Life

Ted Windt

It was hard knowing what to expect from a college course entitled “Rhetoric of Cynicism and Counter-Culture,” and Ted Windt made it no easier. A craggy-faced Texan sporting boots and a cowboy hat, Windt looked not a little out of place in Pittsburgh, a city that relished in hating the NFL’s Cowboys. Yet his plain-spoken style had endeared him to students and those who heard his political analysis on KDKA-TV and KQV radio over the years.

Windt was a “rock star” during the Nixon presidency – “You couldn’t get into his classes,” said one former student – and was a giant in the field of presidential rhetoric. And he loved his home state and its icons – his office had a Texas flag sandwiched between posters of Lyndon Johnson and James Dean (circa “Giant”, of course).

He was the only college professor I had who on the first day of class announced that each student would get the grade they wanted – in other words, if we did all of the assignments to a reasonable degree of satisfaction, an A was in order. Skip a few assignments and you’d get a B, and so on. I chose to get a B and did so – the only required assignment was the five-page course evaluation at the end of the semester.

The most familiar memory I have is the day that Windt strode into class, opened a small book, leaped to the top of the desk and began to loudly recite Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to a somewhat stunned class. There were two kinds of students in that class; those who had heard that it was a wild ride and those unsuspecting people who, needing an upper-level class for a communication major, figured that this one would do. Often Windt’s theater was lost on the latter group, but his intensity and insistence on adapting the class to the philosophy of the material left a huge mark on the rest of us.

The latest issue of Pitt Magazine, the alumni publication, noted that Windt died last October, but provided no details. A fuller obit from The Pitt News does justice to a teacher who saw it as a duty to grow intelligence in his charges, not simply to pass on the stuff of books and history.