From 1991-1999, I was a graduate student, pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. Now, you might think that this is a long time to seek a graduate degree (most people do it in four or five years), and you’d be right: I stretched the thing out as long as I could. Not because I found graduate study especially difficult or ran into too many obstacles en route (although there were a few doozies towards the end), but because I knew things were as good as they were going to get. Twenty-something; loose in New York City, before the place was gentrified, corporatized, and transformed beyond all recognition; drinking, partying, and carousing week after week, interrupted only by a few classes here and there; rocking and rolling without a care in the world. I was in no hurry to move on to the next phase of life.
My friends were “characters” in the truest sense of the word: There was Dave Stein, with whom I shared an apartment for several years and who would abruptly eject people from parties when he’d had enough (“Alright everyone, I have an announcement. Get the fuck out!”); Harvey Martin, who was wound a bit tightly and would guzzle booze in quantities sufficient to blind a horse before smoking marijuana or else have to excuse himself and run laps around the block to stave off a weed-induced panic attack; Matt Sheen, who’d been an undergraduate at the University of Sydney and looked and talked exactly like Crocodile Dundee; Mike Mercer, with his shaved head, Doc Martens, and suspenders, who came off like someone who’d gotten lost on his way to a Cro-Mags show; and there was John Diehl, my last roommate before graduating, who moonlighted as a bartender and was responsible for changing my drink of choice from beer to Scotch (“Danny, we’ve got to get you on the sauce!”) and who made a New Year’s resolution to start smoking, after deciding he’d suffered enough from his previous New Year’s resolution to quit. There were others — Shafir Mehta, for example, who couldn’t make it through an entire party without breaking a limb, and Mark Durbin, who wasn’t a grad student but a stressed-out computer programmer and the target of most of our pranks — but this was the core group.
Our professors, however, were even bigger characters, and these were the more notable ones.
Jared Farber: A major figure in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Farber balanced an enormous, barrel chested torso on top of a tiny waist and spindly legs, which gave the impression of a child carrying a sofa. He was an excellent writer and could make the most difficult papers a pleasure to read by lacing them with his own distinctive brand of humor, but he really shined in live contexts, where he would display incredulity, horror, and dismay in the most creative and expressive ways. On one occasion, when a student asked a particularly stupid question (“Aren’t physical objects just waves of probability?”), Farber stared at him for a long moment, crossed the room to the far wall, drew a square on it with a magic marker, and banged his head in the center, chanting “No, no, no, no, no…” (The square remained on the wall for years after.) And when some poor professor from Kentucky or West Virginia or some such place made the terrible decision to deliver a paper on Farber’s work at our weekly colloquium, the Great Man gave everyone a tutorial on how much distress a person can express while sitting in a chair — slapping his forehead; groaning loudly; vigorously shaking his head; rocking back and forth; huffing and puffing and snorting in disgust — and when he couldn’t stand it anymore, heaved himself up, lurched over to the whiteboard, and wrote the refutation to the guy’s talk, while he was still giving it.
Harry Freid: During my very first semester at the Graduate Center, I was assigned to Freid as a research assistant. He worked in the farthest, most obscure reaches of the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science, so I’d never heard of him, but everyone assured me that he was an absolute genius. When I arrived at his office to make my introductions, I was greeted by a gangly, googly-eyed man with a prodigious mouthful of teeth and a tangled bird’s nest of hair. He was wearing jeans and a torn, grubby t-shirt that had not a few stains on it, several of which appeared to be fresh (I would learn over time that this was his normal state), and spoke in such a garbled, convoluted, mouthful-of-marbles manner that I couldn’t understand a word he said.
Freid was good-natured and friendly, so working for him should have been easy, but between his incomprehensible speech and the abstruse stuff he wrote about, it was very hard. He would give me topics to research that I didn’t understand and the names of which I could barely read, like “Interpreting Complex Trinomials Through the Peano Axioms” or “Quantum Entanglement, Indeterminacy, and the ‘Godeling’ of Truth Functional Logic,” and things only got worse when he tried to explain them to me. I was relieved, then, when he asked me to pick up his daughter after school one day, only to discover when I arrived that she was a miniature version of him, down to the wild hair, googly eyes, and scrambled speech, so listening to her explain what had happened in her fifth-grade class was as bewildering as trying to decipher whatever her father was talking about on any given occasion.
Stewart Schaefer: Schaefer was a new acquisition for the department when I started and a big catch; one of the top people working in the philosophy of language at the time. Unlike many of the other professors, whose attire and overall affect would have made them hard to tell apart from the people pushing shopping carts through Penn Station or living in boxes under the 59th Street bridge, Schaefer was always immaculately coiffed and groomed and impeccably dressed, and you could tell that he thought he was Hot Stuff. I’ll never forget the first conversation I had with him, standing by the lone water fountain in the department.
Me: Dr. Schaefer, it’s a real pleasure to meet you.
Schaefer: Are you sick?
Me: Uh…no.
Schaefer: Then why are you calling me ‘Doctor’?
Me: What should I call you?
Schaefer: I don’t know. How about “Hey, fuckface”?
Alas, the man could be a bit of a dick. He once interrupted a talk that Stein was giving to the student colloquium by opening the door and saying, “Hey, could you keep it down? I’m trying to do real philosophy in my office.” During my oral exam, he drank an entire six pack of beer that he’d brought with him and said “no” when I asked him for one. And the way I learned he’d quit my dissertation committee was during a stoned stroll through Central Park with Mercer one weekend, when he jogged past us (Schaefer was as obsessed with fitness as he was with fashion) and shouted back over his shoulder: “Oh, hey! You’ll have to find someone else for the committee. I forgot that I have another commitment!”
James Kurtz: A small but formidable man, Kurtz combined intelligence and sophistication with a cold elegance, in the vein of Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart from “House of Cards.” The only person in the department with as big a reputation as Farber, the two men were mortal enemies and their clashes the stuff of legends, though most of it went on in the journals rather than in person. In a paper attacking Kurtz, Farber maintained that the biggest problem with his philosophy was that “no one is interested in it,” and Kurtz, responding in a paper of his own, observed that “the quality of a philosophy has nothing to do with what Jared Farber thinks is interesting.” Farber followed up with a response to Kurtz’s response, referring throughout to Kurtz’s philosophy as “The Wrong View” and his own as “The Right View,” and Kurtz, in his response to Farber’s response, wondered whether his colleague had been “body-snatched and replaced with an overgrown third grader.”
At colloquia, Kurtz was feared for his lacerating interrogations, withering expressions, and icy stares, and you could see the relief on speakers’ faces after they scanned the room and realized he wasn’t in attendance that day. Aristocratic and superior in bearing and attitude, Kurtz eschewed the department’s social gatherings including the post-colloquia wine-and-cheeses, which he called “Box-wines-and-supermarket-goudas.” When a student who was finishing her PhD invited Kurtz to her graduation party and gave an address in Brooklyn Heights, he looked at her with visible pity and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t go to places where you need to get shots.”
Max Visotsky: Earlier, I mentioned a few “doozies” towards the latter part of my graduate studies, and Max was one of the dooziest. A sweet man who gave me a lot of breaks, he was the first of several dissertation advisors I would have during my time in the program. Max made me the Managing Editor of Philosophical Foundations (a relatively happening philosophy journal at the time) and gave me broad discretion to do what I liked within the role. He was enthusiastic about my dissertation proposal and a real expert in the field I’d chosen (Aesthetics). An ideal advisor in almost every respect.
The only problem with Max was that he was rather unhealthy. Almost perfectly spherical in shape and covered in thick black hair, I had privately nicknamed him “Professor Tiggy-Winkle,” in honor of the Beatrix Potter character. This portly comportment was due mainly to Max’s diet, which seemed to consist entirely of tea and packaged baked goods that he would purchase from the lobby vending machines: Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Yodels, and his favorite, the pink, coconut covered cakes called “Sno-balls.” I would sit in his office during meetings as he dunked whichever one of these things he’d bought into his tea, and after a few moments it would disintegrate into sodden bits that would end up all over the front of his shirt, leaving greasy spots and smears after he wiped them away. It was all a bit nauseating, but I watched it with a kind of morbid fascination.
The last time I saw Max, he was working his way through the day’s vending machine selection, and I remember thinking to myself, “One of those goddamned Sno-balls is going to end up in his aorta.” A week later, he died of a massive coronary, and I had to find another dissertation advisor.
Sandy Cohn: Tall and thin, with a face not unlike a vulture’s and feet the size of canoes, Cohn was the second faculty member to whom I was assigned as a research assistant. Unlike my work for Freid, which had been scattered and unfocused and devoted to esoteric who-knows-what, Cohn had me working on a single, relatively practical project: an anthology on the ethics of factory farming that was to be published by Oxford University Press. For nearly two years, I read every philosophical article on the subject that had been written; compiled lists out of them; made cuts; indicated papers I thought deserved special attention; consolidated the lists; made further cuts; watched video after video of factory-farming outrages; met with Cohn weekly to discuss all of this and to listen to him talk about his favorite pianists, a subject he was strangely fixated on; and did the last edit which finalized the collection that eventually would be published. In short, I did all the work.
When the anthology came out, I bought it at my local bookstore, brought it home and searched eagerly for acknowledgement of my efforts. Looked in the Preface: nothing. The Introduction: nothing. Scoured the back cover: nothing. Flipped through every page, in search of some mention of my name: nothing. Finally, I got to the last page, which was devoted to thanking people, and found this at the bottom: “Also, thanks to my administrative assistant, Doug Kaplan.” Vulture Face had gotten my name so completely wrong that I wondered whether he’d ever known it. In a fit of rage, I chucked the book out of my bedroom window, which overlooked the air shaft of the shitty apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that I shared with Stein at the time, and swore never to accept a research assistantship again. The next semester, I started bartending at Diehl’s place, which didn’t do my liver any favors, but brightened my outlook considerably. It paid much better, and there were a lot more girls.
