Fond and Fearful Memories of an Influential Professor

 

Spitz, EH. Fond and Fearful Memories of an Influential Professor. The Chronicle of Higher Education Review.

Recently I learned by chance that one of my revered professors, Mary Mothersill, died this past January. There had been no article in The New York Times. Profoundly shaken, I conjured her up and thought about how much she gave throughout the decades of her career, teaching philosophy at Barnard College and at Columbia University - where, as a graduate student in the 1980s, I first encountered her in a seminar on the minor dialogues of Plato. Austere and accomplished, reared in an era when women walked, talked, garbed themselves, and smoked with no-nonsense brusqueness as if to prove they were tougher than men, she made a forceful impact, carving permanent furrows into the cerebral cortices of her students.

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