"He bills himself as a consensus builder," Professor Ghemawat said, "but there's a question about how far you can get with that.
Literary scholar, filmmaker, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored seventeen books and created thirteen documentary films and film series, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots, now in its second season on PBS.
There are people living here who were lawyers, doctors, engineers, designers, journalists, builders, professors and university students.
"We haven't come close to creating new instruments that would inspire someone to practice three hours a day for 20 years," said Bob Ostertag, a composer, instrument-builder and associate professor of technocultural studies at the University of California at Davis.
One became a builder; the other a professor.
"He's a coalition builder," said Michael Peich, a professor of English at West Chester University in Pennsylvania who started a poetry conference there with Mr. Gioia.
"He was an excellent theorist, but his role was as a designer and builder," said Peter Galison, a Harvard professor of physics and the history of science.
"The Canal Builders," by Julie Greene, a history professor at the University of Maryland, takes a very different approach.
"We can see a chance for a huge synergy between the AI learning community and traditional factory robot builders," says Yezhou Yang, an assistant professor who runs a robot learning lab at Arizona State University.
And these two men — the poet and memoirist Mr. Doty ("Atlantis," "School of the Arts" and the recent "Dog Years") and the novelist and memoirist Mr. Lisicky ("Lawnboy," "Famous Builder"), who are also both professors of literature — have done just that.
Richard W. Wertz, a builder in Westport, Massachusetts, is formerly an associate professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
