From Marcia Baron
I had the good fortune to be Katherine’s colleague for two years, from 2012-2014. During that time, she was Head of School, and it was always such a delight to go to the receptions for new faculty and other such events, because Katherine would be there. I always looked forward to conversing with her. She was an amazing human being, brilliant, witty, sharply focused on her work and yet never too distracted by it to engage with others, and always a joy to be with (even if it was only a meeting in which she explained to me the REF and helped me choose which papers of mine to submit). I am so glad I was able to see her for lunch at an APA in 2018, as well as hear her present there on imposter syndrome.
A memory stands out, not mainly for what she said (though partly for that) but for how she said it. At a reception at the Principal’s home, someone from another dept. expressed shock upon learning from Katherine that in our department we did not do double-blind marking, and instead just had the moderator review 25% of the scripts. (Apologies, all, if I’m forgetting the correct terms for these very British practices.) Katherine politely and respectfully listened to the person exclaim about what a mistake that is and enumerate reasons it is important to do double-blind marking, and then said, without a hint of ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’, something along the lines of, ‘But there is always something else that could be done in that time.’ I was thrilled to hear an administrator point this out; I also very much admired the way she brought it up in a tone that suggested merely, ‘Here’s another consideration’. That’s Katherine. Always insightful, happy to share her insights, but never in a way that had any hint of putting the other person down, and always completely devoid of smugness, arrogance, or a need to prove herself right.
Although I’d known she was seriously ill, I guess I never faced the fact that she was not likely to survive the illness. In an email exchange we had in summer 2020, she sounded so fully herself, and so full of life and immersed in life, that I felt sure she’d pull through. What a terrible loss to her family, to the St. Andrews philosophy dept., and to the thousands of people whose lives she touched, always for the better. She lives on in our memories and in her outstanding work. My deepest condolences to Jon and the children, whom I remember well from a lovely dinner at their home in summer, 2012.