Skip to content
GIVING DAY is April 11! Starting now, you can support CSSH students and programs with a $5+ gift to any of our funds.
Apply
Stories

Remembering Michael Meyer, the enigmatic philosophy professor who mentored so many students

His occasional scowl was received by Northeastern philosophy students as an assertion of endearment. He did not cut short their conversations so much as he implored them to frame their arguments more logically. Which, in turn, enabled them to see him as he really was.

Michael Meyer, associate teaching professor in Northeastern’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, died Friday, August 24, at age 72.

“He was the perfect caricature of a philosophy professor that I had in my mind as an 18-year-old,” said Benjamin Miller, now a political science professor at the University of Illinois. “He was bald, with white hair going everywhere, and he would run his hands through his hair and it would get messed up. He would talk to the whole class at length about Platonic dialogue and would just never run out of things to say about it.”

Meyer, who earned his PhD at Boston University, taught thousands of students after moving to Northeastern in 1983. His course load included three courses in each of the fall and spring semesters, said Professor Emeritus William J. DeAngelis, and he often took on an additional class during the summer. He also served as head advisor of the philosophy department.

 

Read the full story at News at Northeastern. 

More Stories

NU Boston’s 3rd annual bell hooks symposium: “Black Feminist World Making”

02.23.2024

In Memoriam: Ángel David Nieves

12.11.2023
Israeli students hold Palestinian and Israeli flags, during a demonstration against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new hard-right government, in Tel Aviv University's campus, on January 16, 2023. (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

A generational divide on views of Israel … in both parties, according to new survey 

02.26.24
Northeastern Global News