"There was a sense of urgency," Gerrard says."[He wanted] to move his career along and move hisinterests along."

West's professors remember him as brilliant anddriven.

Cogan University Professor Hilary W. Putnam,who will be teaching a philosophy course with Westnext year, had him as a student in the early1970s.

"He was a brilliant undergraduate," Putnamsays. "At that time he already had very wideinterests in philosophy, pragmatism, Marxism andjust about anything under the sun."

Houghton Professor of Theology and ContemporaryChange Preston N. Williams taught West at theDivinity School and is his current colleague.

"I've been telling him since he was 17 that heneeded to slow down, and that of course hasn'thappened," Williams says. "He still operates at alevel of high energy."

West's intellectual curiosity extended farbeyond the classroom.

Evans recalls meeting West playing pool, andeven in that setting West would "crack jokes"about Marx, Hegel or Kierkegaard.

"He shot a good game of pool--or at least hethought he did--and I used to play him, and that'show I got to know him," Evans says. "Between shotshe would want to talk about Hegel or Mao Zedong orMarxism. He was very intellectually oriented."

Epps remembers West from a civil rights andblack revolution seminar that he headed.

"He would knock on my door and when I opened hewould push me aside and rush to my bookcase to seewhat new books I had bought," Epps says. "He wasintellectually precocious by any standard."

Gerrard remembers that even West's nightlydreams were on "a very different level ofthinking." West would "dream about ideas fightingeach other," he says.

Like his course selections and intellectualcuriosity, West's extracurricular activitiesreflect deeply rooted interests that still shapehis life. He was active in the Association ofAfricans and African-American Students and theInstitute of Politics, and also dabbled in socialcritique, writing a 1974 piece in The Crimsonexamining the race relations theories of one ofhis mentors, Thomson Professor of GovernmentMartin L. Kilson Jr.

Despite West's heavy academic workload, heremained social and personable.

"He was tremendously down to earth andextremely social," Gerrard says. "He was verypopular among all his peer groups, men and women."