His inspiration will live on

Hayward was a force of nature, something well known those of us who were lucky enough to get within range of his whirling dervish intellect, passions, and heart. Only after he's gone do I realize how much I always expected him to be around -- that even when I hadn't seen him for a long while, his mere existence had become an inspirational anchor for me.

I first experienced Prof. Alker in the classroom, while taking his signature graduate international security studies course. From day one, there were some there who were put off -- and admitted to being lost -- by the rapid fire delivery, intense focus, voluminous (often unfamiliar) interdisciplinary references, and exquisitely four-dimensional reasoning. By no means can I claim to have followed more than a percentage of what he threw at us (I don't believe I know of anyone who ever could keep up entirely -- including most of his professional peers, from what I could tell), but I walked out of most of those first and subsequent sessions exhilarated, inspired, and, like everyone else to varying degrees, wishing that I had the replay tape available to go back to slowly recover what I'd missed the first time. Hayward challenged us to try to keep up, and he didn't suffer fools gladly at times, but if you rose to said challenge you were treated to some of the most interesting, provocative thinking you'd ever heard in your life.

Along those lines, he gave me (us) permission to aggressively, joyfully integrate not only multiple methods, fields and fresh approaches, but to do it all with a guilt-free (though disciplined) sense of justice and emotional acknowledgment. He never lost track of one of the central purposes of academia -- the hope of making a difference in the world -- and he had refreshingly little patience for artificial intellectual or disciplinary boundaries.

I will always be grateful that he helped sustain me, as only a very few could do, in my long dissertation slog. I took on a then-fairly unconventional combination of subject areas for my IR thesis, but whenever I would check in with him he would reaffirm, by his shear excitement and encouragement of the broad, complicated topic the value of what I was trying to do. I always left his office with a surge of confidence and excitement, and a raft of relevant questions to ponder.

The bottom line was this: He "got" me, and I'd like to think that to some extent I got him. So, even though I still cannot fully fathom that he is no longer with us physically (and quite frankly resent the hell out of it), he will be with me for the rest of my life, urging me to stand up for what's just and what's possible, and to challenge conventional thinking -- academic or otherwise. As I have for years now, I will continue to think of Hayward when I need a little (or a lot) extra courage to defend an idea or position that doesn't fit the standard mold, because he helped teach me, and many of us willing to stand the heat in the kitchen, to try to think broadly, in multi-dimensional, non-linear ways, with both passion and compassion.