A tribute to David Tyack

David Tyack took me seriously. From the moment we met, he treated me as an intellectual peer — something he did with every student, no matter their age or experience. He listened to me as if I was an accomplished scholar, which I was not. He responded to my work as if my capacity for growth was unlimited, which I did not yet believe. He shared his time with me as if I deserved it, which I was sure I never would. He was a teacher, through and through.

I was a first-year graduate student when we met, and David was recently retired. Consequently, I never took a class with him. Yet he became my teacher, and the power of his generosity was such that I have no recollection how it all began — how it came to be that we would walk together among the redwoods, gather among friends for reading groups, meet with our spouses in tow for lunch. My wife and I were in our 20s at the time. David and his partner, Elisabeth Hansot, were campus luminaries. Somehow, through what seemed like a case of mistaken identity, they treated us as equals. O brave new world that has such people in it.

Because we were not in class, there was never an explicit lesson; but because David was a teacher — in the fullest, and truest sense of the word — the lessons accrued over time. As David absorbed me into his orbit, I began to think of myself differently — not as an accomplished novice but as a novice expert. And those accruing lessons accumulated around this new identity; they gave it shape, that it might endure.