Profile

PROFILE: JOHN TAYLOR
As a stately professor or as a wrinkled California raisin,
he likes to court disaster in the classroom

By Kathleen O’Toole

o Stanford undergraduates, John Taylor normally looks and sounds the part of a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and a man with Alan Greenspan's ear. On the stage of Kresge Auditorium, he stands high above the students, his broad shoulders fit precisely into a tailored dark suit. His thick, gray-black hair behaves as if it never met a wisp of wind, and his clear, rich voice booms explanations, in proper English sentences, for the red, blue and green line graphs projected on two screens behind him. But a few years from now, what these students will remember is the morning their stately professor morphed into a brown, wrinkled California raisin with six white stubs for fingers.

"I woke up this way this morning," he mumbles to the class, his misshapen hands fumbling to straighten his supply-demand curves on the overhead projector. "But the lecture must go on."

And on it goes at its usual pace until Kresge suddenly is jolted by a blast of bass guitar. The pudgy raisin on the stage, graph pointer still in hand, begins to wiggle, bend and shuffle to Marvin Gaye's voice blaring "Heard It Through the Grapevine." The lyrics miraculously replace the supply-demand curves on the overhead. By the time the raisin stumbles breathless, rumpled and sweaty through the last chorus, Kresge is rocking like Mem Aud on "Flicks" night.

Taylor, the author of the famed Taylor Rule that Wall Streeters and now even Main Streeters use to predict what the Fed will do about interest rates, is considered conservative in his economic philosophy. But the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics is willing to "court disaster," he says, to persuade students that economics is interesting and informative.

John Taylor (Plain text)

Previous | Next