For a while on the last Friday afternoon in October before Halloween, Dwight Watson had his audience seeing ghosts in Salter Hall.

(See a photo album from the event here.)

The writer, actor, director, and Wabash theater professor was delivering “”An ‘Abridgement’ Between Nathaniel Dunn’s and the Graveyard,” the 30th LaFollette Lecture. And though conjuring is atypical of academic talks, Watson noted that “ghosts are not altogether absent in the theater.”

“There are ghosts in the wood paneling on the stage wall behind me,” he told his Salter Hall audience. “Some are more evident than others and they usually line up in threes and fours."

For 30 seconds—as eyes scanned the grain of the wood paneling—the lecture became a leap of the imagination not unlike theater itself.

Not unlike the “synapse” Watson had described earlier—that "gap or open space between the axon and dendrite that works like a bridge between the two."

Or the ways an actor can become, as Watson said, "a direct-line connection between two worlds.”

Thirty seconds reminiscent of the energy, challenge, and collaboration that makes theater important to so many Wabash students and such a necessary discipline to the liberal arts. And a LaFollette Lecture that brought imagination, thoughtful reflection, and a self-deprecating sense of humor together in the way that makes Watson an essential artist and citizen of the Wabash community.

“Engagement with students and the wider Wabash community life is Dwight’s signature,” said Dean of the College and last year’s LaFollette Lecturer Gary Phillips as he introduced Watson. “He has fashioned a career of teaching, scholarship, and leadership that serves as a model of the Wabash teacher/scholar.”

The author of nine books and plays, with his creative work appearing in seven different anthologies, Watson has been a presenter or invited speaker at 18 regional, national, and international meetings, and has received playwriting awards in more than a dozen different competitions.

“He has directed 40 plays on the Wabash stage, all of which, as is his practice, fully involved students in the critical and creative work of assistant directing and stage management,” Phillips said. “By his choice of classical and contemporary dramatic works—Beckett, Brecht, Chekov, Golding, Ibsen, Moliere, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stoppard, and his own plays—Dwight has enabled the Theater Department, and the Fine Arts, to be a leading voice in raising the great liberal arts questions, the enduring questions.”

“Theater is an imperfect art that holds a mirror up to an imperfect world,” Watson said. “Theater is about our limitations, [yet] theatre is about freeing ourselves—audience and performer—as best we can, from those limitations. It is about pursuing an action and experiencing a transcendent moment.

He quoted the late Bill Placher's LaFollette Lecture from 20 years ago: “One of the functions of the humanities is to capture the transcendent in the single, ordinary moment.”

“If we read a text aloud, as I encourage my students to do, we awaken our senses and just might feel the heartbeat of a writer," Watson said. "If we take the challenge to think and feel as if we were