Donald Kagan

Sterling Professor of Classics And History 

Donald Kagan, B.A. Brooklyn College, M.A. Brown University, Ph.D. Ohio State University, faculty member at Yale since 1969, so distinguished are you as a scholar and teacher, and so deep and complex is the story of your career and of your relationship to this institution that a tribute in your honor is a daunting task. 

It is easiest to start with your work. You are one of the foremost scholars of ancient Greek history and one of Yale’s most highly respected historians. Your 4-volume history of the Peloponnesian War delivered a recounting of it so breathtaking in its sweep, that it led George Steiner to say he was tempted to consider it “the foremost work of history produced in North America in this century.” If those volumes seem too recondite for any general reader to undertake, he or she might always consider, among your other works, your later one-volume recounting of the War, which is a tour-de-force of synthesis. Such a reader could then proceed to your volume on Pericles and Periclean Athens; or your biography of Thucydides, the original historian of much of the Peloponnesian War, whose legendary impartiality you reconsider with the kind of critical eye that can come only from the deepest familiarity and understanding. 

For all the excellence of your scholarship, you have also been heralded since your arrival at Yale as a dynamic and influential teacher. Your lectures on Ancient Greek history, delivered with your dry wit and deadpan humor, filled classrooms, despite your strict grading policies; and the Socratic dialogue of your seminars made entry into one of them the lucky lottery ticket for hundreds of aspirants. For these efforts, you have swept the board in teaching prizes, with the DeVane Medal in 1975, at the start of your Yale career, and the distinguished Byrnes/Sewall Teaching Prize in 1995. In all your teaching you have kept at the forefront the principles that are fundamental to your work and life: that history is the crucial humanistic study; and that the lessons from the earliest development of western civilization help shape our present democracy, which you have called “one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience.” 

The voice of the teacher also inflects your prominent social and political commentary. A national champion of your views, you have developed them in many articles and columns, as well as in your address as the 2005 NEH Jefferson lecturer. For the entire body of your work, you have been awarded the National Medal for the Humanities, presented by the President of the United States. 

The study of War has been the subject of your writing and teaching, and nowhere have your own wars been more intimately fought out, nor the stakes higher, than on the Yale scene. It has been said that the fact that you “rooted for the Yankees on Brooklyn Dodger turf” reveals everything about you—and that willingness to stand on principle as an outsider also has been true of you at Yale. Your speeches over the decades—from the platform on Beinecke Plaza, from the podium during a Freshman address, and to the Yale faculty on your departure from the deanship—have unsparingly stated your views on subjects that are to you of ultimate importance. 

Yet no one doubts that you are, in the deepest way, a Yale partisan and loyalist. You were the Master of Timothy Dwight College. You were not only the dean of Yale College but for a year Yale’s acting Athletic Director. You can be found in your usual seat at The Bowl every fall, with inveterate optimism, shrewdly analyzing the plays of the Yale football team. You are part of our landscape. And many Yalies respond to you with regard and affection, even when they do not agree with you, recognizing the gifts of scholarship and teaching you have brought to the University over more than 40 years. Willie Mays said, “If you run the bases, hit with power, field, throw and do all other things that are part of the game—then you’re a good ballplayer.” You’ve done all of those things, Don Kagan, and as you step away this faculty salutes you as a very good ballplayer indeed.