Amy Kass was a great reader of George Eliot; she also had the sympathetic imagination so prized by the author of Middlemarch. Even in the difficult, yet beautiful, final weeks in hospice care, Amy found the generous strength to study the novel’s opening pages with her oldest granddaughter, raising with her the penetrating questions that were her teacherly gift to generations of students.
When her granddaughter reaches the last paragraph of that long novel, she will find a few select phrases that could describe the unostentatious but far-reaching influence her grandmother had on “the growing good of the world.” Like Eliot’s heroine Dorothea Brooke, Amy Kass possessed a “finely touched spirit” and a “full nature.” Every speaker at her recent memorial service feelingly confirmed what her friends knew to be true: “[T]he effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.”
Amy poured herself out liberally to family, friends, and students. She offered her wisdom, her sympathy, her smile, trusting open-heartedly to the result. She was, above all else, a teacher, with the patience and humility that requires—humility before the text and author under consideration, humility in the face of the “mysterious mixture” that is human nature, humility in treating her students as potential equals in philosophic conversation. (The formal presumption of equality was visible in her practice of addressing students as Mr. and Miss, at the same time declining the honorific “Professor” for herself.) The educational force of Mrs. Kass was supreme because she knew how to turn a classroom, or a dinner table, or an elevator ride, into a place where souls were shared and shaped.
Amy’s mode was the seminar, with the entire school quarter devoted to one book, a big one like War and Peace, The Odyssey, Moby Dick, or Middlemarch. In a lecture on George Eliot entitled “Sympathy, Love and Marriage: Effective Reform in Middlemarch,” delivered in 2010 at Bowdoin College, Amy made the case for studying these monsters of the Western canon:
“Critical thinking” is the mantra on college campuses these days. All well and good, but for critical thinking to be anything beyond arrogant cleverness, it must be grounded in moral seriousness. That was what Amy brought forth in her students. They already knew they were bright; she took them seriously as moral agents (more seriously than most had ever taken themselves) who longed to figure out the contours of a good life. They rose to the challenge—and challenge it was, for Mrs. Kass’s encouragement had a peculiarly bracing quality. It wasn’t usually approval of what had been said, but rather an invitation to say more and to say it more precisely and more searchingly.
In June 2010, on the occasion of Amy’s receipt of the University of Chicago’s Norman Maclean Award (given by alumni for extraordinary teaching), hundreds of former students gathered to express their gratitude for her abiding influence on their lives. Some notable teachers receive a festschrift, in which a handful of students who have elected to pursue the scholarly life write scholarly essays in recognition of their teacher’s example. A festschrift is a tribute not to be scorned—but how different this testament was. What Amy’s students shared was not a career path (for they had scattered in many directions), but an education—an education of heart and head, an education that was in many cases being passed on to their own children (“incalculably diffusive” indeed!).
Amy Kass taught for 34 years in the College at the University of Chicago. As a graduate student at Chicago in the early 1980s, I studied with Leon Kass, but never with Amy. Yet, long before I met her, she acquired a special status in my imagination. I knew of her solely from the praise of others and the reputation of the core course “Human Being and Citizen” that she and Leon had created. It wasn’t until a quarter-century later that I finally saw this fabled teacher in action—and she did not disappoint.
After the Kasses moved to Washington, D.C., Amy ran a seminar series at the Hudson Institute for young policy wonks, established think-tankers, and a smattering of academics. This was a scaled-down version of her Chicago classes, meeting less often and reading short stories rather than novels. Because they weren’t as fresh and daring as freshmen are, the Washingtonians were perhaps less inclined to be led out of themselves and their settled convictions. However, they did have more substantial reserves of knowledge and insight that could be brought into play. Amy adjusted her stride to the new audience, but her pathway into a text remained the same. She began with a carefully scripted, masterful summary of the plot along with a few choice observations about the author’s writing style or some needed historical background. These preliminaries would culminate in a deceptively simple question—a question that would then open out into more and ever deeper questions as the conversation took form under her light but sure guidance. There was something magical about it. Even her pixie haircut and the hint of mischief in her eyes, as if thinking hard were the most adventurous of activities, helped to cast the spell and turn us into conversational co-conspirators, feeling more earnest and free.
Post-Chicago, Amy (with Leon anchoring the other end of the table) continued to teach undergraduates under the auspices of the Hertog Summer Program. In general, students appreciate team-taught courses, especially if there is a prospect of dialectical fireworks. In this case, the doubled pedagogical energy had a special charge. Here was a clearly loving couple, equals in wit, who, whether in agreement or disagreement upon the point at issue, charmingly addressed one another with old-fashioned decorum. I suspect their example gave the idea of marriage a new attractiveness, but also led students to a realization of just how seriously one ought to approach the choice of a life partner. One could see that virtues of character and good manners really mattered—could make life more fun and sexy, more joyous and fulfilling.
Because she was a teacher at heart, always willing to adapt to the needs of new students, Amy (in her ever-active retirement) devised new ways to reach a wider audience. Although the Socratic mode of private, small-group conversation remained her ideal, Amy did write and publish. But she did so with a uniquely teacherly intention. The form she made her own was the anthology. There is modesty in that choice; she wasn’t intent on forwarding her own literary interpretations (marvelous though they were). Instead, she put before new generations of students—who didn’t have the luck to study with her in person—selected works (prefaced by those all-important questions) that might enable an inquiring reader to “live feelingly outside of oneself.” Her five edited anthologies make a kind of approximation of her classroom. The topics indicate the matters of central concern to her: marriage (Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, with Leon as co-editor), philanthropy (Giving Well, Doing Good: Readings for Thoughtful Philanthropists and The Perfect Gift: The Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose), and American identity (American Lives: Cultural Differences, Individual Distinction: An Anthology of American Autobiography and What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song).
Each of these was a public-spirited undertaking. To see how a collection of stories and poems might have a broadly political purpose, let me quote again from Amy’s lecture on Middlemarch: “[E]ffective public reform depends first and last on personal reform, which politics cannot itself produce.” This statement about Eliot’s intention reveals, I think, the underlying assumption of Amy’s anthologies: To be effective one must pay attention to the affective dimension. Through literature, with its unique access to the moral imagination, Amy sought to encourage the affective preconditions for a flourishing republic: individuals capable of living on terms of intimate and understanding equality with a treasured other; friends and neighbors who are thoughtfully concerned about how best to care for others, both near and far; finally, and most expansively, citizens who are robust and mindful patriots.
After getting to know Amy through the Hudson seminars, I had the privilege of working with her (and Leon) on the anthology for citizens, What So Proudly We Hail. Every element of the project was an unalloyed delight. For me, Amy stands as the model of all things good: in love, in friendship, in the relations of a full life (from grandmother to citizen), in the activity of thought, and, yes, a model for how to meet death (when to grapple with it and when to accept it). I’ve had a lot of great teachers over the years—her husband, Leon Kass, high among them—but these last half-dozen years of acquaintance with Amy were an unexpected gift: a gift that allowed me to be a student again and at the same time a friend.
At the close of Amy’s lecture on Middlemarch, when she shifts from discussing Dorothea to discussing her creator, she describes Eliot as the founder of an “invisible ‘movement’ ”:
Amy was probably too modest to admit this as a self-portrait. Yet, all who came in contact with the “finely touched spirit” of Amy Kass knew that she too lived a life of “epic reverberations.” We are profoundly grateful for what she gave us.
