On the fifth floor of Agnes Arnold Hall — one of two '60s-era Kenneth Bentsen-designed modernist buildings at the University of Houston and home to the campus's liberal arts contingent — you'll find the office of Dr. Lawrence Curry, professor emeritus of history.

In true professorial fashion, overstuffed bookshelves line his office walls. One contains his original 1948 paperback edition of Richard Hofstadter's "The American Political Tradition: And The Men Who Made It," its pages yellowed, faded, annotated, highlighted and marked-up, loved and treasured in his six-decade possession.

Curry was first assigned Hofstadter's classic collection of essays as a doctoral student at Duke University in the late 1950s. Since his first semester teaching at UH in 1968, he's assigned the book to all his undergraduate students — an estimated 20,000 over the past half-century — every semester since. (For local scale, that's roughly the population of Stafford, Texas.)

It's a testament to his diligence and affection for the classics. "The American Political Tradition" ranks high in the canon of tried-and-true historical literature. Hofstadter threads together mini-biographies of some of the great figures of American history — yes: old, dead, white dudes — under a unifying thesis concerning an age-old tradition of national values and attitudes.

And Curry, in his decades-spanning service to the betterment of intellectual life in Houston, carried on his own tradition, too.

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Next month, at the end of the current semester, he's retiring after 50 years of service to the University of Houston. But if you ask him, he's not reflecting on that: He's in the moment, discussing current events, contemplating today's lecture and how to connect it to the next — lectures that he's methodically outlined, honed and even timed every single time he's delivered them.

His lectures are routine, but not stale. They're edifying and deliberate, and if the student listens closely, amusing — like the popular and eccentric figures of nineteenth-century America he passionately describes.

His attire is sharp, a throwback to the formal attire of old-school university professors: a suit, overcoat, bowtie or necktie (sometimes his favorite Thomas Jefferson-adorned tie), suspenders, dress shoes and often, his UH-red Kangol hat.

On the first day of class, he meditates on the utility and philosophy of history through a series of objectives he's developed over the years. "My hope is that you'll emerge from this course better able to think for yourself, to develop your own intellectual self-reliance and to develop a tolerance for ambiguity," he adds.

It's an ambiguity historians know well, but students need to reconcile: the limits of human knowledge in the face of our unending pursuit of truth. Curry quotes Malcolm X and Cicero, powerful leaders who understood and applied the lessons of historical knowledge to confront and disrupt the status quo in their time.

And he connects historical knowledge to patriotism and love of country, warts and all. "You cannot truly love what you do not know," he concludes. That love — and our ability to measure it — is honest criticism.

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The year he started at UH, 1968, is a particularly memorable year in modern American history: a year beset by tragic assassinations of national leaders; the mutual escalation of war efforts and anti-war sentiment; Black Power's powerful moment at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City — and that's just the headlines.

Curry came on board to the Department of History as a young, white, progressive intellectual from the Deep South who studied southern politics as a dissertation topic and who knew and reviled racism in his home state of South Carolina. Though not an activist, Curry has been consistently critical of social injustice and inequity. He assigned "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" — published just three years before and not yet a standard history text — his first semester and every semester thereafter for his modern U.S. history survey course.

And he openly criticized the Vietnam War in the student-run paper, The Daily Cougar. He once met with Lynn Eusan, the fabled Black Power student leader, as well as other students, to discuss and help facilitate the creation of the first Afro-American Studies program (later African-American Studies) at UH.

Looking back, he's proud to have a small part of it, but recalled its awkward and rocky infancy. "I had the unusual experience of being the interim director of African-American Studies for a little while. The director went AWOL and the dean asked me to keep it alive. Unfortunately, things had steeped to such a low level that a white southerner was asked to be the head of the program, but I took the job very seriously. I kept courses alive and kept the office area from being turned over to someone else."

As any organization in academia can tell you, campus real estate is hard to come by and to be vigilantly defended. The African-American Studies program continues to live a floor above the Department of History.

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If Bob Dylan's prophetic refrain bears any truth — the times they are a-changin' — Curry could attest to at least some of it, locally. Campus culture has changed considerably over 50 years: some good, some bad, some flat-out ugly, to say nothing of the dismal state of affairs concerning gun violence and sexual misconduct afflicting America's campuses.

The days of smoking in class are long gone, but in a strange (uniquely Texan) twist of fate, the admittance of concealed firearms on campus recently became law. The Roy Hofheinz campus legacy of yesterday is slowly giving way to the university's new principal benefactor today, Tilman Fertitta — and with it, a radical architectural facelift. In UH sports time, Lawrence's tenure spans four generations of Shasta cougars — the university's beloved mascot — and the decision finally (and fortunately) to pull the plug on live mascots on campus.

Still, after all this, he's not dejected, or jaded, or bored. He's pursuing a tradition he started 50 years ago and seeing it through until the very last lecture.

Alex LaRotta is a first-generation Colombian-American and native Houstonian. A deejay as well as a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston, he is working on a dissertation on San Antonio's West Side Sound. LaRotta is Curry's teaching assistant.

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