David: You talk about new leaders. Katie, you wanna jump in here?
Katie Steger: Thanks, David. Yeah, I do.
I think Diane is so much the reason why I ever was connected to any of you and why many of us were ever connected to each other. A forte of hers was organizing the most amazing rooms of people to spark the most fruitful conversations that would just fuel you.
I’m not sure she ever really understood how important she was to so many people. I’ve always felt like she was the moral compass for me, for the field. Whatever doubts she had, and I believe that she had many doubts on the inside, the importance of the pursuit of truth was not one of them. She always inherently knew what true North was, and she was not going to stray from that.
As a result, she would very confidently call people to account and take people to task. She also understood fairness and kindness, even in telling people hard things. I feel like she shaped so much of who I am professionally, but also personally, and I’m really grateful.
I want to share a thing that happened at the funeral yesterday. So many people got up to speak, and they all came from different eras of her life and her career. And at the end, sort of last minute, one of her students got up and described this exercise that Diane had them do, which was to go out into their communities with no distraction—no pen, no paper, no phone, no anything—and find a broken place in their community that needed tending, had been abandoned, and sit in the broken place for thirty minutes and just reflect. The takeaway from that exercise was to turn in instead of turning away. I think that’s what Diane always did when there was a hard problem. She refused to turn away from it. She always turned into it and asked the question: What now? What next? How do we move forward? How do we solve this? Maybe we can’t solve this, but how do we make it better? How do we work together? Who do we bring to the table? How do we make space for people at the table?
And she always made space for people; it didn’t matter who you were. She just believed in people and always tried to get the best out of them. So the loss is so enormous.
Diane knew how much she was admired, but I think she would have been astonished by this outpouring of affection and grieving that has followed her death. We all know that she deserved it in spades.
David: We didn’t get the story all the way to the Netherlands. Susan, can you speak to that?
Susan: Thanksgiving 2009, Diane went to Amsterdam for a long weekend and attended a lecture on cultural economics by a leading Dutch cultural economist, Jaap Boter. After the lecture she went up and introduced herself, and she dazzled him as much as he had dazzled her. For the next six months, theirs was a commuting love story. It’s important to say that when she left the Mellon Foundation the next summer— a job she loved, with people she loved, in a city she loved—she left for love.
She moved to a place where even though everybody spoke English, it was foreign for her. A year later she and Jaap married, and, damn it, she worked so hard at that marriage. There were two stepdaughters, and she worked as hard as she could to ingratiate herself into the Boter family life.
Diane began a dissertation at Erasmus University. It was unlike American graduate education, and there wasn’t a lot of understanding of her subject matter or the big questions she was asking. Erasmus had her teach, and somebody quickly realized this was a woman that put her all into everything she did, so they took advantage of that. She had more classes than anybody. She had more students than anybody. She worked harder than anybody.
She worked at becoming a wife, a mother, a student. I believe we have the Jumper blog because Diane was so worried we would all forget her. She needed to connect with us publicly and hear back from us. To have that written legacy is such a gift from Doug McLennan and ArtsJournal.
Diane turned down a number of positions in Europe that would have allowed her to be the public intellectual she was and get paid for it. Despite various international keynote addresses and periodic teaching or consulting stints in North America, she found the time abroad harder and harder. I think she had expectations that as her stepdaughters grew older, she would be able to spend more time in the States with Jaap. That wasn’t proving to be the case, and she eventually made that very, very brave decision to come back.
I want to bring love back into this conversation. Diane knew how much she was admired, but I think she would have been astonished by this outpouring of affection and grieving that has followed her death. We all know that she deserved it in spades.
I hope that I captured her time in in the Netherlands. Oh, and she learned Dutch, and became a Dutch citizen. That was Diane. 200 percent.
David: Thank you. Well, this has been really important for me and for others of you as well. I just appreciate all of you and all of us.
And Diane, thank you.
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