Heads & Tales
by Robyn L. Loda
Photography by Paula Burch

Six hundred years before the Common Era, metal currency of a style we call coinage appears in Western Anatolia, a place that eventually would become the country of Turkey.

Almost 2,600 years later, a little boy named Ken can barely contain himself as he awaits his father at their kitchen table in Long Island, N.Y. Wiggling his feet, he tries to sit still, watching his father bring out long, thin metal boxes filled with tiny paper envelopes lined up in rows. And like magic, from within each envelope, a heavy brown coin is produced. Sometimes his father pulls out coins of silver and gold, too. And the pictures! Faces that he knows were real, forever immortalized in metal. Touching each face, his young imagination runs wild, dreaming of ancient battles waged in full armor and crimson-cloaked royalty upon golden thrones.

Kenneth Harl is 6 years old, but he can already see in coins what others cannot. His heroes are real ones -- Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and his father. He will not grow up to be the kind of international financier his father is, a man prominent in the workings of corporations and trusts. But Ken will follow in his father's footsteps, becoming a financial genius in his own right as the world's foremost authority on ancient coins and economies. Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Medieval, Turkish -- any coins found in the Mediterranean -- he will be asked to identify them all.

This year, an older but no less imaginative Professor Kenneth W. Harl celebrates his 22nd year in Tulane's history department; he teaches in the classics department as well. And along with his status as a world-renowned numismatist, or person who studies coins, he is proud of his Tulane-renowned status as a one-of-a-kind teacher who gives his students everything he has.

As a student himself, Harl was encouraged and nurtured by some of the finest scholars in history and classics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., during his undergraduate years. Still more mentors stoked this fire during his graduate school years at Yale. When he asked these masters how he could ever repay them for their gifts of support and encouragement, they introduced him to a new kind of currency -- that of concern for students, of passing on the torch of knowledge to each one and developing his or her strengths. They explained that only when Harl finally "raised" students himself from bright undergraduates to extraordinary scholars would he fully understand what they had given him -- that's when his debt to them would be repaid. And in the past 22 years, Harl has "raised" an extraordinary number of students academically -- enough to pay back each of his mentors tenfold.

A DAY IN THE LIFE: THE CLASSROOM

They gather in the large lecture hall on the second floor of the Hébert Building in the heart of Tulane's uptown campus. Even the aromas within the old building carry with them reminiscences of scholarly pursuits from days gone by. It is 9 a.m., and the room is filled with bright sunlight. Students in hooded sweatshirts and jeans saunter in and plop into their seats with evident grogginess. Harl enters, wearing a red V-neck sweater, tan pants and boat shoes -- his usual uniform. Walking briskly to the huge blackboard, he pulls down multiple boards from tracks above it, already peppered with the day's key phrases. The kids get settled, seeming to stoically accept the fact that a tidal wave of information is about to wash over them. They pull out their pens and notebooks, perhaps glancing over a handout Harl has printed.

He begins the class. They sit up straighter after his first sentence or two, realizing that he has already drenched them in more ideas than should be allowed at this hour of the morning. But any attachment to sleep has no place here now.

Harl shifts into second gear, and away they go. He rapidly paces back and forth at the front of the room, staring down at the floor in concentration yet projecting his voice at such a commanding level that even the outermost seats are surrounded by his words. He does not look at an outline, though he could just as easily be reading from a textbook full of elaborate names and obscure dates. Harl punctuates almost every idea with extra tidbits, from the Greek roots of words, to anecdotes about imperial families.

In a few minutes, he looks up to reconnect with his students, each of whom he knows by name. He uses those names in scenarios to illustrate dynamics in ancient situations.

"So if Susan here is the coin changer in the marketplace, and Mark is trying to cash in his currency from the next town to get coins to use in this town, she will charge him a service fee...Then she will deliver the foreign currency to David over here...Now he has been instructed by the imperial government to mark each of these particular coins, so he has them struck cold at the local mint by Judy..."

Harl makes jokes about the behaviors of the ancients. But soon he is pacing again, passionately explaining and embellishing at an astonishing rate. Those without tape recorders are surely doomed.

Only the sharpest seem to give an occasional guffaw at his utterly dry wit, or perhaps they are simply the ones least worried about retaining the mass of information that is this man's gift. Harl is like a walking encyclopedia of ancient history.

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