In 2013, The Ohio State University awarded an honorary doctorate to Donald E. Kagan, Sterling Professor of History and Classics at Yale University.
Kagan received his BA from Brooklyn College, which in 1976 conferred a "Distinguished Alumnus Award" on him, and his PhD from OSU. He has since become one of America's most celebrated living historians, winning a host of fellowships, prizes and other distinctions, culminating in the National Humanities Medal in 2002 and appointment as the NEH Jefferson Lecturer in 2005, perhaps the highest honor open to scholars in the Humanities. Through innumerable books, commentaries, and essays, his ceaseless efforts to document and expound the lessons of the past have won him an influence and an audience that extend far beyond the academy. He has become one of the academy's few "public intellectuals."
Ultimately, Kagan's stature rests upon his scholarly contributions to the history of ancient Greece, his primary field. His publications reveal an astonishingly broad horizon of interests, extending from law, numismatics, and ancient historiography to politics, diplomacy, and warfare. A recurring concern has been the remarkable democracy of the classical Athenians, its ever-intriguing practices and institutions, and its prominent leaders. His Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (1991) is especially admired for its author's characteristically learned and adroit assessment of one of Greece's more illustrious statesmen.
Professor Kagan's best-known work concerns the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), the titanic conflict between Athens and Sparta, Greece's twin superpowers, and their many respective allies. Simply stated, Kagan is regarded as the world's foremost authority on this war and on our principal source for the war, the peerless History written by Thucydides, a prominent participant as well as the first and most perceptive analyst of the conflict. Kagan's work remains the essential starting point for anyone interested in the subject, above all the monumental four-volume series which systematically scrutinizes and interprets the war's every major event from beginning to end: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (1969); The Archidamian War (1974); The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1981); and The Fall of the Athenian Empire (1987). The breathtaking ambition of this masterpiece is perhaps matched only by its erudition and style. George Steiner once acclaimed the quartet as "the foremost work of history produced in North America" during the twentieth century.
Kagan's ability to bring Ancient History alive also manifests itself in the classroom. He is a devoted and dynamic teacher whose obvious delight in his subject is contagious. At Yale, his lectures and seminars became legendary and, despite teaching for almost half a century, he still comes to every class with the enthusiasm of someone encountering the material for the first time. He has stimulated hundreds, if not thousands, of students to take up classical sources who otherwise might not have done so.
At the graduate level, he has mentored numerous men and women who have gone on to pursue distinguished scholarly careers of their own. Despite his renown, he is extremely approachable: he sometimes joins students for lunch at the end of class or wanders over to chat with them in coffee shops. His intellectual influence on some students has been a more important than that of their own advisor. His excellence as a teacher has been recognized at both Cornell (where he taught between 1960 and 1969) and at Yale (where he has taught ever since). Yale awarded him the DeVane Medal, one of the university's highest honors for teaching.
The Honorary Degree Awarded by OSU reflected not only these outstanding achievements, but also his "Columbus connection." Not only did he spend three years here, working on his doctorate with Harvey Goldberg, Foster Rhea Dulles, William MacDonald and others in the History Department in the 1950s, but during his last year he also taught at Capital University. Moreover, his thesis concerned Corinth, very close to the site at Isthmia where The Ohio State University maintains an ongoing excavation.
In connection with the degree ceremony, on 19 October 2012 Katherine C. Epstein, who studied with Kagan at Yale as an undergraduate before completing her doctorate at OSU, returned to Yale to interview Donald Kagan about his distinguished career and his memories of Columbus in the 1950s. Geoffrey Parker, who was Kagan's colleague at Yale before coming to OSU, recorded the interview (which lasted almost three hours). Mitchell Shelton of OSU's Goldberg Center has divided the recording into five parts.