NAS Blog

Back when Bravo provided high culture, I was entranced by a South Bank Show episode on a Caribbean poet named Derek Walcott.  When I saw Walcott would read at Stanford, I raced to hear him in person, only to be appalled by the meager audience which clapped and immediately dispersed.  Alone with him, I nervously asked how his book Omeros was coming.  Surprised someone knew of it, he said there were publication delays but it would be out soon.  Shortly after, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A few years later, friends and fortune combined to bring Derek for a reading.  That afternoon, he said he had always wanted to see a redwood tree, so we hopped into my Ford Focus and headed for Palo Colorado Canyon, but stopped just south of Carmel so he could survey the light, the surf, and the hills along the coast.  Walcott also paints, and looking through his framing hands, he slowly rotated and said, “Everywhere you look is a painting.”

Derek’s sold-out reading was magical, including Tiepolo’s Hound, “A Letter from Brooklyn” and his Odyssey section on the Cyclops, a metaphor for all totalitarian dictators who have no depth of vision.

Next day, Derek became impatient as his companion Sigrid embraced everyone, kissing, hugging, saying goodbye.  He turned to me and said, “Let’s show them how men say goodbye.”  He looked me straight in the eye, firmly squeezed my hand, and said, “Goodbye.”

I felt like a child in his presence, this aging yet vital man, numinous, strong despite infirmities and occasional vertigo.  His masculinity was overwhelming.

Now his latest, and perhaps last, book has arrived, White Egrets.  His lines move like waves and trade winds, elegiac, abundant with his island, the sea, sunlight, fields, lost friends, memory, art, and the enchantments of erotic women.  You can own this treasure here.

The Regents of the University of California just voted to embrace a pilot program testing the efficacy of an online undergraduate degree.  Until now, like most research universities, UC has been leery of the online environment because of the thorny problems it poses:  questionable security, dubious academic integrity, loss of “voices around the table,” substantial and perpetual costs.

Conversely, online education does seem inevitable given our technological dependence, a Beltway “college-for-all” mindset, corporate customer service business models, and ruthless competition.  ”It’s the future,” gushed Regent Bonnie Reiss.

Despite teaching online for years and running an online program, I remain ambivalent about the marriage of technology and education.  Showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up “Young Goodman Brown” used to be stimulating; now it’s just disruptive.  Why jerk students back to the terrain they already inhabit, filled with insistent, continuous, cognitive shifts whose interruptions prevent learning?  Handling electronic information, Nicholas Carr says,

We become mere signal processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

As one online student just posted, “During the time it took me to read for this assignment, I received 1 phone call, 6 emails, 4 text messages and 1 Skype message.”

At the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference in June, the most instructive point about online education was made by Porsche, a young African-American college student, who said, “I don’t want to study organic chemistry on my computer.  My computer is where I go to have fun.”

The UC Regents would do well to heed her words because Porsche really is the future.

Most good teachers had a model. Robert Pinsky had Francis Ferguson; Mark Edmundson had Frank Lears. I was lucky; I had two. My Freshman Comp. teacher was Dr. Idelle Sullens, a Stanford-trained medievalist specializing in 14th century literature. But I was mystified to learn that she had also been a naval officer in World War II and Korea. And rumor had it that she was something called a “Daughter of Bilitis.” But what really fractured my high school brain was seeing Dr. Sullens pull up in her brand new `64 Mustang. That I understood, and it elevated her beyond cool. My disturbing discovery was that one could seem professorial but also be startlingly complicated.

Two years later, it was the Lincolnesque Beat Generation scholar Tom Parkinson. One drowsy afternoon in Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium, Parkinson recited Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”with tears streaming down his partially-paralyzed cheeks (he had been shot in the face by a student). I was embarrassed but also feared that this moment was profound in a way I might never understand. How could he so reveal himself? It took years to learn that throughout one’s life, good literature deepens and grows, accumulating, preserving, and incorporating intense personal associations. Now there are poems I can’t read aloud without leaking tears.

Both are gone now, but the spirits of Sullens and Parkinson still gently remind me to be unexpected, singular, complicated, and exposed so that my students will see that one day they can do the same.

Education needs a manifesto for a new humanism; sadly, Martha Nussbaum’s new book is not that manifesto.  I had high hopes for Not for Profit but Dr. Nussbaum’s argument quickly becomes a tangle of faulty logic and ideology and notably stale seventies feminism.  Why is she still pumping the wells of female victimization (while referencing the female president of Harvard) and the plight of African American children who lack role models (while noting the African American President of the United States)?  At one point, she praises Mr. Obama’s personal values as developed by the progressive education she endorses.  Then she indicts him for not supporting such education for others, raising the question of just what sort of person her recommended liberal education actually produces.  When  Nussbaum pleads for progressive schools (wherein teachers sagely guide students to discover and construct knowledge themselves), I think of Geoffrey Pyke [pictured] and his Malting House School (John Dewey meets William Golding).

Although Dr. Nussbaum embraces Socratic self-examination, ideology blinds her to her own biases.  She is pedantic when attacking pedantry, and she abhors “the dead hand of authority” yet repeatedly invokes the authority of Nobel Prize credentials.  She advocates critical thinking to combat “demeaning stereotypes,” then proceeds to stereotype men, women, whites, and Southerners.  Masculinity comes off badly unless it is “maternal” which, she implies, is the true essence of human nature (making masculine behavior an aberration, less than human).  In this book, women are saintly and victimized (unless they are named Margaret Thatcher).  Nussbaum scorns the image of the self-reliant cowboy, then, on the next page, explains that every child must develop “less need to call on others.”  Decrying education that involves mere inculcation of facts (more Seventies flotsam), she later admits to the necessity for “a lot of factual knowledge.”

Worse, Dr. Nussbaum extols the individual but avoids any mention of the tribalizing effects of multiculturalism and its diminution of . . . the individual.  Among several straw man arguments, she condemns “the facile equation of Islam with terrorism” without mentioning just who ever assumed that equivalence.  The values she prizes are particularly Western, giving her desire to spread them globally a whiff of cultural imperialism.  And Dr. Nussbaum recommends role-playing to develop sympathy for “the other.”  I met an eyewitness from one progressive school in Northern California that did just that:  to develop sympathy for slaves on a ship, teachers locked students in a Quonset hut, chained to their desks surrounded by rotting fish.

In fact, Dr. Nussbaum’s book is a call not for a new humanism but for an old political correctness.  She even warns that because artworks are so effective at creating empathy, teachers must exercise “careful selectivity” so that students do not read “defective forms of `literature’” which evoke unsocial feelings and “uneven sympathies.”  Yikes!  Goodbye Salinger, Twain, Poe, O’Conner, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.  With friends like Dr. Nussbaum, liberal arts education doesn’t need enemies.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (June 18), Timothy Knowles, “a former teacher, principal and district leader” laments the difficulty of eliminating “low-performing teachers.”  Granted, there are abundant reasons for tenure reform at the K-12 level.  College, however, is a different matter.

Marketing his new book, Cary Nelson, spear point of the AAUP, says

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, devout believer that you only have academic freedom and free speech if you have job security.  If you don’t have job security, you can’t speak out forcefully, and I think that means academic freedom will be diminished.

I rarely agree with Dr. Nelson, a fellow I find usually animated by left-wing, social constructivist, and Sixties sentiments, but in this case he is right.

Mr. Knowles paints administrators as ex-teachers called to a higher mission.  However, in college, many administrators have little or no classroom experience, and Mr. Knowles seems oblivious to just how political, punitive, and self-serving careerist administrators can be (just look at how many of the cases at FIRE originate from administrative excesses).  Without tenure, my campus would have no discernible conservative voice at all.  I would have been fired by at least three different college presidents for a variety of transgressions:  organizing the faculty union, suing the college, publically criticizing multiculturalism, openly opposing “student learning outcomes.”

Students can survive a poor teacher (how many great teachers are there?), but they can’t survive a university monoculture that is an ideological echo chamber.  Tenure may sometimes protect incompetent knaves but, where it still exists, tenure also protects vital intellectual pluralism.

Since the NAS report on summer reading, “Beach Books,” U.C. Berkeley has announced its own summer reading recommendations.   The theme is “Education Matters” and, not surprisingly, multicultural “social justice” predominates.  Happily, Benjamin Franklin and The Education of Henry Adams are included.  There is also No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech by Lucinda Roy.  As Chair of the English Department, Roy tutored Seung-Hui Cho in poetry after he was ejected from a course for terrifying classmates.  Post-tutoring, Cho proceeded to murder 32 other human beings before killing himself.  Roy argues that VaTech did not adequately address Cho’s disabilities and alleges multiple institutional failures.  I would argue that VaTech also failed to help students and teachers protect themselves.

My friend the Philosophy professor enjoys alarming his students by telling them “Professor Clemens says that a gun society is a polite society.”  Well, yes.  Gun shows are the most decorous events imaginable because you never know who’s packing.  As Webster’s NRA Dictionary says, “democracy” is two wolves fighting over a lamb; “liberty” is an armed lamb.

Call me perverse but I do enjoy that mine is the only car in the faculty lot with the decals “Wild Alaska,” “NRA  Supports Our Troops,” and “Armed With Pride.”  It’s particularly amusing when I park next to the Volvo whose bumper sticker reads “The Goddess Is Alive and Magic Is Afoot.”

Magic and the Goddess notwithstanding, I wish that more responsible teachers were armed.  I have an in-law who teaches at Virginia Tech; he heard the gunfire.  A local student brought an automatic weapon to acting class; one teacher’s office is regularly trespassed at night (hopefully only by amorous custodians).

At one Cow Palace gun show, I bought MACE and a billy club for my division’s office staff.  Diminutive Rosa is alone in the evening; more than once she has had to face deranged, medicated, or otherwise menacing students.  Rosa is a tough cookie, straight outta Compton (wore a bullet-proof vest to high school), but even she gets rattled.  Better if she had training, a concealed carry permit, and a Beretta.  All campus personnel should at least handle guns so that they are not afraid of them.  To the gentle and nonviolent, this no doubt sounds like macho posturing but I grew up shooting, BB gun to 30.06 and .303, Enfield to M-1 carbine, Ruger .22 to S&W .357 magnum.

I always carry a Kershaw Blur, but I’d like to be better equipped to protect my students and colleagues.  Our campus emergency plan tells us to freeze if there is an “active shooter.”  Better it if it read, “keep moving, don’t be a target, shoot back.”  Freeze?  Our victim culture is ideal for the psychopaths who desire helpless victims.

Back in January I wrote about anti-male prejudice at the University of Wyoming here and mentioned the birth of a new “male positive” discipline called Male Studies.  An organizing webinar in April has led to a full Male Studies conference in New York next October 1-2.  As the conference description makes clear, “This is not a gender studies conference. It is not a men’s studies conference in the generally accepted sense.”  That is, the conference will attempt to investigate, understand, and describe male experience rather than mock, condemn, even erase masculinity, manhood, and manliness.  How refreshing!  Anti-male prejudice and stereotyping permeate academia.  I have described my own experience here and here.

One of the funniest sequences in Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary film  Indoctrinate U is when he wanders from campus to campus asking for directions to “the Men’s Center.”  If Male Studies takes hold, maybe someday Evan might actually be able to find one.

Here are the details and the call for papers from the convener, Dr. Miles Groth of Wagner College:

“Wagner College will host the first annual Conference on Male Studies, on Friday and Saturday, October 1-2, 2010. Six themes representing several disciplines will be addressed by panels and individual presenters:

▪  The deep biology of the experience of being male (genetics, biology, psychoneuroendocrinology, paleoanthropology);

▪  Literacy and education of boys and college males (pedagogy, sociology);

▪  Socioeconomic factors leading to males’ over-involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy);

▪  Misandric representations of boys and mature males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

▪  Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography);

▪  Pressing issues related to the emotional well-being of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Specialists in all of the above disciplines as well as related areas of research will present position papers or engage in carefully organized panel discussions of the themes. We expect participants to include scholars from more than the 12 countries who participated along with you in the April 7, 2010 inaugural teleconference and webinar broadcast.

Proceedings of the conference will be published in the first issue of a new journal, Male Studies, in 2011.”

In 2009, ten days before the inauguration, I was in Washington for the NAS conference but had decided to stay near the National Mall at the ritzy Hay-Adams across from the White House.  With Blair House unavailable, President-elect Obama had also picked The Hay, so my stay had been filled with concrete barriers, metal fences, and Secret Service.

One night, walking back from the conference, I stupidly headed the wrong way, towards Delaware, 180 degrees from The Hay.  In the drizzle, I heard, “Hey, beautiful brother . . .” as a woman on a bicycle coasted by on the wet street.  I shook my head but a minute later I heard her again, “I’m no threat to you.”  The panhandler had dismounted and was already at my elbow.

“You’re following me . . . .”

“Yeh, but I can’t hurt you,” she said, looking up.  She was slender, with chocolate skin, soulful eyes, a real smile unperfected by braces, wearing a puffy nylon jacket.  I started walking but she launched into her pitch:  raised by her grandmother, finding her mother dead on the floor.  “Some folks have just had a harder time, you know?”  I gave detached “hmmms” and “ohs,” but also wondered about her—she was engaging, persistent but gentle, obviously smart.  She asked, “What’s your name?”

Cautious, I said, “David.  I’m from California, here for a conference, but I think I’m going the wrong way.”

“I’m Robin.  Where you staying?”

“The Hay-Adams.”

“Oh, you kidding me?  That’s where Obama’s staying!  Aren’t you going in the wrong direction!  C’mon, I’ll take you there!”  She wheeled her bicycle around, pushing off into the night.  “David from California.  You know, isn’t that something?  There you was, lost, and I came along and found you.”  She shook her head.  “That’s how I know there’s somebody more up in the sky than the Man in the Moon.”

“Are you from Washington?”

“My whole life.  I have five kids, but . . .” she ducked her head, “I don’t have any of them.”

“Robin,” I said, “I’m a teacher.  You seem as able as most of my students.”

She was silent.

We reached double digit streets, nearing The Hay, but I no longer wanted the encounter to end.   “Robin, with your personality I’m sure you could . . .” (I thought frantically how to convey confidence in her without being patronizing) “. . . get a regular job.”  She looked down again.  “I don’t like living in the shelters.  There’s too many drugs.  I have to hide my stuff around.”

We cut through a Metro station where human figures hunched near the warm wind pouring up the stairwells.  Back in the rainy night Robin exclaimed, “Look!  Ducks!”  Under a sapling, on a patch of wet grass, two young Mallards huddled, dazed by the glare of headlights and neon.

“Do you read?” I asked.

“Yeh.  `DON’T WALK.’  `NO TRESPASSING.’  `CLOSED.’”  She smiled, then repeated:

Imagine that, David from California.  There you was lost, and I was supposed to find you.

“Are you going to the inauguration?”

Her face clouded, “I don’t like crowds.”

We saw the floodlit Hay now.  She slowed and said hopefully, “I know you would take care of a sister.”

Not yet.  She had to know that I was not embarrassed to be with her.  The moon gleamed off temporary bleachers and metal barricades around the White House as we walked the final block.  At the checkpoint, she stopped again.  I took the last $50 bill from my wallet and said, “Thanks, Robin.  Please take this.  I’m glad I met you and that we got to talk.”

Robin stared at Ulysses Grant; I wondered what she knew about history.  “Oh, there’s more in the sky than the Man in the Moon.” She shook her head, smiled up at me, and we embraced.  Then she swung onto her bike, and I turned toward the security tent, the metal detector, and the shiny black cars.

These days, I often think of my beautiful sister Robin, huddled in a D.C. shelter, still hiding her stuff, still waiting for hope and change.

The current issue of Academic Questions focuses on “sustainability,” that hollow abstraction around which coalesce feel-good connotations of moral superiority and environmental correctness.  At the very least, higher education should foster a scrupulous, continuous, and critical attention to language, yet academia today seems more enamored of rhetoric which is either empty (“student success”) or deceptive (“social justice”).  My own college has an institutional commitment to “diversity,” a word whose apparent meaning changes from document to document even though HR requires all teaching applicants to produce a “Diversity Statement.”  Diversity is a good thing and we’re for it, and, by gosh, you had better be, too, whatever it is!

We also have an institutional commitment to “critical thinking.”  In my experience, most teachers are confident they know what critical thinking is (it’s what they do) but hardly any can provide a definition.  For them, “critical thinking” is just another abstract good thing.  Actually, California State University Chancellor Glenn Dumke’s Executive Order 338 defined “critical thinking instruction” as

. . . designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief (1980).

Personally, I favor William Graham Sumner’s succinct definition of critical thinking as “the examination of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not” (1906).

By either definition, my school’s proud commitment to “Promote academic excellence and critical thinking across all areas and disciplines” is incoherent since critical thinking is not germane in all disciplines.  Music?  Dance?  Literature?  Ornamental horticulture?  The academy’s adoption of language which is, in Peggy Noonan’s words, “bland and indecipherable,” betrays the foundation of verbal communication itself–that, as David Mulroy puts it in The War Against Grammar, “intelligible statements have definite literal meanings.”

“Sustainability,” “diversity,” “social justice,” “critical thinking” are intended to convey feelings, not meanings.  In Disturbing the Peace, Vaclav Havel asks, “Isn’t just such a subtle abuse of the truth, and of language, the real beginning . . . of the misery of the world we live in?”  Perhaps higher education should be promoting clarity rather than sponsoring a new confusion of tongues.

I just hosted a three-week colloquium exploring the relationship between great books and democracy which featured former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, and poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia.

Pinsky stressed how the medium for poetry is the body of the speaker, making poetry individual and on human scale in our mass media world.  Hanson argued three positions which give postmodern academics hissy fits:  that there is such a thing as human nature, that we can learn from the past (reading gives us knowledge without having to go through painful experience), and that life is tragic, not therapeutic.  He attributed California’s manifold problems to a utopian desire to be what we should be rather than a realistic desire to be what we actually could be, reminding me that California was the cradle of the Self-Esteem Movement.  Gioia warned about the cultural dangers of not reading, citing in particular non-readers’ disengagement from civic and social life.  Reading requires “sustained linear attention” which is not a property of electronic entertainments.

Although Gioia was optimistic (“we can create the society in which we want to live”), the nagging question at the center of the colloquium remains:  if reading and poetry nurture the individual and have positive civic consequences, might it be that the fate of liberal arts education is tied to the fate of liberal democracy itself, that the fate of literature is entwined with the fate of the West?

Analytic philosopher Martha Nussbaum offered her answer in the Times Literary Supplement (April 30).  As colleges carve away the liberal arts in the name of economy or productivity, Nussbaum says,

[r]adical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through.  Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.  If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.