Legacy
Hofstadter showed scant interest in his students. In undergraduate classes, he read aloud every day the draft of his next book. As a senior professor at a leading graduate university, Hofstadter directed more than one hundred finished doctoral dissertations but gave his graduate students only cursory attention; that academic latitude enabled them to find their own models of history. Some adopted New Left perspectives that he rejected, among them were Herbert Gutman, Eric Foner, Lawrence W. Levine, Linda Kerber, and Paula Fass, while others, such as Eric McKitrick and Stanley Elkins, were more conservative than he; hence, Hofstadter had few disciples and founded no school of history writing.
Following Hofstadter's death, Columbia dedicated a locked bookcase of his works in Butler Library to him, but his widow Beatrice asked that it be removed when the physical conditions of the library deteriorated.
Read more about this topic: Richard Hofstadter
Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)