One University official jokingly termed last night's event at the Graduate School of Education's "Irish Night"--and the most Irish voice there was Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes.

McCourt spoke at the Askwith Education Forum at Longfellow Hall to a packed house--as well as a simulcast to an overflow audience across the street at Gutman Conference Center--that was both entranced and entertained by his jokes.

"One of these days I'm going to get my own chair," he said, referring to the new GSE chair honoring the school's dean, Jerome T. Murphy.

McCourt spoke humorously about his own British-style education in Limerick, Ireland, which abided by a strict question-and-answer format--the teacher asked and the students answered.

"If you favor the [British] Empire, don't take this personally," he said, adding that, as someone with 30 years of experience teaching, he preferred a less rigid environment.

He then spoke about his pre-teaching days, working at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, where "the Ivy League boys met the Seven Sisters girls," he said.

"All they did was go to Harvard and Princeton and places like that," he joked.

During his time in New York, McCourt also taught creative writing classes and spent much of his career at Stuyvesant High School, the city's well-known math/science magnet school.