QUICK HITS: Dave Stewart

Home Features QUICK HITS: Dave Stewart
QUICK HITS: Dave Stewart
Professor of History Dave Stewart teaching a class. Nolan Ryan

What’s your favorite movie? “Anna and the King.” What’s one piece of advice you would give to every Hillsdale College student? Go talk to your professors about the ideas you’re encountering in the class, not just how to write the paper. What college did you attend, including both undergraduate and graduate schools? I went to Eastern Nazarene College in Boston, and then I went to Ohio State. Looking back on your college days, what is one thing you regret or wish you could change? I went to school in Boston, and I wish I would have been more active about seeing all the stuff. I never went to Lexington and Concord, I never went to Plymouth rock. All the sorts of stuff you would expect a history major should have done. What was your favorite part of being a student? Writing papers. What was your least favorite? The idiots in the dorm. What’s your favorite place you’ve traveled? Cerdanya. It is a huge valley up in Spain. Why? It’s got everything that is good about Spain without a lot of the bad. It is a very rural area with small farms, and people are really friendly. At the restaurants, most of them are buying things from local farms. I look out the window and that cow is tomorrow’s lunch. What is the strangest thing that has happened to you while traveling? I inadvertently got swept into a communist protest march. What’s your favorite type of food? Anything with meat, but probably Cerdanyan. What do you dislike about living in Hillsdale? It is a long way from Spain. What’s your favorite class to teach? They’re like children, you love them all. Honestly it varies from any given week. I like all my classes, it depends how the students are responding. Some students, it surprises me sometimes, will get really excited about something and then that becomes really fun for me. What’s your biggest pet peeve about student behavior? You guys are wicked overcommitted. Where did you propose to your wife? In the parking lot of a shopping mall. What’s your favorite thing to do in Hillsdale? Taking my two little grand-kids to the park,  the dinosaur museum, the ice cream shop, or really anywhere. They are so spastic running around and they think everything is so cool. Which is your favorite duck out of your rubber duck collection? Darkwing duck, of course! What is not to like about Darkwing duck? If you could change one thing about Hillsdale what would it be? I would take out that wall and make Dr. Blum move, and then I would have a bigger office. What newspapers do you read everyday? Online, not physical newspapers, but several out of England, The Straits Times, several out of Spain and France. Lots of them. What political topic is most important facing the nation? Probably primary education. What political topic do you think people spend way too much time talking about? The presidential primaries and the debates. What political topic is most interesting to you? The thing that fascinates me in political topics are boundary and border disputes. How do you resolve them and what do you do about people groups that are bisected by political boundaries, those sorts of things.