‘It’s Lifetime Service’

By Beth McMurtrie

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

Stanley Katz says he has stayed in touch with students he taught as far back as the 1960s.

Sarah Barringer Gordon was sitting outside Stanley N. Katz’s office at Princeton University one day when out walked an older man who smiled at her as he passed. “I walked in and said, ‘Who was that?’ It turns out it was one of Stan’s students 25 years ago at Chicago.” Ms. Gordon was stunned. Mr. Katz then said to her, “Don’t you get it? It’s lifetime service.”

Mr. Katz’s achievements are many: noted historian, director of Princeton’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, and winner of the National Humanities Medal. But among the jobs he takes most seriously is that of mentor. “I have felt for many, many years we in the profession generally don’t pay enough attention to mentoring,” he says. “Yet there’s a real obligation for all of us to mentor our doctoral students after they get their degrees, to be their advocate, to be their adviser, to be the shoulder they can lean on when they need it.”

Mr. Katz has been all of those things to fellow academics over the years. He is proud to say he has stayed in touch with students he taught as far back as the 1960s. To prove his point he names the Harvard professor Howard Gardner, who was in his freshman seminar at Harvard in 1961 and is now one of his closest friends.

“For me the reward is personal. I teach because I’m interested in the people I teach,” Mr. Katz says. “I’m not interested in the work product. I’m interested in helping young people develop themselves.”

Ms. Gordon, who went on to become a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, can attest to that. A frustrated lawyer when she met Mr. Katz, she says he immediately understood that she was searching for more of an intellectual challenge. “He took one look at me and knew exactly who I was,” she recalls.

After she earned her doctorate in history at Princeton, Ms. Gordon received two job offers, one at a university with a great law school but no particular strengths elsewhere. The other was from the University of Pennsylvania, whose law school was struggling but much stronger academically. “Stan said go for the powerful university,” she recalls. “I have to say for the first couple of years, I really wondered why he said that. But now I have a full joint appointment in a top-tier history department and a top tier-law school. I think Stan knew that’s what I would enjoy.”

Mr. Katz says a good mentor will do the same for those he or she advises: understand, and then cultivate, their best instincts and talents. Be a good listener, he says, and don’t try to mold others in your image. “You’ve got to let go at least some of the ego.”