Two or Three Things I Know About Professor Bruner
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Jerry has been a friend and a colleague for more than 20 years now. Here are a few things I’ve learned about him in that time. I first got to know Jerry in the early 1990s when I was a visiting professor at NYU School of Law. At that point, NYU Law—led by an audaciously ambitious dean named John Sexton—was reinventing itself in all sorts of ways: as a top-5 law school, as a pioneer in global education, and as an interdisciplinary research center that attracted scholars from any and every discipline, so long as they were interesting and their work had some bearing on the life of the law. (I fitted into that last ambition, being a sociologist and criminologist: and perhaps the fact that I came from Scotland made me a little “global” too.) Jerry had been recruited as a distinguished university professor the previous year and although he had a position in the Psychology Department, as one would expect, he was also cross-appointed to the Law School, where he taught a lawyering theory class on “Interpretation” with Tony Amsterdam and Peggy Davis. At some point in that year, a law school colleague suggested that I might like to have lunch with Jerry—a suggestion that was surely a thoughtful way of putting me in touch with a fellow social scientist but also, I now realize, a neat ruse to sell me on the charms and intellectual riches of NYU Law School (Which of course it did: I moved there a few years later and have been there ever since). So Jerry and I emailed and set a date for lunch, arranging to meet in the attractive faculty restaurant atop Bobst library with its bright sunlit views of Washington Square Park and its bustling, senior common room atmosphere. That restaurant has long since disappeared, its sunny spaces taken over by an ever-growing university administration, but the details of that first meeting with Jerry remain bright and fresh in my memory. It’s a little embarrassing to admit now but at that time I knew rather little about Jerry, despite his fame. I knew he was a world-renowned psychologist—the Law School’s publicity materials proudly said as much—and I was dimly aware that he had had a hand in developing modern cognitive psychology. I had also read one or two of his essays in the New York Review of Books—I recalled Jerry’s review of a book by Oliver Sacks and another about the role of culture in the acquisition of language—but beyond that: nothing much. And as for Jerry the man—or the lunch companion—I didn’t have the faintest idea. What if he were stuffy? Or pompous and grand? What if he were to talk about his work and uncover my shameful ignorance of it? What if he were just dull? (My prior experiences with ultra-distinguished academics had not always been encouraging: back in the UK I had once complimented a famous sociologist on the remarkable breadth of his work only to be told “You don’t know the half of it!”) So I decided I should do some background preparation prior to our get-together. And because these were the days before Google, that meant going to the university library, checking the author catalogue, and leafing through Jerry’s books to get some sense of what he had been up to. I don’t clearly remember which of the Bruner publications were there in the stacks on the 4th floor of the university library: I recall seeing On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (1966) (a copy of which I subsequently acquired) and The Process of Education (a best-seller published in 1960 and still in print to this day). And Acts of Meaning (1990) had just been published, so perhaps it was there too. But the book that caught my eye, and which I proceeded to read over the next few days with equal parts astonishment and pleasure, was In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography (1983). Today, twenty-odd years later, a copy of that book sits on my desk, and if anyone reading this appreciation hasn’t yet had done so, I urge you to get a hold of it immediately. Its combination of personal charm, life-and-works biography, star-studded intellectual history, and sheer narrative pleasure, is simply unbeatable. It has been twenty years since I read that marvelous memoir—commissioned for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s ‘lives in science’ series—but here are some of the plot-elements and anecdotes that have stayed with me ever since. First and foremost, Jerry’s encounters and collaborations with the luminaries of the academic universe: each episode framed by theoretical asides, transfixing I-was-there detail, and a relaxed familiarity with the common rooms and dining tables of the world’s leading universities and research centers. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, Robert Oppenheimer, B.F. Skinner, Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Kenny, Charles Taylor, Iris Murdoch, Talcott Parsons, Gordon Allport, Claude Levi-Straus, Erving Goffman, Roman Jakobson, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead are among the cast of characters that populate the scenes and stories that Jerry recounts. And nor is this merely high-class name-dropping for the sake of entertaining the reader. (Though what would be the harm in that?--Jerry’s name makes as big a splash as any of them.)
Source Publication
Jerome S. Bruner Beyond 100: Cultivating Possibilities
Source Editors/Authors
Giuseppina Marsico
Publication Date
2015
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Two or Three Things I Know About Professor Bruner" (2015). Faculty Chapters. 652.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/652
