Judith Shklar: The Metics' Metic

COMMENTING ON the announcement of Lecturer Judith N. Shklar's appointment to a professorship in Government next summer, one of her former students--and an avid admirer--remarked that he "was surprised when I found out that she got tenure." Rampant sexism, a retreat from earlier admiration, commentary on the university's controversial hiring and firing policies? Not quite. Knowing Dr. Shklar held a tenured position. In his eyes any perusal of her impressive record indicated the qualifications of at least a full professor, if not a demi-goddess, as she is viewed by some of her more devoted disciples. At forty-four, Dr. Shklar boasts a B.A. and M.A. from McGill University, a Ph.D. (1955) from Harvard, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Birkenhead Prize from the American Political Science Association, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a vice presidency of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and four universally respected books on political theory and intellectual history.

But Dr. Shklar leads another life which she has always refused to sacrifice to the full time teaching load which would have more readily gained her the status of professor. Her determination has won out: Harvard decided to make her a professor although she will continue to teach less than full time. Dr. Shklar's "other life" consists of a husband and three children, and confers upon her the equally appropriate title of Mrs. Shklar. As a credit to her own versatility and a well-balanced division of responsibilities at home, she fulfills her various roles to her own satisfaction, and--although her life-style seems to leave her rather hectic and driven--to perfection in the opinions of those who know her.

Her wit and friendliness are immediately evident. This amazing conglomeration of roles and relations can exist only, it seems, on the basis of an extraordinary personality. Her character smacks of unusual and invigorating qualities. On the other hand, "I'm selfish," she admits, with an apologetic grin, but her eyes challenge any rebuttal of this self-analysis, "and I'm strong minded." "She's human as hell," a student tries to explain in the face of her intimidating vitae and potoriously merciless academic standards, but you couldn't mistake her for a soft-heeled humanist; she's really a tough gal."

Dr. Shklar's accutely European sensibilities (she was born in Latvia in 1928) would wince at these crass Americanisms concerning her qualities, but she needs little drawing out to corroborate the views generally held of her. Rushing from her office in Widener to a hasty lunch in the Toga Lounge, greeting colleagues along the way with little jokes and genuinely interested questions, she stays well within the dialogue of an interview-situation in the meantime. Biting into a sandwich she looks up to find a teaching assistant who is also eating there, consults with him on some impressive sounding paper topics, and then picks up the thread of your conversation again.

SHE SEEMS to anticipate many of my questions before they've been asked. Her intense, rapid speech pattern echoes the quickness of her responses. "That was the one way you knew you'd make a point," a seminar student remembers, "when she completed an argument for you." When quizzed on her personality, Professor Harvey Mansfield, Jr. of the Government Department, immediately answered "sharp." "Of all her excellences her special talent lies in individual teaching. Of the whole department she has the most summas and turns out the best graduate students. She seems to know just how far she can push someone and make them do their best; she calls forth just a little more than the person thought he had in them." Some of the students survey these abilities from a different perspective. "There are some people who spend their time in Widener trying to hide from her," one of them confided, "they stick their noses around every corner first to see if she's coming." Not that they don't like and admire her, but "she has this tendency to impose deadlines on you every time you see her. I used to prepare for her seminar three days in advance and still come out feeling that I had done nothing or had read different books!"

Ungodly terror apart, no one leaves any doubts about her approachability and extreme kindness. To colleagues and students alike, however, she presents an anti-personal, although human, exterior. She knows this full well. "I'm reserved and I dislike amateur advising. I refuse to act as a psychiatrist for my students; that's out of my range. Impersonal is not a 'no-no word' to me."

Much of this friendly distance can be attributed to her European upbringing and background. Last year her graduate seminar read Weber's Science as a Vocation, an essay concerned with the obligation of the professor to be a value-free social scientist. Her students by and large agree that Shklar, too, seems to believe in this posture. She is committed to the non-committal stance on the part of the teacher towards students when political and personal views are discussed. Strongly opposed to subjectivism and irrationalism, she has never tried to impinge on the opinions of her students, and is equally careful to draw the line where even a matter like her own past is concerned. Chatting hurredly on in her self-effacing way about "not much of an education, only three years of high school in Montreal," she does not elaborate on the reasons for this and obviously prefers not to talk about her childhood before she came to America at the age of 12. Considering that the year of her immigration was 1940, this may not be so incomprehensible, nor the grave lines of her smiling face merely the signs of many years of hard work and study.

"I am still an emigree, you might say, but no longer a wandering Jew. I have settled down, it's just that my sense of perspective is different. Taxi-drivers still ask me where I'm from. I don't mind. Culturally, a colleague once described me as being the 'metics' metic'." She smiles wryly. "Although not at all religious. I feel myself very much a Jew. If I need a tag. I guess it would be 'Jewish metic'."

UNIQUE AS her position may seem, Shklar by no means allows herself to be cut off from American society. Although she refuses to discuss her politics in the classroom, she humorously attests to being a "standard Democrat: F.D.R. was-our-last-real-president, and all that." Over the years students have grown to marvel at her intellectual prowess and to respect her academic demands, but when it came to political actions mutual misunderstanding has resulted. Looking back of Shklar's attitude towards the strike and general unrest on campus during the past several years, a student explains that "she thought we should stop playing around and get on with our work, and she would tell us that when she was a student she had neither time nor desire for such goings-on, that students then couldn't wait for the library to open in the morning." This may be an exaggeration of even Dr. Shklar's love of knowledge (she has been known to stay up working forty-eight hours at a stretch), but her views of university life are decidedly conservative. "We treat you like young adults," she says simply, "and expect you to not that way." Her faith in a university education is still strong, but academia, she feels, should not be the height of ambition. "I chose this profession because I love it. My eldest son wants to be a country doctor; that's fine with me."

Accordingly, she believes in accepting people at their word and wishes, when it comes to what a person wants out of life, even if it can't be the vast amount Shklar has managed to achieve. "Maybe it's because I'm a foreigner," she jokes, "but I always take people at their word. When I was in school, the women I knew there were at the top of the class." She throws this out with a kind of proud matter-of factness. "When most of them said that they preferred married life. I believed them. Perhaps I was naive. But now people are trying to turn being a woman into a profession, which is the worst kind of tokenism." She has the distinct sense that American women are suddenly being harassed by the magazines and newspapers they read for new but still wrong reasons. "Too much empty discussion of the role of women and her family can lead to just as disastrous effects as sex-discrimination. American women are being bombarded with articles on how to run their lives and those of their families. You'll notice that the tone is always threatening and pseudo-scientific" (two pet hatreds of Dr. Shklar's). "It's going to get worse--the pressure is on everyone. A less destructive way is needed." A student's impression affirms this attitude. "Her reaction to Women's Lib is probably to stop all that snivelling about insignificant issues, take care of yourself, and get on with it."

NONETHELESS, her career as a woman in a profession cannot be avoided as a point of discussion. Approving of day care only if the parents are unself-conscious about it, she recalls the early years of marriage (she got married at 19) and of babies "being tossed around from one member of the family to another." Far from being harmful, however, this ensured "an even larger amount of affection." Not did any dreams of intellectual bohemia come true. "When I first started house-keeping I though I would never be 'bourgeois', but after a week of nonchalance I simply could not live in a picturesque mess any longer. I would much rather do extra housecleaning than live in filth."

The patterns of earlier years still hold true in the Shklar household where Mrs. Shklar and her husband (a professor at Harvard Medical School) don't have time to go out, except separately, each with a different child, to concerts and the like. An extremely close-knit family, they prefer to stay home and make their own music. Predictably brushing off her own merits as a pianist, Mrs. Shklar is lavish with her praise of the musical talents of the rest of the family. "I'm square," she says repeatedly, and this is the same term she uses for her taste. Her favorite composer is Mozart, her best-loved authors those of the "Great tradition: Tolstoy, Stendhal, Proust, Balzac." In conversation she speaks affectionately of Rousseau as "the old boy," almost making one forget the brilliant and learned pages of her Men and Citizens: Rousseau's Social Theory, in which Jean-Jacques is treated in somewhat; more depth and in the opinions of Shklar's fellow scholars, in a remarkable revolutionary way.

As she says of the great figures of whom she writes (Rousseau Hegel). Judith Shklar "defies classification." Her surprising humility and the bitterness that sometimes tinged her conversation stem, one of her students thinks, from her own philosophical and humanitarian goals. While appreciating herself what the contradictions of man's existence are, she is constantly distressed at what a botch people have made and make in trying to resolve them. More than anyone she is aware of the possibly irreducible contradictions in human life, but she also feels that it is one's obligation to life and reason to make one's existence as fulfilling and redeeming as possible. She herself has helped, it seems, to resolve many of the conflicts inherent in the false contradictions of human-being and teacher, academic and housewife. European and American, woman and scholar. For this she deserves unqualified admiration.