(From remarks made at the New School on March 30, 2015, at Wally's memorial service)
As a child, Wally for me was
neutral ground: she knew both my parents, who were divorced but both taught at
the New School, Unlike others who knew them both, Wally was not on one side or
the other; her relationship with both my parents was a professional one. Precisely
for this reason, when I saw how she interacted with both I gained a perspective
on their peculiarities and learned better how to situate myself between both of
them. This was a skill I think Wally had to exercise many times working as an omni-administrator
at the New School for over four decades: interacting with people of various
dispositions and enabling the institution to negotiate among and around their
various quirks. She was warm yet competent, caring yet efficient; and this
humanistic demeanor helped her work well with the other unusual and resourceful
thinkers—Reuben Abel, Allen Austill, and Al Landa, who epitomized the New
School of the 1960s and 1970.s. Academic traits that are buzzwords
today---interdisciplinarity and, yes, public engagement--were unarticulated
then, but Wally’s work, in the most ingrained way possible, was fostering these
tendencies. Just the fact that she worked both with my father, a political
scientist, and my mother, a literary scholar, showed me that thinking across
disciplines was possible. Wally helped the New School show this to many through
her four decades of service and through many institutional permutations and
redefinitions.
Often, one or the other of my parents
would leave me in the fishbowl room to read while they taught. Wally was there
to ultimately watch over me but never interfered, just letting me read and
adventure amid real and imagined worlds. Meanwhile, I would hear Wally
typing—one still typed back then—and talking on the phone, laughing,
improvising, reacting, arranging, and above all receiving the Hogarthian parade
of humanity that processed through the third floor. To me she was the New School. I was not far off.
