Robert O'Meally

This has been my favorite class at Columbia. Professor O'Meally is an absolute gem of a human and has an extensive treasure trove of stories, facts, and jokes that he uses to keep lectures both insightful and exciting. If you want to learn about jazz, America, art, and/or life, then this is the class for you.

Very chill, impressive man. Sit close to him if you want to hear anything he says. Go to his office hours! Not a difficult class at all.

The course itself was great; the syllabus is varied yet relevant. The fact that this course is taught by Professor O'Meally makes it even better. One gets the immediate impression that he cares deeply about academic work. Scribbling notes with a furrowed brow when students participated (fairly infrequently), I could listen to O'Meally talk all day. Very insightful and with a great collection of anecdotes. Only got feedback on one of the two papers written for the course. It was (for me) surprisingly laudatory but not especially in-depth. Lectures intermittently included screenings of documentary or film clips which nicely complemented O'Meally's lectures. I didn't feel as though they were ever a cop-out or waste of class time, even in a small lecture course.

I just saw that American Humor is being offered again next semester and immediately opened up CULPA so that I could caution everyone NOT TO TAKE THIS AWFUL, AWFUL CLASS. When I was signing up for seminars last fall, I saw that O'Meally had a few bad reviews. Even so, I figured that a class called "American Humor" had to be fun enough that I could stand if the professor was a little full of himself. I was completely wrong. To begin, the syllabus is awful. Instead of reading well-known American humorists like, say, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, David Sedaris, or anyone else the phrase "American humor" might bring to mind, O'Meally has you read things like "Invisible Man"—which, needless to say, is not a very funny book—and a random novel by Mary Gordon. He was also totally unaware that some of the books he assigned this semester were out of print, making it near impossible for us to find them. O'Meally didn't send us the syllabus until the week after classes had begun (our first session was canceled because he was abroad, which shows just how little he cares about teaching), meaning that by the time we all found out how bad the syllabus was, it was too late to drop this seminar and add a new class. The actual class itself is unbearably, excruciatingly boring. O'Meally begins each session by rambling for about half an hour, name-dropping and talking about Ralph Ellison, who he's do…

Bob has made himself one of the most important figures in my academic career. He is incredibly tough, yet always kind. He pushes students to think beyond the purview of their own frames of reference and consider imaginative possibilities that Wilson, and others, were interested in exploring and transforming into realities. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2024 Course: ENGLGU4559_001_2024_3-AugustWilson : ENGLGU4559_001_2024_3 - August Wilson Instructor: Robert O'Meally

Professor O'Meally's approach is autodidactic, folks. And that is what we are here to do in the big leagues. Yes? The model of the Ivy League is to teach us to teach ourselves. So, in response to some other confused reviewers; it isn't about an "easy workload" or being "ripped off" (to use a less pejorative word than the last reviewer) because the only way that you walk away with nothing is if you put nothing into it. Professor O'Meally is not just a scholar, he is the foremost scholar--and yet he is somehow able to soar beyond that; he's like a guru. Yes, guru; for that is to say, he is teaching when he hasn't uttered a word. Yes, I mean he is able to convey the unsaid because he is adept in the art of listening. For that reason alone, he's on another level, plain and simple, people. And if you can't see that, then you're just not paying close enough attention because this gentleman contains worlds; he contains multitudes. I learned more in that class than I ever dreamed possible. I learned about Jazz, I learned about life and I learned to learn. I came away with not just the course content but also his associative way of thinking through the material, an approach that I still employ today. It has to do with this whole idea of montage which speaks to an aesthetic that is unmistakable to jazz and the arts of the African diaspora. So---his being able to teach in the aesthetic o…

By the end of the first semester, O'Meally's section of Lit Hum had a reputation for being the easy workload section. We were never held accountable for reading the books (**no in-class quizzes**), got free pointers on our papers before turning them in again for a grade, and had no real pressure to participate in class at all. To be honest, though, I felt a little gyped in the whole scheme of what I thought I was going to get out of Lit Hum because going to class and "discussing" the books didn't really give me any more perspective on them than I got from just reading them by myself. Class "discussion" consisted mainly of monologues by O'Meally on (sometimes pointless) background information for the books we read--only every 30 minutes or so would he remember to look up and say, "Oh, does anyone have anything to add?" The only time we really got to voice our opinions was on the days when people presented papers and we got to give them pointers, an exercise that would sometimes veer off into the direction of fascinating and valuable discussion but which was usually soon cut off by O'Meally taking control of things again. He was always available and happy to talk to students during office hours, and going to office hours proved to be a *gold mine*. If you wanted help or ideas for a paper, you could literally say five words about what you were trying to do and he would launch int…

Midterm paper: 4 - 5 pages, a manifesto of 'What is the Harlem Renaissance?' Final project: 12 - 14 pages, on a topic of your choice Weekly responses: two paragraphs; these weren't instituted until a month before the end of the term. I can imagine that future incarnations of this course will include weekly responses from the outset.

I don't have enough bad things to say about him. First of all, he is too famous and too self-involved to be teaching undergraduates, because he clearly does not have time for them. When asked when his office hours were, he replied that he wasn't sure and to please call his off-campus assistant to inquire. He treated the class like his baby, though not in a good way: I think for him setting up the reading list was his major accomplishment. He thought he had come up with the canon on American humor, apparantly. The class was dominated by several people who thought O'Meally cared about what they had to say, and he did nothing to stop that. Also, the atmosphere was very unpleasant in that everyone was trying to one-up one another so no one would agree. O'Meally himself could be very harsh for no reason. All in all, I suggest avoiding this class and Professor O'Meally until he comes down to earth and realizes he isn't Toni Morrison.

O'Meally is a teacher who truly seems to be excited by the material that he teaches. He doesn't always get through the material in the syllabus but that is because he wants to thoroughly explore the topics. He is quite knowledgable about what he is teaching but understands that many students in the class do not have the background that the has and tries to make the material interesting to everyone. He sometimes gets a little off topic but he always has something important to say.