Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous alumni award winners with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. In this September 1977 Classic article, Robert Reid—1994 W. R. White Meritorious Service Award and 1995 Reynolds Retired Faculty Award winner—explains the secrets of great teaching. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about his year’s event and honorees.
Originally published in The Baylor Line’s September 1977 issue. Part of the 2025 Hall of Fame: Rewind series.
For Robert Reid, it’s how you respond to a challenge that counts.
“It’s not what happens — good or bad — but how you respond that is the true test, especially with students,” he says.
Reid has responded to the challenge of teaching for twenty-nine years with consistent enthusiasm and compassion which have won him recognition as the 1977 recipient of the Outstanding Baylor Teacher award.
“Not a day has gone by that I didn’t really enjoy — I haven’t had a bad day teaching. Oh, I get irritated, but half of that is put on,” Reid says, divulging some of the secrets of his teaching methods which have kept almost two generations of Baylor history students spellbound.
Reid openly professes his love of teaching. “For me teaching is not work. I stand in awe that they pay me,” he laughs before looking over his glasses with mock intensity, saying, “Now don’t get me wrong about that . . .
“I cannot conceive of not teaching, and I cannot conceive of not teaching at Baylor University. Baylor may not be on the same latitude of heaven but we must be close to it,” he says with great enjoyment.
Reid is qualified to bestow such an evaluation on Baylor on at least two counts. His teaching career has included stints as far away as Beirut, Lebanon, where he says he learned that “all students are alike, whether they are Americans or Arabs, Christians or Muslims.”
Reid is also qualified as a fourth generation Baylorite. His great-grandfather S. G. O’Bryan taught mathematics at Baylor when it was still at Independence. Reid, in fact, may have inherited some of his vocation from his mother. But Reid says he did not always plan on being a teacher. “I slipped into this accidentally.
“From the time I was two weeks old, my parents thought I was destined to be the greatest doctor in civilization, but I really didn’t want to do that. However, I delayed the I-don’t-want-to-be-a-doctor scene and two things saved me: I didn’t do well in science (on purpose) and World War II. When I went back to the University of Texas at El Paso after the war, I finished as an historian.”
Reid had finished work on his master’s degree at Baylor and had begun work on his doctorate at Brown University when he received an offer to teach at Baylor. He accepted with the idea of finishing his degree later. “Then I got the chance for Beirut and took it, and Baylor offered me a permanent position which I took and never finished my doctoral dissertation,” Reid says, explaining why surprised students are corrected to say “Mr. Reid” instead of “Dr. Reid.”
‘You have to knock yourself out studying but give an apparently off-the-cuff lecture.’
“In this day and time you couldn’t get a university position without a doctorate,” Reid says. Possibly even more amazing to those who rely on titles more than ability would be Reid’s recent appointment as chairman of the Department of History.
Reid admits with regret that the administrative tasks of the job will force a reduction in his teaching load, but he says with his own mixture of self-confidence and humility, “If the administration of Baylor has enough confidence in my ability, then I want to respond to that challenge. After all, I’ll only pass this way once. As Chaucer said, ‘Life is so short and the craft is so long to learn.'”
If given the chance to start over, Reid says he would still choose teaching. Even after teaching 143 sections of his now-famous world history survey course, Reid says the newness of teaching is still exciting.
“Oh, sometimes you want things to be different — like just once you want Caesar to kill the senators instead of the other way around,” he says with a hint of mischief. “But every student who comes into the classroom deserves my best.
“In 1948 when I came to Baylor I was up in front of a class in which some of my students were older than I was. I had even roomed with some of them,” Reid adds with humorous relief. “I was so glad when they graduated; they knew too much about me.
“I used to think I had to answer every question in class. Now I love it when students help me out and discover that teachers are human. It’s fun; every day is a learning process.
“In history the main problem is to get across to the students that the person I am talking about actually walked on earth and had the same problems they experience. I try to resurrect people, not institutions. It’s so much fun to watch students realize what they didn’t know.”
Though students may leave Reid’s classes thinking he delivered a completely extemporaneous lecture, Reid says one has to master material at hand for the day to the point of knowing it well enough to explain it to others and yet present it so it won’t be an overwhelming burden. “You have to knock yourself out studying but give an apparently off-the-cuff lecture,” Reid says and then admits to one of his most endearing classroom methods, “You have to be a bit of an actor — a ham. That’s what makes it fun.
“Each person has his own methods. Some teachers . . . 1-2-3-4 . . . take it out and give it back memorized. But you have to give a framework, I think, and be willing to go off on tangents without changing the subject, and students don’t even know you are doing it.”
Reid or his students could cite numerous examples of times when, just as the lecture was losing the class’s attention, Reid would half-tell, half-act out a story. “Then I laugh and say I spent fifteen minutes talking about something that didn’t have anything to do with the course and I drag them back. But, of course, the story has to do with the course because it is people and people are history. By this time the students are relaxed again — because they didn’t have to take notes and they are pleased that they have gotten the professor off the subject, or so they think.”
This sort of knowing patience has made Reid more than a teacher to many students. Some seek him out in his office, some ask him to be best man at their weddings, some even name children after him. This, says Reid, is the icing on the cake of teaching.
Once a student even called Reid to bail him out of jail, which Reid says is a kind of compliment because “in a crisis I was more than a teacher to that student. That is a vital part of a Christian education—not in the narrow sense of merely saying ‘Hi’ to a student, but seeing him as a person. You don’t end teaching when you leave Tidwell.”
Reid says he plans to continue teaching “until people begin to say, ‘You taught my grandfather.’ Then I will pack my little bag and say ‘Thank you, dear Lord, for my experience at Baylor.’
“And when I get to heaven, I’m going to apply to teach at Baylor University up there — surely there is one — but they probably won’t have me because I don’t have a Ph.D.”
