The Tripod

Carver Diserens: I'm going to do something I haven't done since our long interview, I'm going to ask you two shorter questions that don't really have anything to do with each other. First, who would you say is the most famous or influential person that you know?

Jimmy Jones: I would have to divide famous into any number of sub-categories. On one hand would be people like Douglass North, who was the first person to win the Nobel Prize for political economy. He's been a very dear friend of ours for decades, we were at Washington University together. Another person who has had significant influence over the world would be the late Maxwell Cowan who was the chief scientific officer for Howard Hughes. When we knew each other in the 90s, he was giving away a million dollars every 24 hours for scientific research and was therefore, probably the single most influential person in scientific research in the world. Then on the other hand, I would have to include many of the great writers of our time; Carlos Fuentes is one, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alain Robbe-Grillet who was one of the inventors or the new novel in the 1950s and was elected to the Académie Française, Bill Gass, and many more of the writers who were at Washington University while I was there. Howard Nemerov, the Poet Laureate of the United States, used to sit at our breakfast table during parties, talking to the caterer, drinking gin out of an iced tea glass. If you wanted to talk to Howard, you had to go and sit with him in the kitchen because he couldn't be bothered by all of the people in the living room, they were all just ancillaries to Howard's world. One of the great philanthropists of Europe, Hervé Dufresne, was an extraordinary influence on my life. I would say the most influential people in my life have been my teachers and they are imminent in their own domains but they are not household names like Howard Nemerov.

CD: Completely changing gears, what are three things that you think every Trinity student should do before they graduate?

JJ: I would hope that every student would have a chance to study abroad in a foreign country. I've been a huge proponent of foreign study for a very long time. The second thing that I would hope every student would experience, would be to have at least one very profound, meaningful relationship with a faculty member, the kind of relationship where the student would have a friend and mentor for life. I say that because students have always been the most important part of my career. I think that at the end of the day, that is why we teach. I hope that every student would leave Trinity with a professor in his or her life so that five or 10 or 20 years later, they would still be in contact with that person. I suppose the third thing, and this might be nostalgia on my part, I always hope that every student would have some great love affair. [My wife and I] did when we were your age and we just celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary on Saturday. So it's possible to have a love affair when you're 19 and still have one when you are 61. I think you meet the most important people in your life while in college, I see it all the time. Take the class of 1963, this group gets together every year for dinner in Hamlin, just like they did when they were 18, which was in 1959. But I really believe that you meet the most important people for your life in college.

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