Shared Treasures

I have in the past allowed myself some discouraging remarks about the state of higher education in Britain, because it had seemed to me that in recent years the Brits have taken up some of the worst features of our American system at the expense of the better ones. Accordingly, I feel honor bound to report on evidence of a very different kind: the highly enjoyable and exhilarating weekend Joan and I just spent in Oxford, our shared alma mater. In an earlier posting I reported on one of the university’s American reunions. In this one I touch on our experience of one of its “Oxford Thinking” week-ends. Putting this in our parochial terms, such a weekend is more substantial than a “Princeton Today” program, but less grand than a Princeton Alumni Day.

The great battle in Oxford is, and for some time will continue to be, the jockeying between the individual, autonomous colleges and the growing power and ambitions of a central university administration. The joke current in my undergraduate days half a century ago involved the American tourist who arrives in town and baffles a man he meets in the street by asking him, “Which way is the University?” The “University” being a merely platonic concept, it was as though he were asking directions to the Sorry State of Affairs, or to see a printed list of No Uncertain Terms. The weight of tradition and academic conservatism, complicated by ancient legal arrangements hardly imaginable in America, bolster the college-centered vision. Common sense, the realities of modernity, and the palpable need for the effective deployment of limited resources suggest that the more “centralized” vision must certainly win out. These Alumni Weekends give incidental evidence that it is winning.

In this regard it was significant that the only venue really convenient for an event of this sort—the Said Business School next to the railroad station—is among the newest, least traditionally “Oxonian”, and most architecturally nondescript sites in Oxford. There simply isn’t anywhere else one could run five or six concurrent lectures for fifty or more people—a requirement it met to perfection. The thoughtfully chosen theme of the week-end was “Shared Treasures.” This phrase drew explicit attention to the breath-taking interior re-designing of the University's Ashmolean Museum, fairly recently completed, but in a larger sense it reminded us all of the extent to which our ancient university in its ancient city is among the great shared treasures of the world’s cultural patrimony.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: the old and the new

The principal “shared treasures” were intellectual: a dazzling array of lectures by several of Oxford’s most celebrated scholars, among which we had to make difficult choices. To report at length would protract this post unduly, but my own top three—out of a sumptuous menu--were Hermione Lee’s panel on biography, a lecture by Emma Smith on the history of the Bodleian’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio, and an absolutely bravura and apparently off the cuff talk about the English Reformation by religious historian Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch. That’s one erudite cuff, let me tell you.

The trip to Oxford had a double purpose, only part of which I have described. The occasion gave us the opportunity to stay with old and dear friends, Margaret and Derek Davies. Margaret had been among our cohort studying English before she married the young law don of Saint Catherine’s College. For many decades they lived on a marvelous large property on Boar’s Hill. They have now retired to a smaller version of it at the base of the hill, in the village of Cumnor. There is a special quality to ancient friendships even as there is to ancient universities, and we much enjoyed their mellow hospitality. On Sunday morning we went along to the parish church, Saint Michael’s, where a large and voluble congregation was, by chance, celebrating their patronal festival (Michaelmas being September 29—i.e, today). The priest apologized for the fact that he could not actually document earlier celebrations in the spot much further back than seven hundred years, even though Anglo-Saxons were probably worshipping there well before the year 1000.

The parish church of Saint Michael the Archangel: Cumnor, Oxon.

For us the Eucharist is the greatest of shared treasures, and to partake in a place it has been shared for a millennium was most pleasing. But there was another treasure yet to come. We spent Sunday night in a London hotel near Saint Pancras Station, whence the Eurostar for Paris leaves. That meant we were also near the British Museum, and that we would to able to spend part of a morning there. With limited time, we decided to focus on a single goal—the hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold, the largest ever found, recently uncovered in Staffordshire. Well, it had been there, briefly, one of the guards explained. A pity…but we had just missed it. It had now been returned to its proper and permanent home in the Midlands. “But,” he added when he noted the disappointment on our faces, “just over there is the Fishpool.”

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Luke 12:34)

He was pointing toward Room 40, one of the “new” medieval galleries opened only last year and as yet unseen by me. More specifically he was pointing toward the first large case you see as you enter the room. In it, lavishly scattered like the petals from golden roses, are 1237 bright shining coins of the fifteenth century. This is the Fishpool Hoard, and I choose my flowery image with intention. It is quite possible that these gold coins, together with a few exquisite pieces of jewelry, were hastily buried by defeated Lancastrians on the run following one of the skirmishes of the Wars of the Roses—the Battle of Hexham, in 1464. The excitement of my own “discovery” of them can hardly have been less intense than that of the workmen who dug them up on a Nottinghamshire building site forty-five years ago. I have spent my professional life trying to uncover and share the intellectual treasures of the past. This golden hoard was thus the perfect terminal punctuation for our weekend of Shared Treasures. I made a feint at reading on the train back to Paris, but mainly I was daydreaming.

One treasure (the recent Anglo-Saxon hoard) went unshared--until I can get to the Midlands

The Tea Party in Chains

Among the great books I have read in the last five years is the two volume work by E. B. Tylor entitled Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor, an Oxford anthropologist and one of the founders of the discipline, is so little read today that I found he was merely a name to my son, a recent Ph.D. in anthropology. Of course any pioneer anthropologist imprudent enough to use the word “primitive” in a title will have long ago suffered the Oedipal fate of so many other politically incorrect patriarchs.

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)

What I found particularly striking in Tylor had little to do with the “primitive”. What challenged me is his explanation of the principle of cultural conservatism. “When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world,” he writes, “disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in its bed will flow on for ages.” If you substitute the word rut for stream bed, you’ll see where culture is stuck. He goes so far as to say that most things that exist in the world exist for the reason that they once existed. That is an idea deserving pause for thought.

Living the expatriate life even briefly offers that pause, for one is constantly importuned to pass judgment on the ways the small experiences of daily life seem “different”, and different from what. Some years ago when I was making a study of the life and times of Christopher Columbus I was struck by what I took to be a risible feature of his log-books. Here was the first European observer known to record his impressions of a literally New World with all its fascinating alterities. Yet all his experiences seemed to fit succinctly into one of two categories. Things were either “like what we have in Castile,” or “not like what we have in Castile.”

Of course when you stop to think about it, all experience in all times and places, anywhere and forever, will fit into one of those two categories. The question is: how good are the categories? My natural instinct in encountering the thousand particularities of a day in Paris is not unlike Columbus’s. Try as I might, I cannot escape the default paradigm: is this or is is this not what it’s like “in America”.

Parts of Tylor’s book now seem ironic. His vast researches so convinced him of the ineluctably conservative nature of culture that he could not for a moment anticipate the vastness of the changes about to break in upon the world in the twentieth century.

Many aspects of the old life once regarded as unalterable have surrendered to the demands of efficiency. We no longer have twenty systems of linear measurement. We are basically down to two, with the metric system slowly but surely winning. Mostly the big things here and in other parts of Europe really are pretty much like they are in America. That is one of the reasons, I suppose, that small things claim such prominence. Why should you have to deposit a coin in a slot in its pushbar in order to get a shopping cart in a supermarket? Then, again, why not? You do get the coin back when you return the cart to home base, and I have yet to see a stray cart around the town.

The biggest thing that’s not like what we have in Castile is language—metaphorically true even if you should happen to be in Castile. If there’s an argument for reducing the number of measuring systems, surely there’s an argument for reducing the number of writing systems. But I don’t see any volunteers for linguistic self-immolation in Beijing, Moscow, Rome, or London. Living in France for even fifteen minutes will teach you the overwhelming difficulty of learning the French language, especially if you were operating under the delusion that you already sort of knew it. You grasp immediately the huge chasm between basic functional literacy and actual cultural participation. This week the sad evidence was to be found in incatenated ducks and the Tea Party.

There is a venerable weekly satirical magazine here called Le Canard Enchaîné. That “means” The Chained Duck. One of my French professors in college told me how great this thing was. Hence, I have been trying to read it, totally without success, since I first visited this country in the 1950s.

Simply to understand how a magazine can be called The Chained Duck requires a boring course in an obscure period of French political history. Then your troubles really begin. Usually I don’t get the cartoons. I cannot decipher the jokes. Frequently I am unable to identify even the political figures being satirized, or the events alluded to. The trouble is, I don’t really get the language. Though the Canard is definitely not like what we have in Castile, you might try to imagine The Onion written in, say, rapper patter.

Cultural incomprehension is a two-way street. I would point to the total mystification of the “quality” French press in trying to give an intelligible account of the role of the Tea Party in the current moment of American politics. Yes, I realize that the New York Times has no idea what the Tea Party is all about either, and I may not myself; but the French press is operating at an altogether different level of confusion and incomprehension.

Confusion begins with the fact that while the French word parti does denote a political organization, it does not denote a pleasurable social event. Even in Anglophone countries a tea party is hardly what it was in the first sentence of A Portrait of a Lady: “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” But even if you can work your way through that, the whole deal about the Tea Party (get it?, get it?) is that it is supposed to connect thematically with some shenanigans in Boston harbor on December 16, 1773. Try explaining that to some Frenchman at a party—er, soirée. I tried on Saturday night, and it’s not easy.

"Where's the good of a blog," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?”

What's in a name? Keeping up with the Joneses

When I heard that Terry Jones was planning a churchyard barbeque of Korans, my reaction was probably pretty standard for my socio-economic group. I was shocked, appalled, revolted, outraged—you name it. I didn’t telephone him the way Secretary Gates did. I didn’t broadcast a public display of my political frustration with him, as the President did. And I certainly didn’t rush to Florida with my video camera to abet him as half the so-called journalists in the country did.

I was nonetheless mightily concerned, because it just didn’t sound like the Terry Jones I know. We actually overlapped slightly at Oxford. He was at Teddy Hall, where he must have worked with my old friend Del Kolve. Anyway, I last saw Jones a few years ago at Kolve’s splendid retirement bash at UCLA. Of course Jones and I have had our disagreements before. I strenuously disagree with his interpretation of Chaucer’s knight, for instance. It’s always a mistake, in my view, to confuse ideal literary stereotypes with historical documents. But who could fail to applaud the genius of the inventor of “Monty Python”?

Sure, he’s had some embarrassing press in the past. But just at the moment I am overwhelmed with compassionate good feelings for anyone suffering the misfortune of being named Terry Jones. Nothing ought to be more personal than our personal names, but they are constantly being highjacked by others, and seldom with pleasing results. I learned this early, as no doubt anyone named John must do. To her dying day my grandmother told me that the biblical meaning of John is “God’s grace”. Why, I subsequently wondered, is Merriam-Webster silent about God’s grace but quite vocal about (1) a toilet, and (2) a prostitute’s customer? As I walk down the street beautiful women shout out my name, then register offense when I respond. Wrong John.

Last week I mentioned how difficult it is for historians to figure out who the right Simon de Montfort is. But the de Montfort clan is a piece of cake when compared with the East Anglian Paston family of the fifteenth century, famously documented in the Paston Letters. The Pastons really loved the name John. There seem usually to have been two or three living brothers of that name. We are all familiar with the little “disambiguation” tables at the head of Wikipedia articles. With the Pastons it was the dinner table itself that needed “disambiguation”. In the case of the Joneses, the necessary disambiguation would be between the medieval Jones and the medievalist Jones.

Naturally, the problem of too many people chasing too few names has only become more acute with the huge population increases of modernity. I have personally come to terms with being merely the eighth or tenth most notorious of contemporary John Flemings, especially since, at least as yet, no dangerously demented evangelist is among our number. (There is a Louisiana politician, however, and that’s getting a bit too close for comfort.)

Being the wrong John Fleming has not been without its dividends. I am not, for example, nor ever have been, John Fleming (1919-2001) the self-made art historian, expert on the Adam brothers, and author or co-author of numerous well-received books concerning the art of many times and places. Nor, alas, have I ever owned his Italian villa. This man’s books frequently swelled my bibliography as confidently recited by people introducing me as a lecturer, and I once came close to a nice job offer on his account.

But since my field was English literature, the John Fleming who haunted my career was John Fleming (1910-1987), the prominent New York bibliophile, connoisseur, and book dealer to the rich and famous. It will not surprise you that we never met. This guy was very classy and obviously loaded. Half of the lengthy New York Times obituary was devoted to his amazing apartment. He used to take out full-page ads in The New Yorker in which a single, central, dolphin of type—JOHN FLEMING—swam in a sea of white at approximately $500 per square inch. You just had to know who John Fleming was and what he did; and if you had to ask, you couldn’t really know. In 2001 Sotheby’s auctioned off a superb first folio of Shakespeare for a tidy $6,166,000. Mr. Fleming was gone by then, but he had been the last dealer to flog it, and for quite a pretty penny I have to guess.

Fear of litigation from the tomb forbids my recital of some of my tales concerning this namesake, but one of the publishable ones is probably safe. Soon after I joined the Princeton English department one of my senior colleagues, Charles Ryskamp, left to become the Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. After a distinguished tenure in that position he became the head of the Frick Collection. His was, in short, an absolutely amazing career in the world of private cultural institutions in New York, and he spent much of it in his dinner jacket, tirelessly pursuing new acquisitions and the funds to purchase and maintain them. Charles Ryskamp died quite recently, and Verlyn Klinkenborg, one of our former graduate students who is now a regular contributor to the Times editorial page, wrote a lovely memorial of him.

Charles Ryskamp (1928-2010), amid objets

The Morgan Library used to be very sniffy about allowing mere graduate students to work there. I know that for a fact, because in 1962 I studied a couple of their manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose for my doctoral dissertation. The reading room gorgons did all they could to make me feel like Jude the Obscure contemplating from afar the dreaming spires of Christminster. About 1970 a very bright undergraduate student in our department was writing a senior thesis on a subject concerning which the Morgan possessed unique materials. Urged on by naiveté and the rashness of youth, I decided to try to push the envelope with a direct approach to my old buddy and former colleague, Director Charles Ryskamp.

I phoned the Morgan, and the conversation(s) went something like this.

Secretary I: “How may I direct your call?”

JVF: “May I speak with Mr. Ryskamp, please?” Followed by a significant pause, as though I had in peremptory fashion demanded an audience with the Pope. Secretary I forwarded me to Secretary II.

Secretary II: “How may we help you.”

JVF: “Well, I’d like to speak with Mr. Ryskamp, please”

Secretary II: “Concerning…”

JVF: “Well, it’s a professional matter…[Silent pause] I am a former colleague at Princeton.”

Secretary II: “I am afraid Mr. Ryskamp is out of town…perhaps you’d like to leave a message with his assistant, Ms. X.”

JVF: “Yes, thank you.”

Another long pause, followed by

Assistant X: “I am afraid Mr. Ryskamp is not available. Perhaps I can help you?...”

JVF: “Thank you, but I probably need to speak with him personally…[long pause]…Perhaps you could just tell him that John Fleming is trying to reach him.”

Assistant X: “Uhhhh” [followed by a really long pause, followed by]

Charles Ryskamp: “Johhhhn!” I heard my name purred with a kind of breathless excitement midway between Bing Crosby telling me that I was as welcome as the flowers of May to dear old Donegal and Mae West inviting me to come up and see her sometime.

JVF: “Charles, you’ve got the wrong John Fleming, but as I have you on the line, I have a favor I’d like to ask you….”

I knew I was home free. By special easement my undergraduate friend was allowed to use precious Milton materials in the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Montfort-l’Aumary

Rather scuffed and dog-eared from a sleepless overnight flight, I arrived on Thursday last to find the sun shining clear from the bright blue sky of a crisp and comfortable pre-autumnal day. This happy omen was an accurate harbinger of my first week in Paris: joyous reunion with granddaughters, some full and productive library days, a dish of pears and cheese, and some medieval countryside.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Joan had spent the previous ten days or so at Pertuis, in Vaucluse, at a kind of chamber music camp. The players were all amateurs, but many of them at an impressively high standard; and they came from many parts of the world. Among them was a lovely gentleman in our general age group, a Parisian bio-medical computer type on the cusp of retirement, named Marc Le Bret. Marc and Joan became friends, and he invited us to spend a day at his country place in nearby Montfort-l’Amaury. Our rapidly filling calendar suggested “Now, or never,” so on Saturday morning we headed off for Montparnasse station. Montfort is on a suburban line only thirty-five minutes west of Paris, not far beyond Versailles. But the village, at least M. Le Bret’s part of it, seemed at least a hundred years away.

His cottage, which dates from the era of Henri IV and shows it, is a part of a large old family compound at the village edge, with several old houses and a jumble of walled gardens. It practically abuts the large Fôret de Rambouillet, the second largest green space in France. In a leafy orchard garden amid fig trees, grape vines, and rows of kitchen vegetables we shared a huge grilled beefsteak with Marc, Marc’s son and Chinese daughter-in-law, and two delightful Franco-Chinese grandchildren.

Montfort denotes a fortified hill, and there are charming castle ruins at its highest point. The medieval lords of the place, the de Montforts, were international big shots. You don’t even need to be a medievalist to have heard of Simon de Montfort. (On the other hand you do need to be one to know which Simon de Montfort, since for purposes of maximal confusion there were about a dozen of them.) The one I’ll call the really “Bad” Simon de Montfort led the Albigensian Crusade. His just reward was having a large stone dropped upon his head from the walls of Toulouse by its besieged defenders. In order to appreciate the really “Good” Simon de Montfort you have to know that these guys were also the Earls of Leicester in England. “Good” or “English” Simon won the Battle of Lewes in 1264, took Henry III prisoner, and forced him to honor certain provisions of the Magna Carta ostensibly agreed to but in fact mainly ignored by his father, King John. One of these was consulting with the barons in a meeting that was vaguely parliamentary, on account of which Good Simon is sometimes known as “the Father of Parliament”.

There is a huge parish church in Montfort-l’Amaury, far larger than any conceivable past population could have required. It dates mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The town’s more interesting medieval relic is the vast necropolis, a combined cemetery and charnel house, which still has its portal in flamboyant Gothic, along with parts of its fabulous wooden arcade roof. On the outside wall one can still (if barely) make out the inscription of an old French memento mori: “As you are now, I once was; as I am now, you will one day be.” This ditty must be imagined to be spoken by an accompanying skeleton mounted in a niche. The term charnel house (also known as an ossuary) does not deserve its grimmer connotations.

Charnel houses were common in places where constrained space or other physical limitations did not allow for an infinitely expandable burial ground. When bodies were completely decomposed, the remaining bones, which took up considerably less space, could be compactly and even reverently stored in a charnel house. That made room for a new grave. Though long since laicized, the cemetery at Montfort-l’Amaury still has a thirty-year time limit. One of the graves had a note posted upon it from the Municipality announcing that its time was up and that the responsable needed to get to the Town Hall d’urgence. I presume the current tenant is no longer the responsable.

a bug and a bogue

Since Marc and Joan are musicians, a requirement of our tour of the town was a visit to the house, now a quirky museum, of Maurice Ravel, who lived there from 1921 until his death in 1937. You never know when you are going to learn something fascinating. We walked toward Ravel’s house along an old wall under chestnut trees. On the ground were bits of the prickly chestnut hulls or burs. I learned that the French word for this cortex, which I did not know, is bogue. Computer English has pretty thoroughly invaded the French language, despite the best efforts of the purists, who insist the thing is not a computer but an ordinateur. But there is one witty counter-attack. In speaking of a computer glitch, imperfection, or malfunction, Anglophones will speak of a bug in the system. Frenchmen speak of a bogue—a kind of bur beneath the cybernetic saddle I suppose!



Ravel’s house is a funny, steepled, old slate-roofed thing strung out in railway car fashion along a high ridge with a fabulous view—which is no doubt why he called it “La Belvédère”. The local lady who oversees the museum at hours of her choosing--and, as we learned, of her arbitrary alteration--is a delightful eccentric. As you enter the house she starts playing Boléro very loud on a stereo. Fortunately, she then turns it off. (Ravel himself famously said of Boléro: “Yes, it’s my masterpiece. Too bad there’s no music in it.”) Only when you see Ravel’s bed do you realize he must have been a midget. There was a good deal of potentially fascinating musical stuff, but the gardienne seemed more interested in the huge collection of bibelots. Several of these—especially a variety of miniature animal automata in metal, wood, and porcelain—fascinated three-year-old Jade Le Bret.

We came at last to the composer’s small study, a third of which was taken up with his magnificent piano. The gardienne insisted that one of us play it. Joan alone among the visitors was even a church hall pianist, and though she stoutly resisted, the gardienne’s repeated importunities at last so bogued her she did for a moment sit at Maurice Ravel’s piano and play—a snatch of Beethoven. In 1928, just before the Crash, Ravel made a kind of rave tour of America, which included an all-Ravel program in Boston greeted with a standing ovation. I thought Joan had made at least partial repayment, while at the same time earning a most happy memory of a most happy day.


The day was, however, not yet quite over. On our way to the station our genial host dropped a last delicious morsel of invaluable French trivia. After Ravel’s death his brother brought a new housekeeper to La Belvédère to keep the piano polished and the tchotchkes dusted. Her name was Celeste Alberet, and she had previously performed this office in the domicile of a certain literary gentleman named Marcel Proust. She was, one presumes, the world’s greatest expert on fastidious French bachelors.

Peer Review

I am flying to Paris this evening, and certain preparatory exigencies oppress my spirit. Even an imaginary audience, however, can impose a quite real sense of obligation. Retirement has turned out to be rather more of an “experience” than I had expected—meaning that the proportion of the surprisingly unanticipated to the coolly anticipated has been quite high. It has also been quite pleasant; I spend a lot more time in the seventh arrondissement than I used to. I shall doubtless always be part of the “academic profession,” and doubtless live some version of the “academic life” until the day I drop. Still I find that I can now view the profession’s anxieties with detachment and what I might call affectionate amusement.

Rarely does an academic professional issue become general news, but a week ago today, on the front page of the New York Times, was an article entitled “Scholars Test Web Alternative to the Venerable Peer Review”. Most people know that scholarly publication is a requirement for promotion and retention on the faculties of research universities and even many liberal arts colleges. Most people are familiar with the trite but telling axiom “Publish or perish.” But how, exactly, does one publish, or for that matter, perish?

A certain number of aspirants are defeated by the preliminary step, necessary but insufficient, of actually writing a “paper”, essay, or book in the first place. These people suffer from Writer’s Block, or, putting it more positively, participate in the Jesus Syndrome. (He was a great teacher, but he didn’t publish.) But if you do write something, what happens next? The answer is that you submit it for consideration by a scholarly journal or a scholarly press. The editors of these enterprises then seek the advice of already established experts in the particular field of inquiry. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Thumbs sideways (“Rewrite this thing the way we want it, and we may reconsider”)? This process, called “peer review,” is often secret and mysterious, which is one of the factors that allow it not infrequently to showcase with impunity the sloth, inefficiency, and intellectual inconsistencies endemic in the academy.

Now a group of younger, more electronically hip scholars are making a fundamental challenge to the sacred institution of peer review. They suggest that scholars seek their own advice, and on the broadest basis possible, by submitting their work for the review of anyone with access to the Internet. Run it up the electronic flagpole, and see if anybody salutes it. They haven’t worked out all the details yet. The Times notes sagely that many professors “are wary of turning peer review into an American Idol-like competition.” But the article is well worth a read by the intellectually curious.

Well, I’ll try anything once, but as a medievalist I would suggest we need a more comprehensive approach. “Peer review” is but one of numerous aspects of modern academic life that reflect the medieval origins of the modern university. Not that peer review as we know it is itself medieval. Nailing your thesis to the cathedral door was much more like the proposed “novelty” of cyber-review. If people didn’t like it they simply burned the thesis or, on special occasions, the thesis and the author of the thesis. Abelard got tenure by gunning down the theses of his beloved old teacher, William of Champeaux. But peer review is very medieval in its suggestion that the academy is a guild.

Master and apprentices

A guild is self-regulating and, much more important, self-perpetuating. College professors like to think they are the freest thinkers in the land, and one of their most fervently espoused desiderata, threatening to become a terminal good, is “diversity”. That is why on American campuses faculty thinking about the most pressing political and social questions of our times ranges the whole gamut from A to A°. Established professors first decide what works by younger aspirants will be published, and then promote them for the achievement of having published them. Professors decide who will be interviewed and who will not, who will be hired and who will not, who will get tenure and who will not, who will be raided from other institutions and who will not.

That’s pretty much the way the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths operated in Tudor London. There are many attractions to the guild model, just as there is an undeniable charm in so much of the other medieval ornamentation of the American university: pseudo-Gothic architecture for instance, or the funny hats folks wear at graduation, the titles of dean and provost, of master and doctor. I love it all. I served as the Chief Marshal of my institution for nearly twenty years. But it is not obvious that the guild model is the best guarantor of innovation, or of the lithe response, or of supple interaction with the outside world. And when a “guild” faculty joins in tandem with a “corporate” administration—more and more the model in the American academy—the result is too often the worst of both worlds.

During the course of writing this, I had an aperçu of sorts: I realized that I myself have not submitted an article to a “refereed journal” in many years, probably fifteen or twenty. That isn’t because I stopped writing articles. It is because I was unable to honor even nearly all of the solicitations I received. Herein is revealed another bizarre feature of academic life. When a scholar becomes sufficiently antique, and so far over the hill that, looking back, he can barely make out its crest, then people are practically dying to put into print whatever senescent marginalia he can come up with. Of course there is one degradation lower yet: when he does it without even being asked. It’s called blogging.

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