Tuesday’s with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson

For five years after receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago, Morrie worked at a mental hospital near Washington DC under a grant to study mental patients and their treatments. He had a knack for befriending even the most silent of them, getting them to open up to him. He realized that most of them were treated as if they didn’t exist, and that no one, including the overworked hospital staff, showed them compassion.

As a professor at Brandeis, Morrie had many students who became leaders in the anti-war movement of the 1960s—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis—and Morrie’s sociology department sympathized with them, giving automatic A’s to any student who fell behind in their schoolwork to help them retain their scholastic draft deferments.

The sociology professors developed discussion classes instead of lectures, assigned students civil rights projects in the Deep South, and attended protest marches alongside them. When a black student group took over a lecture hall for several weeks, one of them invited Morrie inside to talk, and he came out with a list of their grievances, which helped defuse the situation.

His students love Morrie, and during his final illness, they write and visit him by the hundreds: “‘I’ve never had another teacher like you,’ they all said” (130).