He's a Traditional Guy
By Lory Hough
It became a ritual for Jesse Dossick, Ed.D.’41. Once a year he’d pull out his checkbook and write his donation to the Ed School — $25. Never more, never less.
“I don’t think of it anymore as the amount,” Dossick, now 96, says by phone from his New York City apartment. “I think of it in terms of tradition.”
In 1941, the first year he donated, that amount was pretty significant, especially for a recent graduate and with World War II in full swing. (Adjusting for inflation, the amount was equivalent to about $342 today.) Born on April 29, 1911, in the Bronx, Dossick is still as sharp as a tack and remembers dates and names instantly. Although he stopped teaching education at New York University in 1973 after 37 years, he’s far from retired. He just finished writing — in longhand — a 7,000-item index on all dissertations about central and Eastern Europe written at American, Canadian, and British universities. As he talks about the project, he ticks off the list of countries included in the index without missing one. (He’s also written indexes on dissertation topics covering Russia, Canada, and Puerto Rico, among others, and for 30 years wrote an annual article in Slavic Review.)
Dossick started teaching in the 1930s when he says there weren’t many other jobs available. He eventually got his master’s at NYU and, after reading a book about the conquest of Mexico, decided he wanted to study the topic further. Although other doctoral programs were offering courses on Latin America at the time, Dossick says he chose the doctoral program at the Ed School because it was the only one that specifically offered a course on the history of Mexico.
“Dean Henry Holmes gave this New York kid a break and gave me a scholarship,” Dossick says. Holmes also gave him bad news: Once Dossick got to Cambridge, Holmes told him he had been looking at the previous year’s course catalog and that the Mexico class had been replaced by one on — what else — Latin America.
“So Dean Holmes created a reading course just for me,” Dossick says. “He had me read six books at a time and we’d meet to talk about them.” Dossick says he was so grateful that he used the middle name Holmes for his first child, Philip, born the year after he graduated from the Ed School. “I was able to point out to my son,” Dossick jokes, “that he was born with a Ph.D.”
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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