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The Path Between Two Worlds
by Kevin Sully

Walking into the Espresso Roma coffee shop near the University of Oregon, Professor Ken DeBevoise bumps into a former student. After asking the student about graduation, DeBevoise continues into the coffee shop. Sporting his usual T-shirt and jeans on his lean and fit frame, DeBevoise looks much younger than his 60 years. Once inside, he hardly gets a moment to himself. “Hey Ken! How are you doing?” one of his current students calls out. DeBevoise acknowledges the student and smiles. The student begins to talk about the Middle East politics course that the student is taking from DeBevoise.

DeBevoise, speaking thoughtfully and carefully, asks the student’s opinion. After a five-minute conversation, several other students stop to talk. DeBevoise discusses term papers, rugby and whatever else they bring up. It takes 20 minutes before DeBevoise can finally sit down to enjoy his hot tea.

Students going out of their way to talk to DeBevoise is nothing new for him; and DeBevoise seems to enjoy every minute of it

Later that week, DeBevoise receives an e-mail from another student who also wants to talk to him. This student, though, isn’t just any student. He’s one of his first. And the e-mail isn’t sent from just anywhere. It comes from Thailand.

The former student tells DeBevoise of an upcoming reunion of classmates from DeBevoise’s first class, a class he taught more than 30 years ago. It was a time when DeBevoise embarked on an adventure that changed his life as much as those of his students.

At the reunion, the former students will no doubt tell tales of where it all started for them: learning English as teenagers in a rural Thai college, being taught by a young American Peace Corps volunteer. They will also talk about where they are now: Most are working in education, but they all have successful jobs and are all appreciative of what DeBevoise, their volunteer teacher, helped them accomplish.

DeBevoise also feels thankful, because he knows that those students helped him to decide what he would do for the rest of his life.

Teaching was something that DeBevoise always thought he could do. “When I was at law school, I used to lie in bed at night and think about how I would approach teaching and what I would do differently from the teachers I had,” he said.

However, by the time he graduated from law school in 1966, he was already fully entrenched in a law career. After passing the bar exam, he began clerking at a San Francisco law firm. Three years later, wanting a personal challenge and a chance to see if he could put his teaching goals into action, he signed up for the Peace Corps and was assigned to teach in Thailand.

The decision to join the Peace Corps was not difficult for DeBevoise; all it took was a visit to a friend already in Thailand. “Seeing Thailand firsthand showed me that it was something that was very doable and was also different and adventurous,” he said.

In 1969, DeBevoise headed for north-central Thailand, to a rural town between Bangkok and Chiang-Mai, where he would be teaching English on a college campus. At first, DeBevoise was a bit apprehensive about his new home. The sweltering Thai heat as well as the exotic Thai food made DeBevoise uncomfortable.

Once he started teaching, DeBevoise realized that there were also differences in the culture of education that he would have to overcome. After he caught a student sharing answers with another student, DeBevoise punished them. But he soon figured out that this discipline was exactly what he was not supposed to do. In Thai culture, cheating is seen less as something wrong than as a way of helping out your neighbor.

Despite these differences, his love for teaching grew as he saw his students, mostly from low-income backgrounds, begin to make progress. His initial two-year commitment soon turned into four years, as he became more accustomed to the country and his work.

His teaching style, which emphasized large amounts of reading, seemed to be working with his students. Instead of using the traditional techniques to teach English, DeBevoise challenged his students to read one book per week. Soon after, the students were trading in their standard reading and writing worksheets and picking up novels by Ernest Hemingway.

The capstone of his teaching experience came when students in his group earned three of the top ten scores on a national exam. Relishing the fact that he was making a difference in his students’ lives, DeBevoise began to wonder if law was really the right profession for him.

When his four years in Thailand were up in 1973, DeBevoise returned to the United States. Concerned about the extra education required to become a teacher, DeBevoise put teaching on hold again and instead went to Guam to practice immigration law. Finally, after going back and forth between law and secondary-school teaching, DeBevoise returned to school to earn his Ph.D. and become a social-studies professor.

“When there is one job that you want to get done with as soon as possible, and another job that you are willing to work around the clock for, you want to do work that you have a passion for,” he said.

DeBevoise’s time in Thailand also provided him with a new world perspective. Realizing that he valued Thai lives just as much as American ones, he wanted to help others who were in bad circumstances.

“I didn’t think I was saving Thailand,” he said. “My role was to just help students get a better job.” His connection with the Thai people inspired him to develop a scholarship foundation. With the help of a former American student, the foundation helps pay for the education of one Thai child a year who otherwise would not be able to advance past the seventh grade.

Currently a University of Oregon political-science professor, DeBevoise uses the same teaching methods that he first practiced with his class in Thailand. DeBevoise’s courses, which range in topic from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Watergate, are notorious on campus for their immense workloads. DeBevoise characterizes the workload in each course syllabus as “outrageously heavy and unreasonable.”

He dismisses the lecture system, calling it a “silly, inefficient, lazy, and relatively ineffective learning method.” Reading, which was the centerpiece of his Peace Corps teaching, combined with lively class discussions, mostly led by students, make up DeBevoise’s classes. Posing questions to the class, such as, “What would you have done differently in Lebanon if you were in charge of Israel?,” DeBevoise constantly forces students to challenge their thoughts and beliefs.

DeBevoise, who is known to his students as Ken, has an informal and eccentric style, encouraging, for example, an impromptu saxophone performance by one of his students in the middle of class. DeBevoise has a large following of students who take his classes every term, regardless of the subject matter.

“Ken forces you to analyze your opinions and justify them,” said Ian Spencer, a UO sophomore, who has taken one of DeBevoise’s classes every term of his college career. “His classes are able to break college students’ black-and-white perceptions of the world.”

Despite the fact that decades have passed and countries have changed, DeBevoise sees many similarities between his current students and those in his first class in Thailand. He believes that students still have to be motivated, and that they can achieve above expectations if they work hard enough.

His Thai students and his current students also share a desire to recognize DeBevoise’s efforts. Whether it’s a meeting in a coffee shop or an e-mail from halfway around the world, DeBevoise’s students all want to make him a part of their lives because they realize that they are such a big part of his life.

“When I was playing basketball as a kid, I had greater satisfaction assisting on a basket than I did scoring the basket,” DeBevoise said. “I teach because I would much rather help others to achieve great things than I would do them myself.”