Good professors are hard to find. So hard, in fact, that one former NIU president told a good one to clone himself.

Bill Monat, NIU president from 1978 to 1984, praised political science professor Gary Glenn, who gave a speech Wednesday afternoon at the Holmes Student Center’s Heritage Room.

“There should be more Gary Glenns,” Monat said. “You should clone yourself.”

Glenn is finishing his last year in the Presidential Teaching Professorship, which required him to give Wednesday’s speech. The honor is one of the highest bestowed upon NIU professors.

In the seminar presentation, Glenn spoke about liberal education and the new and old obstacles preventing students from seeking a truly liberal education.

A major factor in being liberally educated, Glenn said, is to know and study one’s own opinions while also knowing and studying those of the opposition. Glenn quoted John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” to explain this.

“The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater intensity, than even his own,” said Mill, who was referring to ancient Roman orator Cicero.

Liberal education, Glenn said, is about being free from ourselves and not necessarily just restrained by the government.

“One could well be legally free, and yet, intellectually and morally enslaved,” Glenn said.

In today’s world, economics and efficiency rules do not allow for simply thinking about permanent questions or enduring issues, Glenn said.

Glenn said state legislatures increasingly have come to view higher education as a “private good” for the betterment of an individual instead of a “public good” for the betterment of society as a whole. That is why, Glenn said, the state only provides about 30 percent of the university’s operating budget, instead of the 72 percent the state provided when Glenn began teaching here in 1966.

Glenn described the liberally educated, in the eyes of those who are not, as “sand in the gears of a smoothly functioning machine.”

“Such people think beyond the next election and the bottom line. They raise untimely questions about right and wrong, which frequently go against the grain of getting elected and of making a profit,” Glenn said.

Liberally educated people worry about a future they may not live to see, but about which they nevertheless care, he said.

“I think the possibility of liberal education in the future at NIU will, in some ways, be what it has always been,” Glenn said. “A matter of suitably inclined students are becoming somehow aware of, and gravitating to, teachers who make this kind of education available.”

Glenn, who Monat considers one of these teachers, had just one request.

“All I ask is that the flame will not go out,” Glenn said.