Historian Andrew David Teaching Impeachment during an Impeachment Inquiry

Andrew David was a week away from delivering his scheduled lecture on Eleanor Roosevelt and other first ladies in his 20th-Century American Presidency course when another important woman in politics, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, uttered two history-altering words: impeachment inquiry.

So David (CAS’05, GRS’18), a College of Arts & Sciences lecturer in US history, who remembers being riveted in high school by the Clinton impeachment proceedings, ripped up his syllabus. History was being made, tweet by tweet. Eleanor Roosevelt would have to wait. 

Short on time—he and his wife have a five-month-old son—David hustled to put together a new 75-minute lecture, complete with PowerPoint slides, tracing the impeachments of two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, the almost-impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, and the short-lived push to impeach Ronald Reagan. 

Why take on the extra hours of work just to deliver a different lecture to his 50 students?

Because it’s not every day a history professor gets to teach about historic moments as they are happening. “It was an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up,” David says. 

So he didn’t.