Stan Pierson

Stan Pierson was one of my two most memorable professors at UO. After meeting him, I tried to take more of his classes and I was never disappointed. He was a serious thinker and a serious teacher and he did not suffer intellectual laziness or sloppy thinking. When I took his classes in the early 1990s, he still held to what I assume was an old fashioned custom of addressing students as "Mr." I appreciated the rigor and seriousness implied by this formality. He was less inclined to coddle than...

Thank you so much for letting me know. I read the beautiful obituary and found myself tearing up. He was simply a wonderful human being and I am sure you are very proud that he was your father. I knew some of those personal bits (like the lookout job), and his war service, but of course much of it was new to me. One of the quotes you selected to use (At the time, he described the goal of the successful teacher to be "prompting students to ask questions worth asking. I want to sensitize...

Pierson children: your parents and I were members at Central Presbyterian for many years. I served with your Mom on a Pastor Nominating Committee in the mid 80's and got to know and appreciate both of your parents through that process. My father, a retired Presbyterian minister who met your parents on visits to Eugene, died last September. In reading your father's obituary I discovered that he and my dad were both in the 66th Infantry Division in France in WWII. My dad was a mortar sergeant....

I had terrible history teachers in high school and took a very dim view of that subject with me into college at the University of Oregon. My attitude changed, however, during my junior year after I took Stan's "Europe Since 1789" history class. He was a superb teacher and that class instilled in me a fascination with history that continues to this day, more than 50 years later. Stan's class made me realize that most everything that happens is in someway related to things that happened in the...