The professor, bird dogs, and German social analysis

There was a nice blurb about a former professor of mine, Jan Dizard, in this past Sunday's Boston Globe. In classes and out, Dizard was just as eager to talk about shad fishing in the Connecticut River or that the wonderful asparagus fields in Hadley were being paved over for shopping centers.
And then, without missing a beat, he'd assign us a chapter from On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas with chapter titles such as, and I quote, "The Phenomenological Constitutive Theory of Society: The Fundamental Role of Claims to Validity and the Monadological Foundations of Intersubjectivity."
I like the guy, but sometimes he was too smart for my own good.
Here's a link to an interview with Dizard.