Courtesy: Shahid Riaz Islamabad – Pakistan

Malcolm X University
. ford hall had chemistry labs, and 
some administration officials worried that these radicals were making bombs in the 
basement. Morrie knew better. He saw right to the core of the problem, which was 
human beings wanting to feel that they mattered. 
The standoff lasted for weeks. And it might have gone on even longer if Morrie hadn’t 
been walking by the building when one of the protesters recognized him as a favorite 
teacher and yelled for him to come in through the window. 
An hour later, Morrie crawled out through the window with a list of what the protesters 
wanted. He took the list to the university president, and the situation was diffused. 
Morrie always made good peace. 
At Brandeis, he taught classes about social psychology, mental illness and health, 
group process. They were light on what you’d now call “career skills” and heavy on 
“personal development.” 
And because of this, business and law students today might look at Morrie as foolishly 
naive about his contributions. How much money did his students go on to make? How 
many big-time cases did they win? 
Then again, how many business or law students ever visit their old professors once 
they leave? Morrie’s students did that all the time. And in his final months, they came 
back to him, hundreds of them, from Boston, New York, California, London, and 
Switzerland; from corporate offices and inner city school programs. They called. They 
wrote. They drove hundreds of miles for a visit, a word, a smile. 
“I’ve never had another teacher like you,” they all said. 
As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about deat
h
, how different cultures view 
the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who 
believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body 
that holds it—so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside 
him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being 
born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great 
feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth. 
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it 
disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the 
moon always returns, as do we all. 
That is what they believe.