Laudator Temporis Acti

Joshua Katz, "The Educational Guild," Daily Princetonian (April 2, 2013):

No one needs me to explain that, thanks to nature and nurture, all of us inherit and take on traits, good and bad, from our parents. But there are academic parents, too, and their influence, which can naturally have a profound effect on any student, is typically of particular importance to those of us who choose to follow seriously in their intellectual footsteps and join the educational guild ourselves.

I was astonishingly fortunate in my teachers, both in college and in graduate school, and it would be wrong of me to name any one of them as my most important influence: I study what I study, teach what I teach and in many ways am what I am because I am a mutt, the son of all of them. Nevertheless, when one's Doktorvater — that wonderful German word for Ph.D. supervisor, literally "doctor-father" — is the single most prominent scholar in the field, and when that scholar is also a deeply kind person who has no truck with hierarchy, it would be wrong to downplay the extraordinary role he has had in shaping one's career. And that's the case with me: My Doktorvater was Calvert Watkins, the leading historical and comparative linguist and Indo-Europeanist of our times ...

[....]

But it isn't because of his brilliance that I loved Calvert. I loved him because he had a fantastic sense of humor, because he was the consummate host, because he had a thing about black-eyed peas, because he introduced me to Myers's Rum with a splash of tonic and a wedge of lime, because he devoured mysteries, because he wasn't pretentious and yet wore a pocket watch and because he really and truly couldn't understand how anyone could claim to be educated without being able to read cuneiform. During my years as a graduate student, few days passed when I didn't have at least one formal or informal class with him, few days when we didn't have at least one informal meal or drink together. In and out of the classroom, day after day, he taught simply by being himself.

[....]

The pursuit and advancement of knowledge is a traditional craft, in some ways not unlike blacksmithing and the production of stained glass, and giving a lecture of this kind is a neat way of demonstrating to students that they are part of a tradition.

Joshua Katz wrote 36 articles for the Daily Princetonian. I have been able to find only two on the World Wide Web, this one and My Two Ferdinands. Considering the current frenzy in favor of cancellation, I downloaded them, because I don't know how much longer they will survive in cyberspace.