Kate Burnett has passed. (Well, I only recently found out, and it was five years ago when she departed this world.) She had reached the ripe old age of 94.
She was a tough, older New Englander when I first met her back in the autumn of ’79, with graying hair, a muted knee-length skirt and horn-rimmed glasses. In retrospect, she evoked the actor Anne Bancroft from that era. She was highly educated, having received a master’s degree in literature from Tufts and a doctorate from Harvard. She taught expository writing for four decades at a few of the area’s Ivy League schools.
Kate, as it happened, wrote me a timely recommendation letter that helped me gain admission to University of Washington School of Law in the autumn of ’83, then a top-10 national law school.
I had only recently come across a note from her from ’82, typed on a Tufts stationery pad. The note assured me that a letter I’d requested — the third one I needed to complete my law school application — would be sent along to my undergraduate adviser. Her note to me, composed in perfect ‘Elements of Style’ English, also observed how it’d taken a month for my request to find its way to her desk.
During our semester-long class, she got me, for the first time in my academic life, to reflect on and to defend those ideas I’d put down on the page for her to grade.
Kate did not have a taunting voice in class, in contrast to my first-year law school professor, James Hardisty, who would taunt us with his demeanor and intellect. Hers was a voice that challenged you, as if to say, “Hey you, now it’s time to speak up in class,” else we late-’70s bright-but-entitled Tufts undergrads would have slid by, as we did in other classes.
She didn’t let us, and I’m glad for that.
Behind those black, horn-rimmed glasses that framed soft gray eyes, she might have been shy by nature. But she never let on.
She couldn’t lead with shyness in an expository writing class that endeavored to pry ideas out of us on topics such as Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” after all.
I was most definitely shy in class at 19 and offered a few views on content I had written only as a result of her prodding. They were never forceful or compelling opinions, but they were my own. And that wasn’t such a bad thing for a young man who aspired to attend law school one day.
She was likely the first instructor who got me to defend my ideas conveyed through writing. I never had to do that before, and most of the responses of my Tufts engineering professors had been to grade my content as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or to locate me in a distribution of exam scores. (I was near the bottom.)
At age 33, upon taking my doctorate from the UW in cognitive science — I never did finish law school, but I did receive an outstanding first-year education that featured James Hardisty’s Torts — I learned I had a strong writer’s pedigree. I was the grand-nephew of a famous American journalist.
I wonder if Kate sensed some future potential in my writing and, sensing this, might have commented in a positive way in her letter.
I never did read her letter about me. But during a Friday keg party, I did question our UW law admissions counselor about how important those personal letters were that we’d spent months crafting. He told me they were very important and that mine, in particular, had helped me gain acceptance at UDub. I certainly wasn’t going to gain admission based on my meager 3.3 GPA.
I got in and launched my own professional career thanks to her timely letter of support, which remembered me from her writing class.
More than 40 years later, I recall her only on her passing. I am, as it turns out, too late with my letter about Kate Burnett. My remembrance and thanks now stand as long overdue.
