James Coke Haden (1922–1991), Compton Professor of Philosophy, came to the College of Wooster in 1973 and retired in 1986. Haden was educated at Haverford, the University of Virginia, and Yale University. After his undergraduate work at Haverford in physics and electrical engineering, he served in World War II in the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a radar repair and patent officer. Following a brief post-war career in electronics, he discovered philosophy through reading Plato’s Republic then returned to study philosophy at the University of Virginia and then to Yale for a Ph.D. From his earliest studies in philosophy to the end of his life, Jim was concerned to reform and re-humanize the academy. He constantly became associated with programs that sought these aims. In two separate appointments at Yale, he taught in the Directed Studies Program, becoming its head on his second appointment. At the University of South Carolina, coming in with a new president, he worked toward educational reform there. In 1961, he joined the faculty of the newly founded Oakland University as part of that experimental education project. And, in 1969, he was one of the first faculty hired to help shape what was to become Hampshire College. Exasperated at attempts at new starts in education, he came to the College of Wooster as Compton Professor of Philosophy in 1972. Here he continued his attacks on the flanks of the educational establishment, whether it be administrators, old guard faculty, deconstructionists, feminists, or school philosophers of any ilk. He retired from Wooster in 1986 and moved to Greece with his wife, Olympia. There he continued his scholarly work until his short illness and death.
Although Haden’s energies went into teaching and agitation for educational reform, he published numerous articles, mostly on Plato, book reviews, and translations. His translation of Ernst Cassier’s Kant’s Leben und Lehre with Yale University Press was well received by the philosophical community. In his last years, he was working on a translation, commentary, and teacher’s guide to the Euthyphro dialogue.
Among his many interests were baking French bread, appreciating fine wines (he founded an oenological society while at Oakland and supplied Wooster faculty with fine and rare wines), and playing and teaching the recorder. He was a member of the American Recorder Society, played in and taught for Medieval and Renaissance music groups, and published his own translation of a German recorder player’s handbook. His recorder groups played regularly at St. James Episcopal Church in Wooster where he was a member and sometime lay reader and preacher.
No notice of Jim’s life’s work would be complete without mention his effect on students. He taught aggressively and believed that the moral improvement of his students was the aim of his teaching. Universally his students described him as “demanding.” By this they meant not simply that philosophy as he taught it was difficult, but that he expected them to be different people for having studied it. After making their assessment of him, students fell into three groups: i) avoided him, ii) savored the experience of one of his classes, or iii) became life-long disciples. Socrates was his model for teaching, and the eradication of all forms of relativism was his stated objective.