Gayle Greene, a professor of English at Scripps College, who took her PhD in English at Columbia, shared this charming story about her experiences with Professor Danto:

“Julius Caesar!”  He looked up with genuine astonishment.  He was a philosopher.  Why on earth would anyone ask him to read a dissertation about Julius Caesar?

“Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.”

“Oh.  Right.”  As though that made it clearer.

The young woman who’d cornered him in his office was a complete stranger.   He’d never laid eyes on me, nor I on him.  Doubtless I was wearing a leather mini skirt and high brown boots, my usual garb back then.

My take on the play was vaguely philosophical— very vaguely.  I had ideas about Shakespeare and 17th century nominalism, though no philosophical context to fit them into, nor any other context, actually, self-directed as I was, the usual experience for women graduate students at Columbia those days. The Shakespearean hadn’t liked my topic, said it was “too modern and psychological,” so I approached the Miltonist with the idea, who said, uh, no, it would be awkward for him to direct a Shakespeare dissertation.  I went away and came back a year later with a completed dissertation, throwing myself on the mercy of the Miltonist, who said, okay, okay, he’d try to set up a committee,   there was a theater person who might read it, and a nice young assistant professor who more or less had to say yes since he didn’t have tenure, and he suggested that I talk to Arthur Danto.  And that was my committee.  They more or less smuggled me out the back door, unbeknownst to the Shakespearean (who found out years later, after I was comfortably ensconced on the west coast).     

So that’s what I was doing in Danto’s office that spring morning, with my request. He didn’t have to agree, he was an eminence, even then;  I wasn’t his student, and the dissertation was very long.  But he came through.

After the dissertation defense, I stood outside in the hall, Philosophy Hall, waiting for the verdict.  The committee filed out, shook my hand, congratulated me, handed me a few pages of typed notes, and went away.  

Everyone except Danto.  He stood there, I stood there, an uneasy moment, then  he said,  “By the way, do you have a job?”  

“A job?”  I had, as a matter of fact, just lost the adjunct position I’d been counting on to keep me in New York for the next few years.  It was 1974;  the job market had crashed.  

“Would you like a letter?”

“Like… a recommendation?  Sure, that’d be great.”  It had never occurred to me to ask, I was that clueless.

He needn’t have offered—nobody else did.   And he wrote not just once but many times through the years, as I applied for grants, fellowships, positions.  He wrote a good letter;  I never saw it but I was told it was eloquent. It opened doors.  

Those were the only times we met.  We corresponded when he was writing for The Nation and, for a time, so was I;  we said, the next time I was in New York, we’d get together, etc., though we never did.  But I remember him more fondly and vividly than I do almost any of my Columbia professors, as the one who had a sense that there was a person on the line, a person who might need a job.

I think that’s what we take from our teachers, finally, not so much information imparted as a sense of who they are.