Most students probably wouldn't guess that a UB English professor from a small Bavarian town in Germany who holds a doctorate degree from Yale and studies Dante in Italian was once arrested and spent time in the slammer.
It was 1971 and college students were protesting against the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
"We had cops on campus with tear gas and a K-9 squad, supposedly stopping students from rioting," said professor Max Wickert. "There was a group of us who said this is no way to run an education."
So Wickert, along with 44 other faculty members, gathered in Hayes Hall - the former location of UB's administration - and refused to leave the president's office. They knew of an illegal assembly injunction the university could use to arrest them, but decided to risk it anyway.
"We said we weren't trespassing," said Wickert. "We said, we were academics meeting in an academic space and that this was our ground. We wouldn't leave. So they arrested a bunch of us and threw us in the can for a night."
Wickert and the other protestors later became known as the "Hayes Hall 45." The charges were later dismissed, but Wickert was up for tenure and worried whether the incident would affect his position in the department.
"I sweated tenure," he said. "I thought they would use that against me rather than for me." Apparently the incident did not hinder him; Wickert has now been an associate professor in the English department for more than three decades.
Wickert describes those years as the "golden age" of Buffalo, when the university housed Nobel laureates in many of the humanities, before UB distinguished itself as a research-based professional school.
The English department in particular grew to national prestige during the late 1960s thanks largely to efforts by the late Albert Cook, chairman of the department when UB became part of the SUNY system. Cook hired 25 prominent literary poets, writers and intellectuals to work in his department.
"In those days, Buffalo was something else," said Wickert. "It was very exciting. The place was really buzzing with lots of money. There was lots of hiring and lots of experimenting, in terms of the kinds of courses offered, and fabulous students."
It was also a time when Wickert met the late John Logan, one of the literary gems hired by Cook and founder of the poetry magazine Choice. Logan became a powerful mentor to Wickert and others, encouraging the writers to find their own voice in poetry.
"John's philosophy was that there was no formula or knack," said Wickert. "He was a very magnetic, beautiful poet. He was a kind of farmer's boy from Iowa who happened to be a great poet."
The experiences during those years were both personally tumultuous and formative for Wickert, as he was getting a divorce and also abandoning his academic profile, which was nurtured at Yale as a Victorianist. "I dropped William Morris [his Victorian dissertation] altogether and decided to become a poet."
Helping organize a project called Outwriters in the 1970s, Wickert held poetry readings at bars after convincing owners they would lure drinkers in on the off-nights. "It was a period where people cried at the poetry meetings, which doesn't happen anymore," he said.
While an undergraduate at St. Bonaventure University, Wickert studied math before switching over to English, following artistic inclinations inherited from his father. Wickert's father moved his family from Oxberg, Germany to Rochester, NY in 1952 in part to make a career as a commercial artist, though eventually settling as an art teacher.
Wickert said the transition to American life was tough and spoke of the difficulties in trying to connect with other kids. He told a story about how he, being already moderately versed in Latin from his German education, would correct his Latin teacher, obliviously putting miles between himself and friends.
"It's not going to make you popular if your teacher holds up your paper and says to the rest of the class, 'now this kid came over here from Germany just three months ago and he writes a better paper than all of you!'" Wickert said.
College life at St. Bonavenuture was no less difficult for Wickert. "I hated it there, and you can quote me," he said. He found the academic curriculum unchallenging and was disillusioned by the prevalence of "school spirit" over academics.
"If you go to a school that's intellectually undistinguished, you get A's with your left hand," said Wickert. "Nobody wants to talk to you at your own level because it's not the thing to do. If you say you would rather talk about Aristotle than go out and have a pizza, it just doesn't work."
It was at Yale where Wickert finally clicked with American education. "Yale was a godsend," he said. "I had a great time there. I was very gratified with just being an ordinary graduate student among a lot of very bright people."
Despite all the activity of the "golden age" of Buffalo, everything started dying down in the 1970s. Money was no longer at the department's disposal and hiring freezes became not uncommon.
"We started feeling that we had a problem in '72 and then it continued for decades," said Wickert. "The rug kept getting pulled out from under [the humanities departments]. People started leaving and the place started to feel duller."
Faced with a shortage of graduate students assisting the department, Wickert had to fill in on required courses like Shakespeare and came close to burning out. But then he received a fellowship in 1985 to study Italian literature with a group of non-Italianists at Dartmouth College.
"It was one of the most exciting intellectual ventures I've ever been part of because these were wonderfully intelligent people," said Wickert. "We had five instructors who were crack Dante scholars, young ones, and they pulled in, as guest lecturers, every big name in Dante studies."
The next summer, while vacationing in Italy, Wickert decided to forego the traditional city-to-city sightseeing and set himself down for several weeks in Perugia. The day he arrived, he walked by a building with a sign reading "Universit?Ae per Stranieri." He asked around and discovered it was an Italian language school specifically for foreigners. Wickert took a basic language course for a month and has continued to study there every other summer for the past several years.
Learning Italian galvanized Wickert's enthusiasm, as he met new friends and began translating texts and teaching Dante.
"I could've burned out," said Wickert. "It was absolutely rejuvenating."
Wickert looks forward to retirement there. "The only way I've been drawn back to Europe is Italy. I really love Italy, I'm crazy about it."
