Alumni Essays • Department of Philosophy at Boston University

Letters from our alumni

Roberto Michael (CLA '58)
Dr. Don Howard (CLA ’69)
David Mogolov (CAS ’00)
Steven Karbank (CAS ’79)

March 4, 2007
By Roberto Michael

Philosophy means everything to me. It was embodied by the Department at Boston University and taught to me by teachers who are still with me in spirit--John Lavely, Richard Millard, and, especially, Peter Bertocci.
Whenever things got tough for me, I depended on the guidance of the principles learned in the Philosophy Department, though faculty members themselves sometimes had to remind me. When I served in the U.S. Army 1958-61, posted to the Pentagon and then to an missile unit in Bitburg, Germany, I was having a devil of a time with authority (I was a PFC) until Millard replied to my letter: "Nur kein Schwitz das Kleinzeug. Don't sweat the small stuff."

When I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Columbia, a professor asked me, "What does Kierkegaard intend by this statement in Sickness unto Death? 'Spirit is the self, and the self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation. The self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself.'" I headed toward the door, quipping, "This material sickens me unto death." Lavely wrote back to my recounting of the story, "I suppose this was what Kierkegaard was aiming at."

Bertocci was, well, Bertocci. My first semester at BU was highlighted by his Problems in Philosophy class. He became my almus pater. His theory on a limited God was that "God tries to do the right thing but sometimes fails. God has faults. He's flawed, like human beings."

When I tried to explain this to my Orthodox-Jewish, Yiddish-speaking mother, she replied, "Did Big Mister College Professor think up all this farkuckta nonsense by himself?" After I told Bertocci, he laughed himself silly.
Whenever I enter a classroom to teach or sit to research or write, Bertocci stands by my side, his voice stirs my spirit, his principles inhabit my heart: creative insecurity, the search for truth, humanism, caritas, endeavor. When I wrote to thank him, he replied: "I've received appreciation letters from former students before, but never before have I been as touched as I have by yours. I'm so pleased and proud that I've had a hand in your life." Although Bertocci is now long dead, I'm convinced that he's still challenging those around him to be the wisest, the justest, and the best they can be.

Blessings and Shalom,
Robert Michael

A.B. Boston University 1958 with Distinction in Philosophy; Phi Beta Kappa; Magna cum Laude; Professor Emeritus of European History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; Graduate Faculty, Florida Gulf Coast University. Author of Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust; A Dictionary of Antisemitism; A Concise History of American Antisemitism; The Holocaust: A Chronology and Documentary; Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich; The Dark Side of the Church: A History of Catholic Antisemitism; and the novel, Yankee Jewboy.

Dear Drs. Griswold and Brinkmann,

I am a graduate of the department of Philosophy at Boston University (1969). I received a letter from Dr. Brinkmann describing the department's recent accomplishments. In that letter he suggested we graduates write to you and he to tell of our doings since graduation. With this request, I am complying.

My father asked me, when I was a student at B.U., what I was going to do with a degree in Philosophy. My answer to him was "go to medical school". He laughed. Well, I did go to medical school, in New York, and graduated in 1973. Following this, I completed internship and residency in medicine and pathology, becoming board certified in the latter (University of California San Francisco, Univ. Southern California, University of Vermont). My interest was in academic scholarship and research. To this end I continued my studies,
and obtained a Ph.D. in experimental pathology (immunology) from the University of British Columbia, where I was a Terry Fox Fellow. I have published quite a number of scientific papers related to cancer and the human immune system.

After my Ph.D. I became an attending pathologist at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle Washington and Clinical Associate professor at the University of Washington Medical School. I have been here for twenty years and have been chief of the department of pathology.

Last year I formed a new company, CellNetix Pathology, of which I am Chairman and CEO. This is one of the largest private Anatomic Pathology companies in the country.

I am married and have five children and eight grandchildren! I live on an Island a short commute from Seattle.

The years have flown by, but I have never regretted my choosing to major in Philosophy. I entered B.U. as a biology major. During the summer between freshman and sophomore years, I worked with a senior Philosophy major at B.U. His thoughts, ideas and musings turned my head around (thank you Tony Long, wherever you are). That fall I enrolled as a Philosophy major. The rest, as they say, is history.

I am perhaps most proud of having done all of this myself. During my four years at B.U., I worked 20-30 hours per week, in addition to attending school full time (my kids should have this experience!). The rest of my education was all self funded as well. The short of the story, is that I left home at age 18, without a penny in my pocket, and never looked back. The back seat of unlocked cars were my bedroom and the occasional free lunch from a kindly friend's mom, kept me afloat, while I worked, saved some money, got an apartment and continued my education, all without missing a beat. I used to tell my father, from whom I never accepted support, that it was important in life to suffer for one's character. Many years later he asked me "Don, are you done suffering?" I said yes!

I am not sure if this is a bit much or what you wanted. But I would like to thank you for keeping alive a great philosophy department and B.U. for giving me a wonderful education, that launched me to places I could never imagine. It has been a wonderful ride, this thing called life.

With my best regards,
Don Howard

Since graduating in 2000, I've remained in the Boston area. If I were to divide this update between what's changed and what's the same, that would be about the only entry in the latter category. The overview: I've been married for a year now, am living in Cambridge (for another couple weeks before moving), work as an editor on music and English titles for Bedford/St. Martin's, a college textbook publisher, and have spent a fair amount of time writing and performing comedy shows, primarily at ImprovBoston (Yes, I write at a theater that features improvised comedy, and yes though it's called ImprovBoston, it's in Cambridge. Go figure).

The details: I got married last June. My wife is a native New Englander, works at Wellesley College (from which she graduated), and is the best writer and editor a writer and editor could marry. We're living amid boxes right now as we prepare to move to Arlington in July, and our cat thinks the boxes are the best furniture we own.

When I graduated from BU, I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do for a living. There's no way I would have wanted to do what I'm doing now, because I had no idea the job existed. Like most true surprises, it's interesting: it's my job to acquire new books in music and developmental English. In practice, that means that I travel all over the country visiting campuses and academic conferences to meet with professors about their ideas for books. The projects vary widely. A day might start in the English department talking with instructors about basic reading classes, and move immediately to a conversation with a jazz history instructor about American race relations in the 1950s, before going on to meet a faculty member who's pioneering the school's online course initiative. A lot of my conversations get down to the basics of how students learn, what motivates them to be there, and what it means, in a given class or discipline, to have succeeded academically.
Those conversations, and when I'm in the office (or on a plane) reading a manuscript and asking the same questions, are when my philosophy studies are most obviously relevant. If you've tried to write an A paper on The Critique of Pure Reason, you've taken on a writing task that'll prepare you for responding to ANY manuscript. Also, Epictetus is a good behavioral model if you're a frequent traveller: if United cancels a flight, don't fight United. That flight is cancelled.

I hope that does it for an update. There are a thousand other tiny details that I find fascinating, but which are probably best suited for other venues, like someone's Red Sox blog or cookbook. I hope it's enough to say that life is pretty good, and I'm doing well, reading plenty, and surrounded by decent, intelligent people. Six years out from graduation, that's plenty for me.

Best,

David Mogolov