A PAUSE TO LOOK BACK AND REFLECT

I was born on December 27, 1933. Today is therefore the last day of my 87^th year. As I prepare to launch into my 88^th year, it occurred to me to look back over the course of my life and remember things I have accomplished of which I am proud, before, in the words of Marc Antony, they are interred with my bones.

 

Far and away the two things of which I am most proud are my really quite minimal role in the creating of my two sons, Patrick Gideon Wolff and Tobias Barrington Wolff, and the somewhat larger role I played in raising them to be the splendid men they now are. I bathed them, I changed their diapers, I gave them their bottles, I took them to doctors and to dentists, I went to their teacher conferences, I taught Patrick to play chess and read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to Tobias (or Toby, as he was then called.) But mostly I just stood by and marveled to see how they turned out. If I have done nothing else in my life, this alone is enough to justify the space I have taken up on the earth during these 87 years.

 

Leaving aside my writings, which in my mind occupy an entirely separate space, I have enjoyed creating or participating in the creation of academic programs, an activity that I have returned to repeatedly during my half century teaching career. In my third year of regular teaching, I played a minor role in creating and then for a year ran an undergraduate interdisciplinary program at Harvard called Social Studies, whose graduates after 60 years include such varied former students as E. J. Dionne, the current president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Merrick Garland. 13 years later, shortly after arriving at the University of Massachusetts, I created a perpetually underfunded but much more interesting left-wing version of Social Studies called Social Thought and Political Economy, or STPEC as the UMass computer labeled it. STPEC is now approaching its half-century anniversary and with a little luck I hope to be able to attend the festivities. Quite my most consequential creation was a scholarship program designed to help poor black young men and women in South Africa attend historically black universities there. I ran University Scholarships for South African Students pretty much single-handedly for 25 years and managed during that time to help roughly 1600 poor South African students get a chance at a tertiary education.

 

In some ways my quirkiest creative act was prompted more by anger than by ideological commitment. My first wife, on her way to a distinguished career as a literary scholar, suffered a series of insults, slights, and professional setbacks due entirely to her gender, particularly during her early years in the 1960s. Unable to do anything at all to help her because of the stovepiped character of the Academy, I conceived in 1969 the idea of getting the American Philosophical Association to establish a Standing Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. I drafted a letter to the president of the APA, got some well-known philosophers to sign it, and was successful. It is decades since I have had anything to do with the APA but I believe the committee still exists and I hope it has had some effect on improving the conditions of professional life for women in philosophy.

 

Save for the South African scholarship program, which I sustained for a quarter of a century, and always leaving to one side my sons, that is not much to boast about for a man about to become 87. But it is not nothing.