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4 SLAVERY AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
Berns was both an inspiring and a life-changing presence for me.
But he was not always an easy person.
My first personal contact with him came at the end of my sophomore
year when I, and all other Cornellians of that age, had to
declare our major, and as a part of declaring our major, we had to
take a little card and have it signed by somebody who we had
selected to be our adviser. I chose Walter. And, with a good deal of
trepidation, I went to his office. Trepidation because this was the
first time I had ever been in a faculty office at Cornell, so this was a
new experience for me. Everything went very well—until I got to
the office. I had just taken the only course I had had with him at
that point, that very large introductory course, so he didn’t really
know who I was and I had to explain why I was there. I explained,
“I’m declaring my major, I would like you to be my adviser.” He
looked me over and he asked, “Why me?”
This seemed like a completely unanswerable question; no answer
I could come up with would be sufficient to answer this question. I
stammered out something—I have no idea what it was, but he did
sign the card. With great relief, I left his office, and I got halfway
down the stairs and realized I had left this card in his office. I had
to go back and get the card, and it is at that time I started to think,
“Maybe another adviser would do better.” In any case, I knocked on
the door again, knowing that I was looking like an idiot, but Walter
very kindly overlooked, or likely forgot, this less than auspicious
beginning to our relationship. In any case, I still remember many
things that I’ve heard or read by Walter, but what sits most in my
memory is that “Why me?”
In any case, I am hoping that he did not say something similar
when he heard that I was giving the Walter Berns lecture: “Why him?”
Now you probably did not notice this, but today we are celebrating
the 226th anniversary of the day the delegates to the Constitutional
Convention met for the last time and signed the
document they had drafted. One of the reasons you did not notice
this is that we don’t usually notice 226th anniversaries of anything.
This anniversary is nowhere near as visible as was the 200th
anniversary of the Constitutional Convention in 1987. Chief Justice