Arthur Kahn

The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal Iii: Academia and a Rearguard Defense of Humanist Tradition Arthur Kahn

In The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal III, Arthur Kahn recounts how after returning to New York from a nine-month sojourn in the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe he found himself adrift. Under Truman's loyalty oaths and blacklistings and McCarthyite Cold War repression, the left-wing community within which he had participated in activist struggle for more than a decade was in dissolution. Reviewing his earlier years, Arthur Kahn concluded that except for the periods in which he had a sense of direct involvement in history he felt most alive during his career as a teacher, and in this third volume of his autobiography he describes his returning to university at the age of 41 to obtain a doctorate and his subsequent rapid advance to a full professorship as chairman of a Classics Department in a new Canadian university. He recounts the vicissitudes he underwent in an abortive struggle to revivify the humanist tradition. He reports his success in enriching the lives of his students, in establishing fruitful associations with professional colleagues throughout the United States and Canada and in contributing to scholarship with the publication of articles in learned journals and in a twelve-year effort in composing a biography of Julius Caesar that would prove to be his magnum opus. He recounts, too, his Dr. Jekyll's wrestling with an obdurate Mr. Hyde.