For years, you could find Paul Zopf in one of those quiet sun-smeared offices in Archdale Hall with its old floors and the smell of chalk dust and books that outlived their authors. 

He’d arrive there early, the kind of professor who believed in presence as much as knowledge. A man who wore a jacket to class not for vanity but because it was respectful. To the College, to the work, to the students who were learning how to think.

Clarajo Pleasants ’67 was one of those students. “He was the epitome of gentility,” she says. “Immaculate manners. He would never let me open my car door. I could be driving and he would still rush around to open the door for me.”

And something else, something that spoke less to the gentleman and more to the educator. “He had such a way with words,” Clarajo says. “Not in a flowery way but in a way that made you want to listen to him. I felt if I wasn’t listening to everything he was saying I would miss out on something important.”

In the history of Guilford College, few people carried the institution with more meaningful purpose than Paul, who died Oct. 9 at the age of 94. A memorial service will be held Sunday, Oct. 12, at 3 pm at New Garden Friends Meeting in Greensboro.

The student always came first with Paul

Paul arrived at Guilford in 1959 as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Over the next 34 years, he was promoted to Associate Professor, full professor and finally Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.

But those are just titles, black dense words on a CV. What many Guilforidans seem to remember most after learning of Paul’s passing wasn’t any particular theory or concept, but the way he paused – that gentle, expectant silence that offered space and said: Go ahead, figure it out.

“He was a pupil’s professor,” remembers Bill Pleasants ’65, Clarajo’s husband and one of countless students who stayed in touch long after grades stopped mattering. “The student always came first with Paul.”

Karen Blum ’72 remembers being one of those students. She arrived at Guilford chasing politics but found Sociology  – and Paul – instead. “I sort of glommed onto him,” says Karen. “He was hard, he was very demanding. If you got an A in his class you earned it.”

Once, stuck on a senior paper, Karen trudged into Paul’s Archdale office and poured out her frustration. “I talked and talked until I finally slapped my hands on his desk and said, ‘Thank you!  I’ve got to go!’”

As Karen tells the story a half century later, Paul barely spoke. “And because he didn’t, I figured it out,” she says. She raced back to her apartment and finished the paper.

Style that was Quaker in its silence

That, says Karen and so many others this week, was classic Paul. His teaching style was Quaker in its silence – patient, perceptive, almost holy in its restraint. Whether in the classroom, his office or walking across the leafy quad, with a student next to him, he knew when to hold his tongue, when to let the student discover the spark themselves.

Bill tells a story that seems almost too small to mean much, until it does. On his second test in his first class with Paul, Bill found a math error that cost him two points – an 89 instead of a 91. “I checked it four times and knew I was right but I was nervous telling him,” says Bill, who finally summoned the courage after class.

Paul’s reaction? “He looked at me and said, ‘If you added it four times it must be my mistake,'” says Bill. “Then he walked away. He changed my grade without ever looking.”

That, says Bill, was Paul: no defensiveness, no fuss. Just trust offered without ceremony. “He didn’t posture, didn’t play professor,” says Bill. “Paul assumed you were capable. And somehow with that unspoken affirmation he made you want to prove him right.”

Paul was the rare academic who combined precision with warmth. He grew up on a Connecticut farm. His father had been a cabinetmaker, and Paul inherited that instinct for proportion. Every word sanded, every pause measured. His life outside the classroom was built the same way: tidy, unhurried, made of care.

Fixtures in the fabric of Guilford

For decades, Paul and his wife Evelyn, who died in 2016, were fixtures in the fabric of Guilford. They hosted dinners, welcomed students into their longtime home on George White Drive, and blurred the old boundaries between teacher and friend.

For more than a half century, if you looked toward the graduation procession, you’d see him walking alongside the students as the ceremony’s chief faculty marshal. “Guilford was Paul for the longest time and Paul was Guilford,” says Karen.

Even their home was an extension of the College. The Zopfs lived a frugal life. Whenever the College renovated a building, Paul was there to give new life to what would have gone to a landfill. The brass door plate on his front door came from a Duke Hall renovation in the 1970s.

Much of the ornate trim in their house came from reclaimed wood when Founders was rebuilt and reopened 50 years ago this fall.

Transforming something old into something new. The metaphor is not lost on Michele van Gobes ’72, another student who kept in touch with Paul through regular lunches all these years. “He did that with students for years,” she says.

"I know we couldn’t have him forever, and we had him for 94 years and it was such a wonderful 94 years,” Michele says. “But now that he’s gone I wish he were here. A lot of us think this. Just one more year.”