Meet professor Robert Ellmann

A man some students meet at least once a week is not just a teacher but a well-travelled person of many experiences and occupations.

Robert Ellmann teaches wide range of subjects in which he shares with the pupils his wealth of knowledge and outlook on philosophy. Sitting in the cafeteria, looking through papers for his next lecture, Ellmann started to answer questions at first a little nervously, not knowing what was coming, but quickly he became relaxed and forthcoming.

He grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where almost all his neighbors were African-American. When he was "just a kid" he would take baths with "two nice black twin sisters from next door." He says that it was nothing since they were all so young but that there was "racial harmony in the bathtub."

Later Ellmann moved to the suburbs with his parent, where almost all his neighbors were white so there was "no grey" in his upbringing.

Ellmann studied not only at Michigan Law School, but also in England at Cambridge and Oxford. It was due to Yale University that he first came to Prague and because of Oxford that he stayed here.

Ellmann first visited Prague with his then-fiancée and was here for a Yale university-based project, which had sent him to "corrupt Eastern Europe" for a Christmas meeting in 1992. But at that point he was living in Lithuania then he would move to Hungary and Slovakia and it wouldn't be until "the late 90's that I'd have any connection at all with Prague and I wouldn't move here full-time until several years after that is till this millennium."

He moved to Prague under a premise of becoming a vice rector for a new university called Atlantic. He was invited by his former Oxford professor, Zbynek Zeman, but the project never received financial backing from the British Council.

"So here I was in Prague and I had a law degree as well and I saw an ad for a law position in a Czech law firm so I interviewed for it and got the position." Many would imagine that that would mean a boring office job but that was not so. In fact, Ellmann traveled around Europe chasing financial criminals who had absconded from Czech Republic with investor funds.

He would try to catch them in Western Europe because "when someone is in prison they're much more willing to see the error of their ways and we got quite a lot of money back."

As exciting as this work must have been, Ellmann always wanted to be a teacher. While he was practicing law in California he applied to 30 community colleges for a teaching position but was politely told that "California had been cruel to women and minorities and I wasn't welcome at the time because they were trying to make up for past mistakes" so he only started teaching much later for the "Yale University of Eastern Europe," as he refers to his current posting.

"They were the only ones that would give me a job," he says with a laugh. He finds his work highly fulfilling because he has "never been married - I've never had a family. So I feel I can give something back that way or try to."

Although Ellmann has a law degree, he teaches mainly subjects tied to economics. He also used to teach criminal law and now teaches a philosophy course on different aspects of freedom. When asked why, since economics and philosophy are two very different subjects, Ellmann replies with a smile that he tries to be "a good dilettante."

He adds he is studying the hard sciences again because he would "like to put together a big course on energy - but the science, the economics and the politics of it" because "you know you get bored if you stay doing the same thing - I can't rewrite lectures forever. Sometimes you have to take a jump."