Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

24 William Breit, Kenneth Elzinga, and Thomas D. Willettteacher in the same way that it endears great performers to their audience. LelandYeager had duende.For example, like some show people, Yeager instinctively knew how to use aprop. A yardstick was to Leland Yeager what a violin was to Jack Benny and a cigarwas to Groucho Marx. Nearly every student who responded to our inquiry mentionedthe yardstick when describing Yeager’s classroom demeanor.Why this effect?Because in Leland Yeager’s hands, the yardstick was more than a mere straightedge.It was a tool for perfecting, before class began, elaborate three-dimensionaldiagrams that would be referenced in the lectures. The yardstick was the implementYeager used to expand the visual experience of the student beyond the blackboard’slimits. It was not unusual for students to come into class early and find himprecariously standing on a chair or desk, constructing a diagram that needed morespace than the blackboard permitted. Yeager would draw lines and quadrants thatwent outside the boundaries of the chalkboard itself. One student has described hisimpression of this scene:What has kept the image so vividly etched in my mind these many years is notmy surprise at seeing him so engaged, but rather his nonchalance at beingdiscovered. Unlike other professors who sometimes staged such activities foreffect, I am certain that Professor Yeager’s indifference reflected his convictionthat no one would think his actions unusual. After all, the graph needed to becompleted to scale, did it not?This was not the only way that Yeager found his yardstick useful. A characteristic ofYeager’s lectures was his penchant for summarizing the ideas of other scholars.This presented a problem for him. Being scrupulous about attribution, he worriedthat his students might mistakenly give him the credit for the particular position orcontribution of another. The yardstick provided the solution.Whenever he was expositing the position of another’s writings, he would lift theyardstick over his head; he would lower it when his own ideas were being presented.While Yeager’s students today remember the mental image of the raised yardstickwith wry amusement, and while they might not have chosen to adopt the techniquein their own classrooms, the image still serves as a reminder of the importance ofmaintaining high standards of academic integrity.One of the striking characteristics of Leland Yeager as a teacher and scholar wasthat his ideas were developed in reaction to the ideas of others. Some teachers areknown for an ability to get students to track their instructor’s thought processes asthe professor attempts to develop original approaches to a topic. These students arefortunate to see a creative mind at work before them. But they often are left bereftof any knowledge of alternative approaches that exist in the literature or thehistorical background against which the ideas were first generated. Yeager wasknown for his ability to get students to cover every angle of a topic, as that topic hadbeen developed within the discipline. His own assessment was ancillary to thestudents becoming aware of what others had done.