“Oh God, this is going to be horrible,” Rachel Bitman said she was thinking on the first day of her Intro to Sociology class freshman year. Students just kept coming through the doors, filling Tech’s Ryan Auditorium to capacity. Bitman was nervous. She did not like the idea of large classes. But then, everything changed.
“He walked onto the stage and started introducing himself to the class,” Bitman said. “There was just something about him, and at that moment, I was really at ease.”
The man was Professor Charles Moskos, a sociology professor since 1969. Unknown to Bitman, he was a highly popular professor and a long-time student favorite. Bitman, now a SESP senior, learned why.
“He speaks to students, and not just because he’s been teaching for so long,” she said. “He wants to know you and he wants to listen to you. He would spend two hours talking to any one of the 200 students in his class.”
Suzanne Hansford-Bowles, a grant writer for University of Missouri Extension, was Moskos’s teaching assistant for three years. She also saw first-hand what Bitman describes.
“Every day after class there would be ten students hanging out down at the front to talk about anything,” Hansford-Bowles said. “The reading, the lecture, their favorite hip-hop band, anything.”
The professor’s clout as a teacher is matched by his impressive professional and military accomplishments. Moskos, who was drafted into the army in 1956, is best known for the “don’t ask, don’t tell” homosexuality policy that he constructed for the U.S. military in 1993. He has been honored with the Army’s highest civilian decoration, the Distinguished Service Award. The Selective Service System has also selected Moskos as an Honored Patriot. In addition, Moskos has authored at least five books and has written for a number of notable publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Moskos took off the 2006-2007 school year to be treated for prostate cancer. But luckily, he plans to return to Northwestern in the fall.
“If my health permits, [my return] is definite,” he said.
Moskos, born in Chicagoland and raised in Albuquerque, N.M., spent the last year in Santa Monica, Calif.
“There are no Greek restaurants, but the weather is perfect,” he said.
Moskos loves Greek culture, especially the food. He prefers to dine in Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood, and his coworkers said that he held all of his meetings in Greek restaurants. John Butler, Gale Chair in Small Business and Business Management at the University of Texas, was Moskos’s major advisee in graduate school and co-authored a book with him. Butler has joined Moskos for many Greek dinners.
“I think Charlie came to every Greektown in America,” he said. “I’d always ask, ‘Where are we meeting, in the hotel room?’ And he’d say ‘No, in the Greek restaurant!’”
Moskos’s curiosity was never satisfied. He took advantage of any opportunity to learn something new, even when he was out to dinner. He asked about restaurant employees’s ethnic backgrounds to learn more about other cultures. Moskos regularly asked them to teach him to count to ten in their native language.
“People are surprised that he even cares where they’re from,” said Hansford-Bowles. “And then he asks them to teach him to count. It always works. People will always stop and teach him.”
This genuine interest in others’ lives shows in his teaching, too. Bitman said that she could talk to him about anything.
“He’s done so much in his field and he’s so well recognized, but he still has that humble attitude that you don’t feel bad approaching him for anything,” she said.
Moskos’s view of sociology is another part of what makes his Intro to Sociology class appealing to students. He doesn’t view it as a subject one needs to memorize, but instead as more of an understanding of other cultures.
“If I could call my course anything, I would call it Society Appreciation 101,” he said.
After teaching a class of 600 students for nearly 40 years, one might wonder what keeps him teaching, but Moskos said the students are his real inspiration.
“I enjoy the students. I learn a lot from them,” he said. “I’m supposed to be an expert in this field and I have undergraduate students telling me things I don’t know.”
Students seem as interested in Moskos as he says he is in them. During one of Hansford-Bowles’ years with Moskos, a rumor started that he was going to retire after that year ended. Students went crazy trying to get into his class before it was too late.
“We’d get handwritten cards from students begging to be let into the class,” said Hansford-Bowles. “He’d always let them in. I think it got to be a fire hazard sometimes with the number of kids he let into that auditorium.”
But despite the high demand for his classes and his academically decorated background, Moskos remains humble about his accomplishments, his popularity and the excitement surrounding his return.
“I’ve just been so fortunate to be teaching these students that laugh at my jokes,” he said.