I, too, had Dr. Robert Hawkes as an undergraduate advisor for my history B.A. at George Mason. He passed away earlier this month. His hard-core Southside Virginia gentleman farmer accent couldn't hide a great subversiveness and humor as he told us about growing up a privileged white boy in the Jim Crow south and his transformation to post-racial liberal at college. He also told me that getting your B.A. and M.A. from the same school was looked down upon as incestuious in academic circles. I'm not certain that's true, but it caused me to drop out of George Mason's graduate program in history after one semester in 1993. I still regret that. Maybe he was just trying to get rid of me. Ha!
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