Our household, meaning mainly myself, is in a state of transition. That word, transition, is an improvement over what I first wrote: disarray. This is the week that our son Luke’s family has had to return to Montreal. Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel were able to have some days in Greenville with the South Carolina grandparents, but they have had to hurry home to get the kids prepared for the new school year. But my stalwart friend and aide Chrstie Kadelu is still here. I now have to arrange some commercial ferrying operation to take me to and from Joan’s rehabilitation hospital on a regular schedule. She is holding her own there, and many friends are stepping forward to help me.
In terms of the weekly essay it is perhaps time frankly to admit that at eighty-nine one has definitely entered the Age of Reminiscence, probably quite soon to be followed by the Age of Oblivion. One of our sons suggested that anecdotes concerning Colleagues Past might offer material, and I think I might give that a try. One of the greatest pleasures of a long career has been the opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of famous colleagues.
There are literally dozens of these. Picking one almost at random among so many I remember with a special admiration I might begin with Thomas Kuhn, a philosophical historian of science or a scientifically trained philosopher—hard to characterize. He was a bit of an academic gypsy, and he spent only about fifteen years here between appointments at Berkeley and MIT. But they were heady years. And during that time he chaired a committee I served on. It was informally and very transgressively denominated among us as the “War Crimes Committee”. Was there, as some alleged, a danger of allowing government money to divert scholars, however subtly, from pure research to, well, less pure research. How could something as transgressive-sounding as an Institute for Defense Analysis (the dreaded IDA) be allowed to have a presence on our campus? Our mandate was not to reach conclusions but “ask smart questions”. Maybe we did, but they weren’t all that smart, and we didn’t come close to answering them. We did learn quite a lot about our fellow committee members, though.
Prof. Kuhn had been chosen by the President for this particular task partly because of the extraordinary way in which Kuhn’s work appealed to both natural scientists and humanists. He was the author of a still famous book that demonstrated the breadth of his prowess. Some books are of such scholarly influence and importance that they—or their publishers—practically demand sequels or extensions. So it was with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which Kuhn had published in 1962. I think I understand the gist of his famous book, but I don’t quiz me on it. I get the ideas of scholarly paradigms and paradigm shifts, both of which have at least fairly clear parallels for humanistic subjects as well. In any event there appeared posthumously from the University of Chicago Press in 2002 a somewhat miscellaneous collection gathered together by admirers at the University of Chicago and entitled The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. So we have a famous scholar who has now become the subject of other scholars. This is a not unfamiliar pattern in the history of scholarship.
Many memories crowd my mind, including one that combines in typical academic fashion the ridiculous and the subline. In the heady days of my friendship with Kuhn, the faculty clamored much about their independence and the semi-sacrality of their deliberations, which were not to be profaned by the presence of outsiders of any stripe. That is, faculty meetings were “closed”. The idea that any “outsider” might wish to crash a meeting of the Princeton faculty should seem bizarre to you, but rare occasions did arise. In May of 1970, in response to the Ohio National Guard rampage at Kent State University, undergraduate journalists from the Daily Princetonian petitioned for admission to the emergency faculty meeting at which the Kent State slaughter seemed certain to be addressed. For this meeting there was a huge turnout. There was actually some ambiguity surrounding much of the campus “unrest” of the period. But that unarmed students walking across campus should not be gunned down by inexperienced and undertrained members of a state’s National Guard did seem a no-brainer to most Americans who were not the governor of Ohio. That American college professors should protest the slaughter of American undergraduates also did not seem a dangerous political aberration. College faculties, whose skills in formulating and passing ceremonial motions, were busy passing them all over the country.
But here, with the world burning around us and half the campuses in America in tumult, the assembled Princeton faculty began its conclave with approximately an hour’s Talmudic debate about the barely thinkable suggestion that in these extraordinary circumstances a representative student journalist might be allowed in to observe our discussions. What seemed an inessential and peripheral question to me had for some others all the force of the laws of the Persians and the Medes. Very seldom had I seen even among college professors such an eloquent engagement with the irrelevant at the expense of the essential, or such an elevation of surface at the expense of substance. After about a full hour of this, Prof. Kuhn was recognized. He began with a shock. He was an outspoken liberal. Yet he opposed observer rights for a few undergraduate student visitors, a novel possibility which seemed a popular idea to many younger faculty. Perhaps the suggested innovation lacked the gravitas of an actual paradigm shift? “Because,” Kuhn said, “if the next hour of this meeting is as stupid as the last hour, we surely do not want any observers.”
I never knew Tom Kuhn well. We were simply friendly colleagues whose paths crossed for a short if dramatic moment in American academic history. I lost touch with him when he moved on from Princeton. He died in 1996. But if in general one aspect of an academic career is its steadiness and comforting predictability—a never-failing succession of student generations both always the same and never quite the same—it has its many moments of high spiritual satisfaction born of the nobility of its goals, and at times the fatuity of their means of expression. And amidst all the Arnoldian high seriousness there are a few good laughs along the way.
