Posted on Nov 17, 2008

 

On the Web:

Martin Jay, Class of 1965. Around the time of the June 1965 Commencement. For the Union College magazine Web site.

To read the original typewritten text of Martin Jay’s 1965 Commencement speech in PDF form, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An abiding model

Before Martin Jay departed for a junior year abroad at the London School of Economics in 1963, he was planning to become a lawyer. But the intellectual ferment Jay found among students and professors in London pulled him off that career path.

“I enjoyed the academic give and take. London was an enormously cosmopolitan place at that time. Political life among the students was vigorous, and the faculty dauntingly accomplished, yet far more remote than at Union. It was a step into the larger world. I felt its lure and never turned back,” Jay said.

During Jay’s senior year at Union, he began pursuing a career as a professor, historian and writer. That probably came as no surprise to then-Professor Joseph Finkelstein ’47, who had acted as a mentor and advisor to Jay since his freshman year. Jay would become valedictorian and deliver a Commencement speech in June 1965 that eloquently urged the College to expand its academic offerings. (To read an obituary of Professor Joseph Finkelstein ’47, here.)

After graduation, Jay followed in Finkelstein’s footsteps, earning his doctorate at Harvard University. Jay became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and has taught there ever since, while authoring ten books. A new volume about the unanticipated benefits of lying on the political stage is set to be published in 2009. His most recent book, Songs of Experience, explores the history of European and American ideas about the linguistic, cultural and theoretical meanings of experience.

Earlier this year, Jay penned an essay for The New York Times Magazine about his lifelong relationship with Finkelstein. The essay appeared in the magazine’s annual College Issue and can be found here.

A native of Troy, N.Y., Finkelstein majored in social studies at Union, and began teaching history classes a year before graduating. Finkelstein went on to earn post-graduate degrees from Harvard University and returned to Union in 1953. Finkelstein specialized in economic history, in particular the interaction of technology and society. He was instrumental in developing the Graduate Management Institute, now Union Graduate College before retiring in 1996.

Over the years, Jay and Finkelstein met periodically in Schenectady or the Bay Area, visits that reinforced Jay’s appreciation of Finkelstein’s deep sense of pride in Union.

Today Jay himself seems to have become in turn an “abiding model” for a new crop of professors, teaching at universities such as Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Penn and Michigan. In December several of Jay’s former graduate students will publish, through Berghahn Books, a collection of essays honoring Jay’s career called The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory.

“I have always tried to pass on some of Joe Finkelstein’s DNA to them,” Jay said.