To our clients, colleagues, students, and friends,
This month marks the end of Logos Consulting Group’s 22nd year and the start of our 23rd year in operation.
As we turn the page to a new year, we want to take a moment to thank all of you for your support and confidence over the years.
We are blessed to have the opportunity to pursue our mission – to equip people to become leaders who ignite and inspire change in the world for the good.
Over the more than two decades of our journey, Logosfolk, as we call ourselves, have worked with thousands of people at more than 500 client organizations around the world. We have taught thousands more in universities and professional schools. And we have deeply mentored hundreds. Most of our mentoring has been off-the-clock. We receive no compensation for it. But it is an essential part of our mission – to equip people to step into their potential.
One reason we are so passionate about mentoring is because each of us has benefitted from personal and professional mentors throughout our lives and careers. No one succeeds alone. However successful we may be, and however far we can see, it is always because we stand on the shoulders of giants – of deeply successful people who went out of their way to invest in us, almost always off the clock.
And we are committed to paying it forward.
Honoring our Mentors
In the coming month, Logosfolk will share stories about our mentors – the people who invested in our success.
In this initial tribute, Logos founder and president Helio Fred Garcia profiles one of his mentors, who worked with him for 25 years and who, among other things, put Garcia on a path to becoming a teacher.
Philosopher Helps Me Become a Professor:
A personal tribute by Helio Fred Garcia
I received my formal invitation to join the adjunct faculty at New York University (NYU) on August 1, 1988.At the time, my mentor of 14 years had encouraged me to consider teaching. He was NYU philosophy professor Hiram J. McLendon.
As a young man, right after World War II, McLendon had studied with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell at Trinity College, Cambridge University. And in the style of Cambridge, he referred to people by their last name only and insisted that we do the same with him. So I was always and only Garcia; he was always and only McLendon.
McLendon completed his PhD at Harvard and taught at Harvard and the University of California. He also taught philosophy to U.S. armed forces in Japan in a program jointly sponsored by the University of California and the Department of Defense. And McLendon helped to establish public television in the Bay area of California, teaching one of the first educational television programs ever.
McLendon joined the NYU faculty in 1962. He was my first teacher in my first class on my first day of my first year of college – in September 1975. He immediately became my favorite teacher and a mentor.
McLendon was passionately devoted to igniting both understanding and curiosity in his students. There was an electric feeling being in his classroom. He also regularly defied the conventions of academia as he welcomed everyone – be they registered or not – into his classroom. He held his office hours on a bench in Washington Square Park; if raining, his office hours would be held either on the ottomans in the NYU library or at McDonald’s.
I studied with him every semester as an undergrad, where I was completing a double major in philosophy and political science. He was my advisor in the philosophy honors program. And after graduating in January 1979, I spent the Spring helping him grade papers and organize his writing for publication.
Shortly before I graduated, I let McLendon know that I had chosen not to go to law school, as I had originally intended, but rather to go to graduate school to study philosophy. He told me, “Well, Garcia, then you will need to learn Greek.” He meant Ancient Greek.
So I did. In the summer of 1979, without consulting McLendon, I enrolled in the Latin Greek Institute of the City University of New York Graduate Center. It was essentially a boot camp for first-year doctoral students who needed to qualify in Latin or Greek to get their PhDs. On June 1, 1979, I entered the program without even knowing the Greek alphabet. For three months, we were in class Monday through Saturday from 9:00 to 6:00 and on Sundays from 9:00 to 1:00. And we then had five hours of translations every night. By September 1, we had read some Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and the Christian Gospels — all in the original Greek.
As I finished and was about to start in the philosophy department at Columbia University, I told McLendon how I had spent my summer. He was shocked: “Now, Garcia, I told you to learn Greek because I did not want you to study philosophy, but to go to law school!” Too late. I studied at Columbia for a while after getting my MA, but left before completing the PhD.
For ten years after graduate school, I met with McLendon every Tuesday night, usually at the Greek coffee shop on West 4th Street, adjacent to the NYU campus. We would discuss philosophy, teaching, students. Sometimes I would grade papers with him. For a long time, we edited his writings.
Then, in 1988, I was working in public relations and he invited me to teach in his NYU Plato graduate seminar. I taught a class called “Plato and Public Relations.” He brought a tape recorder and taped my class. Then he encouraged me to become an adjunct professor. With the tape in hand I went to the interview, and was then hired to teach communication ethics, public relations, and investor relations in what is now the NYU School of Professional Studies.
I taught on Tuesday nights. I was not a very good teacher. But for the first four semesters I taught, McLendon was in the classroom for every session, always with a tape recorder, always taking copious notes – not on what I was teaching, but on how I was teaching. Over dinner after every class, we'd discuss my teaching: what worked, what didn’t, and how to do it better next time. And I got better at it.
McLendon shaped me as a teacher. And after my second year at NYU, he stood next to me as I received the school's award for teaching excellence. I literally could not have done it without him.
When my Dad died suddenly, one hour before the funeral, a bus stopped in front of the church and out stepped McLendon. He was there to share my grief and to support me as I delivered my Dad's eulogy.
Four years later, when I exchanged vows with my bride, McLendon was standing to my right, my best man, there to share my joy. He closed the ceremony by giving a benediction in the form of a Greek prayer from Plato that we had translated together.
And in the year 2000, I delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
McLendon showed me what it meant to teach, and to learn from, and to mentor students. He was also my best friend. He changed my life, as he did the lives of so many of his students. And every time I walk into a classroom, and with every person I mentor, I carry a little bit of him with me. And like a flame that can light another flame without being diminished, I try to share that little bit of him with them.
Comments