Jean Starobinski: Apotheosis at Hopkins

The night before commencement in 1993, Jean Starobinski was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars—the only scholarly society of its kind—founded by President Milton Eisenhower in 1967. The Society of Scholars honors former postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty members who come to Hopkins early in their career and who go on to attain pre-eminence in their discipline. Candidates for the society are nominated by current Hopkins faculty members and selected by the Committee of the Society of Scholars. With many nominated, but few elected, the Society is august company indeed.

Recently arrived in 1992, I was keenly aware of illustrious predecessors like Georges Poulet, Leo Spitzer, and of course Jean Starobinski. These figures resonated for me that fall since, a few months before, at a dinner in Geneva, Staro had recalled in vivid detail his years in the early 1950s teaching at Hopkins at the invitation of Georges Poulet. During our talk, he evoked with particular nostalgia the long hours spent at the School of Medicine’s Welch Library in East Baltimore. He reminisced about his discoveries among the papers and correspondence of early European psychoanalysts in the Welch archives. He left no doubt that the hours spent there contributed immeasurably to his deep understanding of psychoanalytic criticism.

With this encounter fresh in my mind, it was natural in the fall of 1992 to propose Staro to the Society of Scholars when the committee requested nominations. Selected by the committee—how could he not have been?—Staro arrived back in Baltimore in May 1993 for his induction. Since each sponsor gives the laudatio explaining the new scholar’s distinctions, I was to present him. From the moment the ceremony began, it was obvious that most of the inductees were doctors, scientists, economists, or public health experts. Jean Starobinski was the sole representative of the Humanities.

But he was also the only one to have both a degree as a physician and a Ph.D. Moreover, he was the only one to have distinguished himself as a pre-eminent literary critic, theorist, essayist, cultural analyst and historian, while also producing psychoanalytic studies of startling originality. And even more singularly, he was the only one of the inductees whose early career at Hopkins had bridged the divide between the medical complex in East Baltimore and Arts and Sciences at Homewood.

One by one, sponsors extolled the undoubted virtues of the inductees from the other schools. The portraits revealed scholars fully enmeshed in their disciplines, paragons of professional specialization. Coming near the end, if not at the end, of the alphabetical order, Jean Starobinki’s laudatio—purposely a bit longer and more circumstantial than the others—had all eyes focused on him as he strode to greet the president and receive his medal. The applause that greeted him as he returned to his seat was vigorous. And President Richardson’s unscripted greeting after the ceremony left no doubt as to his admiration for Starobinski’s achievement in bridging medicine and humanities so emphatically. Without missing a beat, Staro replied wryly that he learned it at Hopkins by riding the shuttle regularly between Homewood and East Baltimore in the 1950s.