There were only two responses to my faux pas in yesterday’s Essay which skewered me quite correctly for reporting Sept. 7 was the date of the Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.  The correct date is December 7, 1941.  My spell checker worked but my fact checker didn’t.  If you missed the mistake, shame on you for you did not read what I wrote.

Erwin Jaffe would not have missed this one.  He was a constant critic of my writing. In his last days he did not have the strength nor the interest in my constant pouring out my thinking about ideas, issues and reflections on what is going on in the world. He died as the result of a fall in a bathtub resulting in a concussion and a hidden brain bleed.

I met Erwin at Rutgers where we were both graduate students.  He was in Political Science and I was in Education.  They were worlds apart as disciplines but we were united in the suffering graduate students had to endure with chairmen of departments and the committees that were assembled to torture the candidates.

Erwin Jaffe was impressed by the ease I demonstrated in writing a 363 page MASTERS Thesis which people rarely chose to do.  They saved themselves for the Doctoral Dissertation.  I could have switched my Thesis with my Dissertation and no one would have known the difference.  There were a great many students and Profs who attended my defense of my Thesis because of the nature of the topic.  “Utopia” was a subject like the “story of how I love you” has no end.  But, Erwin was not interested in my choice of subject of research.  He was embroiled in disputes with his Chairman and went on to become not only a professor of political science but the Dean of the Department (School?) of Political Science in the University of New Hampshire.  His experiences there continued the conflict one has with the politics of higher education.

Erwin would tear my logic apart as well as remind me that there was much, much more to the subject than my restriction to one page would allow.  He was angry with academia and this colored his remarks about what I chose to write about and how I did not dig deep enough to really get at the meat of the subject.  I respected him for that and knew that for much of the last few years his strength weakened; but he was never less demanding.

When I continued to find that my essays did not reach him, I decided to call and when Marianne answered the phone she asked Carol and me to sit down. Erwin had died just that morning.  I will miss his tearing into my mistakes and lack of academic rigor although I thought I was just writing a daily essay on thinking.