Don Munro used to wonder why students in his undergraduate courses perpetually took him to be advocating for Confucian philosophy when he described and analyzed it. “Zhuangzi’s actually my favorite,” he complained, “why do they think I’m trying to persuade them to become Confucians?” The answer was simple: Don’s combination of formality and kindness, intellectual authority, and obvious interest in ideas that his students and others expressed, presented a model through which students understood the meaning of the term junzi (君子): the Confucian ideal of the virtuous person, always seeking to be, and to help others be, better.
In those undergraduate classes, Don set the framework for learning and debate. But his graduate seminars were a very different matter. Those courses were a crossroads of disciplinary encounter. Don’s research program attracted students from political science, law, education, and other departments and schools distant from the humanities, who would join aspiring philosophers and historians in bringing the perspectives of their specializations to bear in contesting the meanings of text passages, philosophical ideas, and evolving intellectual currents in Chinese history and contemporary Chinese society. In this way, Don’s ideas, rich with implications far beyond the discipline of philosophy, spread to other fields, but equally, Don encouraged students to challenge his ideas and uncover where his own viewpoint was narrow or his evidence shaky, so that he could progress towards ever more comprehensive perspectives.