Going Back – To Grad School

I read with great interest, appreciation, and nostalgia the Student Dispatch column by Carolyn Edelstein. Right after the Second World War, my dad (’43) had been invited back to Princeton, together with the future president Robert Goheen (’40 *48), to pursue a Ph.D. degree in classics. For family reasons (a publishing house), my dad was unable to accept. A generation later, he encouraged me to continue my art-history studies at Princeton, and I stayed on for a Ph.D. under my thesis adviser, John Rupert Martin.

Looking back 40 years later, I still consider it the best decision I ever made for what my dad called “the life of the mind.” I wouldn’t trade those two extra diplomas signed by President William Bowen *58 for anything. “Narrow-minded”? Arguably. (I applied only to Princeton’s graduate school; but then, I had applied four years earlier only to Princeton for college!) Yet I prefer to call it “focused on Princeton” — and that focus has never waned. Princeton remains, in Shakespeare’s lovely phrase, “the constant image.”