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| Affiliation | Nonpartisan |
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| Name | Harold Howe, II |
| Address |
, , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
August 17, 1918
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| Died | November 30, 2002
(84 years)
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| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Nov 29, 2015 04:16am |
| Tags |
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| Info | We are here to celebrate the life of Harold Howe II, one of the finest human beings I have ever known. He touched the lives of all gathered here today, but his influence and leadership touched the lives of thousands of colleagues and friends, and millions of children and their teachers throughout America.
I first met Doc Howe in 1967. I was then a young assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Doc was the U.S. Commissioner of Education. One of his deputies had offered me a job as director of something-or-other, and Doc asked to meet with me, presumably to clinch the deal. I was immediately charmed by his brains and his savvy but even more charmed by his human qualities. He listened. He wanted to know what I was doing in my career, what I cared about, what I wanted to change in American education. After we talked, he advised me not to take the job because it would be a diversion from my principal interests at the time. From this first meeting I learned that our friend Doc Howe cared about people first and institutions second, a priority not evident in many leaders of his stature.
Three years later I was offered a position as a program officer at the Ford Foundation. I took the job after learning that Doc was coming back from India to be the Foundation’s Vice- President for Education. In my eleven years at Ford I came to regard him not just as my boss but also as a colleague, a mentor, and a friend. Over the years, Doc continued to advise and counsel me, urging me to be sure my reach exceeded my grasp, criticizing ideas or projects he found unworthy, and sharing both the wisdom and the humor that he offered to so many.
Doc was Doc, not a carbon copy of anyone else, not even like anyone else. He was just himself. He knew who he was, what he valued, what he enjoyed, what he stood for. A gentleman from the old school, he was modern and progressive in his thinking. Born of distinguished lineage and raised in elite institutions, he championed better education for ordinary people and equal opportunity for all.
Doc was keenly intelligent and liberally educated. His publications, letters, and (in recent years) countless e-mail messages to friends, reveal command of our language and how to use it to communicate clearly and persuasively.
Doc loved Sibby, or "Blossom" as he called her, his life partner and true love for 61 years. He died one year to the day after Sibby passed away. Doc loved his children, their children, and his brothers and sister. He valued friends and relished an astonishingly broad circle of them. Some were famous but many were not; some were academics while others were advocates. Doc genuinely liked people. He enjoyed helping people grow, and improve; he was a wise counselor to all of us, but he was also a learner, always seeking new understandings and exploring new ideas.
Doc’s life reminds us that for truly great men and women, intellectual rigor and human compassion go hand in hand, each reinforcing and enriching the other. Doc never wavered in his steadfast determination to help disadvantaged children, and never wavered when his views were unpopular in the academy, in the state house or in the White House.
As education vice president at Ford, Doc quickly showed the stuff he was made of by committing $100 million to support the nation’s historically black colleges. In those days, that was real money! He relentlessly fought to preserve and expand ESEA Title I. He never gave an inch of ground on desegregation. He strongly supported and defended our program at Ford to reduce inequities in the financing of education and in other children’s services, as well as in state-local tax systems. He became a champion of gender equity. He constantly advised friend and foe not to get isolated in the abstract world of policy but to focus instead on teachers and teaching, and how to develop and sustain educational leaders for the classroom and the school.
His advice to policymakers today was to stop trying to motivate students by failing them and their schools, and stop trying to improve teachers by telling them they are no good.
But Doc was not just national leader and inspired advocate. He was a well-rounded person with an amazing variety of interests and a great sense of humor. To put it bluntly, being around Doc Howe was a hell of a lot of fun.
Doc’s inquisitive and playful mind led him into dozens of topics you may not know he cared about.
• He loved cigars, sailing and tennis with equal fervor.
• He wrote about "walking to work in New York" and offered pungent advice to fellow walkers about such elevated topics as dogs and jaywalking.
• His love of words led him to muse about acronyms used as names for educational organizations; one day I received a two and a half page letter about how NBPTS was a hopeless acronym for National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
• He thought that those who wanted to require all kids to wear school uniforms were slightly daft and should look for other ways to achieve "uplift", a favorite word of his.
• He wanted the world to adopt a nine-day workweek, with two-thirds of us working each three-day segment.
• He wrote L. L. Bean to advise about how to improve the design of men’s pajamas.
• In India, he and friends hired an elephant and covered it with ads promoting the use of condoms.
• He wanted K-12 teachers to have the same academic freedom that professors enjoy.
• He loved verse and could endlessly recite limericks, some even fit for public consumption! For many years at Ford, just before Christmas, a lengthy poem would appear on every desk, chronicling the year’s events large and small, serious and humorous. Modeled after the legendary Holiday poems in the New Yorker, the work of the anonymous "Bard of 43rd Street" was eagerly awaited by one and all. Few knew that Harold Howe II was the author.
• One summer in his youth, Doc hiked the Appalachian Trail, end to end.
• His love of sailing, cigars, toasts, and limericks were important elements in getting Australian education leaders in 1976 to help us establish the U.S./Australia Education Policy Project – years before his son Gordon married an Australian and the Howe family began their own U.S./Australian collaboration!
Attending a conference I was running on school finance reform, a conference plagued by horrible weather across the country on the day it was to start, Doc arrived finally at the conference hotel in Arizona and found that in the chaos of the storm-delayed travels for those arriving and those trying to depart the hotel, he had been assigned to a room with three female graduate students. He never stopped kidding me about my "scramble system of assigning rooms". Amazed at how much good work on school finance could be done in the hotel’s Jacuzzi, he complemented me frequently on the "Jacuzzis provided by your imaginative philanthropy".
When Dean Paul Ylvisaker of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education invited Doc to come to Harvard, Doc was more than a little puzzled about what he would do in this new role. After all, his undergraduate degree was from Yale, and - worse yet – he had been a Yale Trustee! So he asked Paul what he could possibly contribute to Mother Harvard. Paul thought about it for a moment and responded, "Just go down to the student commons every afternoon about 4:30 or so, buy a bottle of beer, and talk to the students". Sound advice. Lucky students.
Doc was famous for his inattention to his clothes. At a Harvard dinner for his close friend and colleague Frank Keppel, Doc wore his usual uniform of gray slacks and blue blazer. I complemented Sibby on how snazzy he looked but added that his slacks were badly rumpled and could use a good pressing. She replied, "But he’s wearing his finest slacks!"
Good people leave the world a better place because of their influence on other people. Harold Howe II was a very good person, and the world is a much better place because of him. Doc led by exhortation, by persuasion, by teaching, by appealing to our better instincts, and most importantly, by example. To borrow and bend a favorite toast of Doc’s, we can surely say, "We are all a lot more like we are now than we were before we knew Doc Howe".
In the years ahead, let us celebrate his life by striving to emulate his love of family, his passionate commitments to social justice, his exemplary character, his lifelong pursuit of truth, and his uplifting presence in our lives. To borrow still another of Doc’s favorite sayings, we’ll do out best to "creep about" without him.
Who will take his place?
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