In Memoriam: Joseph Francis Kett

Intellectual history, taught with a Brooklyn sensibility

Joseph Francis Kett, co-author of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, whose wide-ranging intellect and barbed Brooklyn patter captivated decades of students in some of the history department’s toughest classes, died in April at 86.

“He was the funniest person on Grounds,” says retired history professor and close friend Michael F. Holt. At the department’s faculty-vs.-grad-student softball games, “Joe always pitched because he could needle the batters while he was pitching to them.”

Kett launched generations of graduate students into prominent teaching careers and held undergraduates in his thrall through his signature course, American Intellectual & Cultural History. In 1995, just past the midpoint of his 47 years at the University of Virginia, he received one of its highest honors, the Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award.

The exacting standards of his classroom reflected the rigor of his Jesuit education, first at Brooklyn Preparatory School and then the College of the Holy Cross. Kett went on to Harvard University for master’s (1960) and doctoral (1964) degrees.

His widow, Eleanor Kett, remembers picking him up at the airport after his UVA job interview in March 1966, when Joe was a Harvard instructor during their first year of marriage. She navigated another Boston snowstorm to get him, then listened as he told her about the springtime beauty of the Grounds he had just seen. They packed up and moved in time for his September 1 start.

Kett’s scholarship swept in grand concepts across long arcs of American history. His first book presented a history of how the American medical profession took form. Next came histories of adolescence in America, of adult education and, most abstract of all, of the American notion of merit. “He wrote books on things that weren’t topics until he wrote books on them,” Holt says. “He got these things that seemed very elusive … and historicized them.”

More mainstream was his collaboration with UVA colleagues E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the English department and physicist James Trefil. In 1987, Hirsch published the New York Times bestseller Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. It included an appendix the three professors compiled, listing some 5,000 important events, personages and concepts. The next year, with Kett and Trefil elevated to Hirsch’s co-authors, the three spun off The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, which in subsequent editions grew to 672 pages.

The hard work took place over Friday lunches on the Corner at an upstairs Mexican restaurant. Hirsch rode point on the humanities, Trefil the natural sciences and Kett the social sciences. “We were such regulars that when we showed up they would bring out our glasses of wine before we ordered anything,” Trefil says.

Hirsch served as group leader, Kett as reality check. “He was kind of a solid anchor, the common-sense guy,” Trefil says. “Joe is a real no-bulls--t kind of guy.”

His students learned to appreciate that about him too. An anonymous course evaluation from 2007 described Kett as “hilarious … eager to chat with us all after class … fascinating and brilliant. … I’d recommend him in a heartbeat.” The student added, “TOUGH paper grader though: I quote, ‘Good paper, but your prose needs a diet. C+.’”

In addition to Eleanor, his wife of 58 years, survivors include daughter Jennifer Kett; son John Kett (Col class of ’92, Arch class of ’98); and five grandchildren, among them Hannah Kett (Col class of ’22).

—Richard Gard