My Friendship with Martin Buber

2. The Cost of My Commitment

16 2 The Cost of My Commitment Ispoke in the last chapter of having no notion of what the commitment to Buber would entail. I shall in this chapter sacrifice chronology and offer a few vivid illustrations of the price I would have to pay to honor the vow I made to fulfill my commitment to work with Martin Buber after I received a wonderful letter about my doctoral dissertation. The fall of 1951 was my first year of teaching at Sarah Lawrence College—a progressive women’s college outside New York City that was also enormously demanding for the faculty. Hearing that I was working on what later became my first book, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (a title that Buber himself liked very much), an economist colleague at Sarah Lawrence said to me, “If you can get a book written while teaching at Sarah Lawrence, please let me know!” She left the very next year to teach at MIT. I stayed on for fourteen years and did, in fact, succeed in completing many books (including a dozen books of Buber’s that I translated from German to English, usually with an editor’s introduction). I doubt that Martin Buber ever really understood the burden that I placed on myself during those years. Buber himself took on unbelievable tasks during his many, many years of active work, not to mention carrying on an active correspondence with scholars, educators, political and social activists, and countless others who sought the advice and help of this world-famous man of goodwill. THE COST OF MY COMMITMENT • 17 But Buber never taught in an institution of higher learning such as Sarah Lawrence College. What made Sarah Lawrence so difficult a place to teach in was the fact that, in addition to regular class meetings, every teacher met with each student once a week individually. These meetings were really tutorials—not about the subject matter of the course but about the individual interests of the student. This study and research eventually resulted in a “contract”—a term taken from the North Shore Country Day School outside of Chicago. In contrast to the traditional “term paper,” the contract need have little or nothing to do with the subject matter of the course. Nor did it have an important part to play in the grades that students received for these year-long courses since there were no grades, only paragraph-long evaluations . Neither were there any academic majors nor any across-theboard student requirements. There was, to be sure, an important committee of faculty that kept track of the student’s overall progress and could decide when the student in question was no longer qualified to remain in the college. I often felt as if I were throwing out planks as far as my knowledge extended and then inviting the students to go out on the plank beyond my own knowledge! I seldom walked to a class without some student at my elbow discussing her present or future contract. One other thing that made the Sarah Lawrence system more difficult for the faculty than any I have encountered before or since was the fact that the faculty also acted as “dons” for those of the students who chose this or that faculty as a don. Although the term “don” was borrowed from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England, that is where the resemblance ended. The British don is strictly a tutor whereas the Sarah Lawrence don is the overall student adviser. Again, though, this bore little or no relation to the general academic adviser that in most colleges or universities the students see about once a semester. When I 18 • MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER first came to teach at Sarah Lawrence, the faculty met with the “donnees” every week, later every other week, but always with a total responsibility for every aspect of the student’s life. This included whether she was spending too many weekends with her boyfriend at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia. Although the don-donnee relationship was not thought of as a form of therapy, it was at times the don’s responsibility to refer the student to the college therapist if that seemed called for. (I discovered in practice that this transfer was not always easily made, since my donnee had built up a relationship of trust with me which she did not have with...