His students trickle into the room and settle into their leather desk chairs around the edge of the table. They catch up on their assigned reading and ask questions to clarify the assignments to the teaching assistant.

As Elie Wiesel walks in carrying his texts, a hush falls over the room and everyone sits at attention.

He takes a seat at the center of the table and makes brief pleasantries with the students closest to him and then he gets to the task at hand, discussing the story “Seven Beggars” from the book Rabbi Nachman’s Tale. The often-studied book in Judaism is the main subject of Literature of Memory, a class through the College of Arts and Sciences and the University Professors Program.

Wiesel, the Boston University Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, is the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner and has authored more than 40 works, including Night, one of the most famous books to be written about the Holocaust, which includes Wiesel’s personal experiences surviving the concentration camps.

Although Wiesel has won numerous literary awards and honors from universities and institutes around the world, he still says he is a teacher above all else.

“I love it,” he said. “I love learning and that is why I like to teach. My belief is that the noblest profession in the world is learning and teaching. The act of teaching is when I give and receive.”

Wiesel has been teaching at BU for 30 years after President emeritus John Silber recruited him from his professorship at the City College in New York.

“Dr. Silber came for a year and tried to convince me that I should come to Boston University,” he said. “He was so persistent and his arguments were so good that I accepted to come and help him.”

Since then, Wiesel has taught Judaic studies, philosophy, religion and other humanities classes through UNI and CAS. He also gives his annual lecture series about a variety of topics, including the Torah, the Bible and both classic and modern issues. The three-part series attracts a packed crowd to Metcalf Hall each fall.

This year’s topics ranged from the importance of prayer to discussions about Jewish literature.

While Wiesel said he does not pick the topics with any pattern, he said he enjoys sharing new ideas with the audiences.

“I love these lectures,” he said. “I am a matchmaker. To see so many hundreds and hundreds of people and teach them about literature and to give them what I have, what I am.”

While he lectures to a sea of students and community members through these lectures, he teaches a much smaller group each week.

His Literature of Memory class is composed of fewer than 40 students who all meet in a large room in the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at 147 Bay State Road. The paneled room has fireplaces at each end, crystal chandeliers and an ornately decorated ceiling, a very different setting from the folding chairs of Metcalf Hall.

While many of his students say his class is the most profound experience they have had at BU, he said he takes just as much from the experience.

“I learn from my students more than they know because I learn with my students,” Wiesel said. “I receive so much from not only the students I know personally, but those that were their teachers and theirs’ and theirs’ and it goes back for centuries.”

Even though he has been teaching classes on similar subjects for more than three decades, he said he varies each class he teaches.

“In my 35 years, I have never given the same course,” Wiesel said.

Wiesel teaches two classes every fall and takes a sabbatical each spring to write and travel the world. This past spring, Wiesel finished a novel written in French and also worked on a new volume of his memoirs, he said.

“I don’t want to have a moment to waste,” he said. “I won’t waste it.”

Because Wiesel only teaches two classes each academic year, with limited spots, the classes are competitive and require a different type of registration process.

His assistant Rachel Strauss accepts letters on Wiesel’s behalf from interested students, who are usually seniors or graduate students. They express their interest in taking the class, their background in literary studies and also why they want to study with Wiesel, she said.

“We usually have to turn away people,” Strauss said. “Not that they aren’t wonderful, but there are only 35 spaces.”

Third-year theological and religious graduate student Jodie Parnes went through this process to get into the class. While she said she was previously interested in Jewish history, she said she did not have a specific interest in the time period or topic.

“I chose to take his class mostly for the opportunity to hear him speak regularly about a topic he has spent his life studying,” she said. “I believed that he would have a unique perspective on the subject, as he grew up in his early years living in this world and saw its destruction first-hand.”

The class includes literary analysis and written work, as well as in-class conversations with Wiesel and Ariel Burger, his teaching assistant. Parnes said the class is challenging and stimulating at the same time.

“He also is never satisfied with only one interpretation,” she said, “but encourages us to stretch our minds to truly uncover the many layers of meaning within the various texts.

“He creates an environment, however, that feels safe and supportive,” she continued, “where we are all free to ponder issues in our own way.”

Wiesel said it is one of his key goals of class is to create a safe classroom setting.

“I have learned in my class they are united,” he said. “I don’t remember in my 30 years here a moment of tension with my students in class. I have had German students and Jewish students … and the Jewish students surround the German students with such generosity that it warms my heart – there is a generosity of friendship when they gather.

“I come to my class with a smile because I love being with them,” he continued. “The goal of teaching is to share about cultures, to sensitize them. How can you change the world? You sensitize them. You want to sensitize those in your classroom, to be open to other people’s joy, other people’s pain and other people’s woes.”

While Wiesel is 77, he said he has no plans to leave the classroom anytime soon.

“[I will teach] as long as I can,” he said. “I have no desire to leave my students.”