When a Teacher Changes Your Life
On Being a Student, Mentee and Friend of the Late Mark Mancall
When I encountered Mark Mancall as a freshman at Stanford, he scared the shit out of me.
He was a giant of a man, not just in stature but in his presence; one that would announce itself with his trademark rumbling laughter that seemed to shake the earth beneath it. His voice — which seemed to be a couple of octaves below everyone else’s — had an unapproachable, commanding cadence to it.
But what really scared me was the ease with which he pulled the ideological rug under freshmen who’d enrolled into the Structured Liberal Education program (or SLE, a yearlong, residence-based humanities program that Mark had founded in the early seventies). I distinctly remember in the first lecture how he’d pointed to a tree just outside the lecture hall and asked us,
‘What do you see?’
A tree, I thought, shocked that a Stanford professor would ask such a facile question.
‘No,’ he said emphatically, expecting students like me to think that it was a facile question. ‘It is your perception of it.’
The lecture turned into an extended proof about how we couldn’t trust that our senses would return an objective reality to us, but one distorted by our projections of it. Projections that we would never, really, be able to reconcile. Interpreting it to mean that we lived in an infinite regress of relativity, I was left floored. Here I was thinking that I’d just signed up for a glorified class that was meant to fulfill my humanities requirements — not blow up my unquestioned faith in my sense faculties.
That first quarter, I was one of about twenty other students in his discussion section. Through each discussion, it became clear that this man’s knowledge spanned just about every canon of literature — East and West. Any book you’d read, he’d already ten times, could recite sections that you’d forgotten, and, to top it off, he knew the historical context in which it was written. It was a knowledge that he could easily weaponize to dismantle the big ideas that many of us were still affixed to, such as: democracy as the best form of government, careers as the primary goal of education, religions as the primary source of truth. These ideas were like clay pigeons to Mark, ones he would swiftly explode by way of intellectual deconstruction, leaving students like me lying in the rubble.
After I’d gotten over my fear of him, I became angry. This man was a destroyer of worlds. He knew more than any human I’d ever met; more than I thought anyone could know. Plus, there was also this strange, cultish aura around him, Facebook groups that collected his many quips, past students who followed him with religious adulation. Watching his many disciples (who jokingly referred to themselves as ‘Marksists’) huddle around him after a lecture, I made it my mission to stump the great Mark Mancall.
And, surprisingly, that moment came sooner than expected. In a discussion about the Heart Sutra — the Buddhist sutra with the famous proclamation that ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’ — I came up with some dumb, parallel universe question, asking him how a Buddhist version of Arjuna (from the Bhagavad Gita) would have responded to the ‘duty’ of a leader to kill one’s kinsmen if it entailed preserving social order.
‘I don’t know,’ Mark said, without any hint of irony. ‘That sounds like a topic you should explore.’
Mark was never interested in being the smartest person in the room (though he often was). He simply wanted to help his students cultivate habits of inquiry; to develop an appetite for pursuing one’s truth (and the ambiguity that comes with it). And, as a disciple of the ‘great Uncle Karl’ (he would always raise his fist when invoking Marx’s name), he wanted you to think about ‘society’ — analyzing it, critiquing it, and imagining how we might make it more just, more inclusive.
This was something I came to understand during my sophomore year. At the start of the year, I was still lying in the ideological rubble that Mark and SLE had left me in: groundless, hapless, and without a major. Seeking further nihilistic dismantling, I decided to sign myself up for as much Mark as possible. (I was a bit of a masochist then.)
First, I became his personal assistant, a role that mainly comprised fetching Mark books from the library — which, I’ll have you know, was no small task. Mark would request books by the dozen, books that were often giant tomes in multiple languages that would require me to scour all of Green Library to find. And then, I would have to balance these in the three backpacks I hauled across my back and handlebars as I biked uphill towards his home on Coronado Ave.
Every time I arrived at the screen door to his house, I would see him there, sitting on his couch while reading a tome in some Scandinavian language. ‘Come in,’ he would beckon me. After receiving his books (and seeing me in a sweat), he would invite me to sit on the cushions opposite him. There, I saw a softer side of him. Not the commanding, all-knowing professor. But the loving father to Dechen and Tashi, his son and daughter-in-law; the grandfather who tended to his grandchildren (who would scamper in every time with their latest toys). He would ask me pointed questions, non-class related questions. ‘What have you been thinking about lately?’ was one of his favorites.
That year, I thought a lot about Buddhism. In the fall, I took what would easily be the most important class I’d ever take at Stanford: Mark’s seminar on Buddhist Political and Social Theory. As with every class with Mark, we were forced to wrestle with more world-destroying texts. We read books and articles that challenged the very foundations of conventional thinking and exposed us to a multiplicity of perspectives on how Buddhist philosophies were used in the service of social change. One that particularly affected me was David Loy’s Buddhist History of the West, a book that argued that civilization was primarily shaped by the self’s desire for groundedness.
But, rather than leave me falling further and further in the despair of deconstruction, the seminar gave me a landing in the Buddhist view. By way of the course, I became more and more interested in the philosophy and practice of Buddhism; how it, unlike other spiritual paths I’d been exposed to, provided a coherent set of tools and methods to train the mind and unleash its capacities for wisdom and compassion. It was all theoretical at this point, but my curiosity was piqued and I wouldn’t be able to rest until I learned more.
Mark was never one to identify as ‘spiritual’ — an avowed atheist-monarchist-Marxist, he hated the term he felt was loaded and mostly meaningless. Nevertheless, he had sympathy for so-called spiritual paths, particularly those that provided the narratives and tools for social liberation. At various points in his life, he had tested the waters of various spiritual traditions; he had prayed in a Sufi shrine, lived in an Israeli kibbutz, spent time with the Jesuits. He had a soft spot for Buddhist divine madmen such as Drukpa Kinley, who applied their crazy wisdom to mock the hypocrisies of society’s institutions. He even told me that had he met the great Buddhist teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in his lifetime, he would have “ordained as a monk in a heartbeat.” I suppose it was the collection of these experiences that helped him identify the hunger that was taking root in me, a yearning to continue the spiritual growth that he had seeded.
And so, being the generous teacher he was, he connected me to opportunities to further my exposure to Buddhism. He would give me informal reading assignments, which he fully expected me to report on anytime I’d come to visit; he had me serve as his Teaching Assistant for his Sophomore College course, ‘How is a Buddhist?’ so that I could support the learning of others (‘If you want to become an expert in something,’ he told me once, ‘put yourself in a position to teach it to someone else.’). But the greatest opportunity of all came that summer when he accepted me and fifteen others to go on an overseas seminar in the country of Bhutan.
The focus of the seminar was on “Gross National Happiness” (GNH), a philosophy for holistic economic development rooted in Tibetan Buddhist values. That year (2008), Bhutan had been going through several changes, the biggest being a transition from a monarchic to a democratic form of governance. (This was a transition initiated by His Majesty the Fourth King himself.) In his role as an advisor to the recently crowned Fifth King of Bhutan, Mark worked tirelessly to explore how the tiny country might operationalize GNH as it navigated these changes.
Did I mention that he was still a full-time Professor at Stanford at the same time? Often, his interests in Bhutan would find their way into his course content. He was always interested to hear what his students thought about what he was thinking about, as he knew their perspectives would help strengthen his. When I first heard about it in one of his seminars, it struck me as revolutionary: this small country pinned between India and China was trying to flip the economic script by saying that people’s wellbeing was more important than some arbitrary number — Gross Domestic Product — that everyone else seemed to worship as the end all and be all. Maybe ‘revolutionary’ is the wrong word; it just made sense (and, by extension, made every other country seem insane!).
From the moment I touched down in Paro that summer, I fell in love with the country. The trip felt like a honeymoon, one in which Mark introduced us to the many luminaries working in various sectors to make Bhutan’s GNH aspirations a reality (including my future boss) and guided us through the beautiful landscapes and sacred sites sprinkled throughout the country. Between the endless expanse of mountains and the never-ending servings of chilies and cheese, I experienced what Buddhists might term as the ‘ripening of a karmic link.’ A wandering nomad for most of my ‘third culture kid’ upbringing, in Bhutan I experienced the strange and unfamiliar feeling of arriving at a home. After the conclusion of the three-week seminar, I knew I had to return — both to continue my spiritual development and contribute to what felt like an exciting movement.
Fast forward three years to 2011, I returned to Bhutan upon graduating to work full-time at the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy (BCMD). Led by the fierce and relentless journalist, Aum Sioksian Pek, BCMD was focused on fostering a democratic culture in Bhutan’s very young (then three-years-old) democracy. As one of the founding members of the board, Mark had been instrumental in the organization’s setup, as well as its focus on education.
In contrast to my first visit to Bhutan — in which I had been a tourist — my experiences as a resident stripped away the ‘Shangri-La’ sheen that writers loved to peg to the country and revealed to me the many and manifold challenges that Bhutan faced. Choosing to honor its GNH philosophy by conserving, rather than mining, its many natural resources came with a cost; as a small, low-income, and landlocked country with a small private sector, the country relied heavily on international aid to fund its annual budget. Much of this aid was focused on financing large hydropower projects and connecting the country’s diverse and dispersed communities, many of who were smallholder farmers. These farmers worked in harsh conditions with limited machinery and income to support their children who, after being exposed to international media and TV, would want to leave their communities and seek greater opportunities in Thimphu, the country’s capital and locus of business.
At or near the top of these challenges, for Mark, was the challenge of reimagining Bhutan’s education system from top to bottom. Founded by visiting Canadian Jesuits in the sixties, Bhutan’s education system had been designed to funnel its best and brightest into roles as functionaries in the civil service. For Bhutan’s democratic experiment to be successful, many, including the King, knew that the system needed change. To Mark, this meant that Bhutan’s education system needed to equip young people not just with the skills necessary to obtain jobs, but with the critical capacities to serve as active citizens contributing to society.
Tasked with leading many of BCMD’s educational programs for young people, I grew close to many of the young people there, who welcomed me as though I were just another local, inviting me to basketball games, dinners at their homes, and late-night jaunts to the local discotheques. In those relationships, I learned firsthand about their thoughts on democracy and what they hoped for their country moving forward. And through it all, I thought often about how to translate the many questions that SLE had raised into action. How, for example, does one structure an educational experience that raises one’s consciousness, that gets young people to care about their social conditions? How does one empower others to enable them to believe they can change those conditions and create better outcomes?
In the three years that I was at BCMD, I worked closely with Mark to design and develop curricula, workshops, and educational resources. Instead of directing me (as I’m sure he could have), he knew to play the role of mentor, helping me to hone my faculties not so much as a student now, but as a fellow educator. He would always lead our discussions with probing questions, to think about ways that I could help young Bhutanese learn democracy by doing. One idea that he challenged me to think about was community. How could we invigorate the communities in Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital, that were rapidly splintering due to the forces of rural-urban migration and haphazard urban development?
One way that we experimented with this was through a series of ‘community mapping’ workshops that we began piloting in 2013. In the workshop, we taught young people research methods — from interviewing to basic data analysis — and had them go out in groups to identify their community’s assets (its people, places, and resources) along with the challenges they faced. Each group ‘mapped’ these assets and challenges digitally and presented their findings to local leaders, including Thimphu’s mayor. The young participants challenged their leaders to improve basic sanitation conditions, to better engage those who were jobless, and to support the creation and upkeep of better spaces for young people. Also in the audience was Mark, who, throughout the presentation, was visibly beaming. Later, he told me how fantastic he’d found the young people’s presentations and how they had given him greater hope for the country’s future.
Mark cared a lot about Bhutan and its people. Like me, he had a karmic link that had been seeded many years before when he first visited in the early nineties. He had seen the country through many changes and trusted the wise leadership of their Majesties the Fourth and Fifth King. But there were times when Mark could become impatient and frustrated with the pace by which the country was changing. Towards the end of my stint in Bhutan, there was one discussion I had with him that was particularly disheartening. He cut a defeated figure, one who felt he had not done enough to push for better curricula, better teacher training. He even went so far as to suggest that conservative aspects of Bhutan’s Buddhist culture might have been hindering the country’s progress. I walked away from the conversation feeling saddened, betrayed by the mentor who had turned on the two things that were so crucial to my life.
But, what I would later learn is that one should not judge Mark’s views by what he says — he was prone to occasional fits of despair — but by his actions.
Following my time in Bhutan, I went to graduate school to study international development. During this time, I chose to distance myself from Mark. I felt that any of the ideas I might come to him with that I had been thinking about, he would scoff at, dismissing as too limited, as not revolutionary enough — just as he had Bhutan.
After finishing grad school, I made a trip with my girlfriend at the time to visit Northern California. While there, I chose to make an impromptu stop at Mark’s house. When I arrived at that same screen door on Coronado Ave, I saw him sitting there, meditatively poring over his texts just as he had when I first visited all those years ago. ‘Come in,’ he said, before even looking up to see who was there. He expressed no anger over my recent breakdown in contact with him. Instead, he signaled me over to his seat so that he could give me one of his warm, one-armed hugs. Sharp as ever, Mark had been preparing an article for the Druk Journal, a nonpartisan journal focused on Bhutanese social thought that he’d founded with Aum Pek and Dasho Kinley Dorji (the journalist power couple of Bhutan).
In the course of our conversation, I asked him if he’d given up on the country.
Before he could answer, one of his grandchildren stumbled into the room to ask him a different question. I can’t recall the exact question — I think it may have been about division and carrying over remainders. But I can recall the transformation that went across Mark’s face, from stony-faced contemplative to a bright, joy-filled grandfather, smiling ear-to-ear as he helped his grandson complete his assignment.
Mark couldn’t get enough of his grandchildren. Beneath his capitalism-loathing and abrasive exterior was a deep, deep well of love — a desire to give and receive it. As his health and mobility issues had begun to pile up, I could see that he’d reassigned much of his energy to be around them and watch them grow. He was, by all measures, a very happy man.
‘No,’ he said, responding to my question of whether he’d given up. Now well into his eighties, he knew none of the changes he’d strove for would likely come to fruition in his lifetime. But, he told me, they may during my grandchildren’s.
And for his family, he would never slow down. Whatever earlier suspicions I had about age catching up to Mark were proven wrong. From that point on, every time I would visit him, he would tell me about all the latest projects he was involved in: colloquiums with students, online classes and podcasts on democratic socialism, more journal articles and think pieces he’d been drafting. Nothing seemed to slow his vast and ever-curious mind or quell his hunger for social change. In the tradition of the many teachers that he admired, he strove to live the life of ‘social scientist’ — a public intellectual who sought to break down the silos of academia. To him, most of us were having the wrong political conversations: instead of issues, we should be talking about systems; instead of mechanical forms of change, we needed to break down the destructive narratives of individualism and tell a new story of ‘us’.
While I could find no rebuttal for these points, I find his views difficult to reconcile with the direction my life was headed in. Since graduating, I had become involved in a long-term relationship and chosen a fairly practical path to employment as a consultant. For the first time, this path was affording me a stable income, enough to enable me to enjoy some of the delights the world had to offer. After having so many conversations with Mark, his voice began to replace my superego’s, whispering, asking me whether I was truly abiding by the values I had learned through him. Am I truly benefiting society with this work? Am I doing what I can to speak out against injustice? Or, had I succumbed to the threat that Mark most vehemently opposed — indifference? Perhaps this was Mark’s plan all along — to insert himself into the minds and hearts of his students so that they wouldn’t fall astray.
I last saw Mark this past October. My friend, Viria, and I had spontaneously schemed to surprise him for his 87th birthday by inviting dozens of past friends, colleagues, and students to appear at his home. Part of me feared that Mark — who hated anything that put him as the center of attention — might be upset by the event. But the evening proved to be a magical one, a reunion of the generations of people that Mark had impacted and come to love.
There was a beautiful moment towards the middle of the event in which some of the many attendees shared one of their favorite ‘Mark stories’ that they had. Some shared stories of how Mark had helped them in times of hardship; others shared funny stories about drunken misadventures in communist countries. When it came to my turn, I looked at Mark, this giant of a man who had left an indelible ‘mark’ on my life, and I realized that I had never once told him in the 13 years that I’d known him what he had meant to me.
And so, I told him about those first impressions I had of him after that first lecture. I told him how I still thought he was an incarnation of Socrates. And I told him that he had, absolutely, changed my life. I told him I couldn’t imagine a life without him in it. In telling him this, I choked back a lot of tears — tears that are now forming as I write this. He nodded in acknowledgment, and later gave me a big, big hug as I left his home.
The next day, he wrote one of his trademark cheeky emails to thank both Viria and me for organizing it. In it, he wrote:
“It was only after I went to bed last night that the full impact of last night’s gathering hit me, so the first thing I want to do this morning, having brushed my face and washed my teeth, is to tell you how incredibly grateful I am for it.
I am not sure how you worked it all out, but one of the things that struck me strongest, as I lay in bed, is that the people there were those associated with the most important and for me meaningful parts of my own life. It was as if you had purposely mapped it all out. And it felt like just the right number of people.
And this morning, I thought that the most wonderful moment of all was after everyone else left and we sat around talking for those few moments. That brought the past and the future together really quite brilliantly too. Although I must admit that my eye is still very itchy and I am convinced that Steve and his dog were responsible for that. Perhaps Steve more than the dog.
Anyway, I won’t forget last night. The memory of it will keep me warm.”
I’m not going to claim that I had some kind of foresight that this would be Mark’s final birthday. Though, looking back, it almost felt like the whole evening had been reminiscent of the final scene in Big Fish when Edward Bloom (a Mark Mancall character of sorts) finds himself in a field where he is met by the many people whose lives he has influenced throughout his own. His son, Will, then proceeds to usher him through the sea of people who look upon Edward with a grateful love and back into the water, his final resting place, this big mythical fish that no one could catch.
With over fifty-some years of working in education and social change projects all over the world, I wonder whether we’d even have a field large enough to accommodate the thousands upon thousands of people whose lives Mark helped shape. Though, knowing Mark, he wouldn’t want to be led to the water. He would want to be led to the people — particularly at a time like this.
I continue to hear his voice beckoning in my head:
‘You’re in a pandemic, with the impacts of climate change not far off, and an election on the horizon — there is so much work to be done!’
Now, in the wake of his passing, I have been thinking about whether I’ve been a good student to the teacher who has given so much to me. There are so many questions I still want to ask him, so many conversations that I wish I’d had but now never will because I seriously doubt that there will ever be anyone else quite like Mark Mancall.
But then, I hear him say,
‘You think I’ve really left?’
And I think about all the others who, like me, are hearing Mark’s basso profondo voice laugh in their heads, reminding them that a great education never ends with the passing of a teacher; it lives on through their students.
