resident assistants called a mandatory dorm meeting, disrupting study groups preparing for finals and other activities.

Toulmin then made an eloquent appeal for tolerance by recounting his experience living in Europe during the rise of the Nazis, telling how, “It didn’t seem that much to begin with, but in the end 6 million Jews were dead.”

Ed Silva, a graduate student who is the dorm’s assistant resident director, recalled how many of the students were initially restless, “but that settled them right down. His wisdom made the difference.”