English Department Chair Bill Cook's office in Sanborn House is smaller than you might expect. Subdued wooden shelves and colorful African murals cling to the ancient walls, and the tables and floor are lost in piles of dusty books.
The clumsy disarray is both scholarly and unconventional, like Cook himself.
One of the strangest professors at Dartmouth, Cook is also one of the most popular.
"Probably because of my good looks," Cook joked, his grin exposing two rows of flashing teeth and raising the gray lassos of his trademark mustache. "It is hard not to be popular when you are an object of passion and desire."
But Cook's students say they like him because of how he acts more than how he looks.
"He is himself," said Renee Baron, a graduate student who works with Cook. "He is comfortable with who he is."
"He is not trying to be a 'Dartmouth Professor,'" she added. "He is Bill Cook who happens to teach at Dartmouth."
And Cook's quirky mannerisms and uncommon wit pervade all he says and does.
For instance, his "great dream was to be an opera singer," Cook said.
"I only lacked one thing," he said. "A voice."
Cook spends time on the Dartmouth stage, at least, where he has been in many plays. His roles include the comic and corpulent Falstaff in Shakespeare's First Part of King Henry the Fourth.
"The best part is there are students in the cast, and we all come in as colleagues," he said.
Cook's democratic attitude is also obvious in his irreverent teaching style.
"I love to teach, I love students, I love to challenge and shock. I don't teach down to folk. Never teach to the belly or chest, but always one to one -and-a-half feet above the head," Cook said.
When he becomes excited or impassioned in class, Cook's "black English creeps in."
"Nobody feels in standard English," he said.
And though he may lack a voice for opera, he has found one in verse. Cook publishes his own poetry, which, he says, tries to recover African-American life and heritage.
He is also the author of a play and many works of literary criticism.
If Cook has any philosophy, he says it is "a hatred of same-ness and stasis and an interest in variety and change."
Cook's cluttered office helps him in his quest for freshness.
"That's the good thing about being untidy," he said. "It is easy to lose your old lecture notes."
