Vaut-la-Visite

 Nicolas Fouquet (1615-1680), on a good day

 Most people spend much of their lives working, yet fewer things are more difficult than explaining to others in an accurate, detailed way what it is that one actually does.  I myself would claim that it has been an eventful week had I not learned over the years that a scholar’s sense of an “event” is not always shared by the world at large.  What I have been doing is this: I have spent most of my waking hours sitting in the new and improved library of the Fondation Gulbenkian making minor textual revisions and filling out incomplete footnotes in a manuscript in progress.  Such labor is utterly exhausting, yet deeply satisfying, though I would not begin to be able to explain how and why to people who have never experienced it themselves.

            The point of all this is that the arrival of the weekend was welcome, and it brought with it more conventional excitements, some more pleasant than others.  Half of my Saturday and all of Joan’s was spent trying to get her to her rustic string quartet week somewhere—and I still don’t know exactly where—in the vicinity of Culoz, near the Swiss border.  The railway strike that we had dodged on our trip to Poitiers finally caught up with her in the form of mind-numbing French bureaucracy, solemnly delivered misinformation, multiple cancelled trains, an insufficiency of cell phones and of people to answer them, and so forth.  But by the evening she got there, and she declares it a “paradise”.  All the participants have their own denominated quarters.  She is in the Bach suite, which is highly appropriate.

 Guillaume Bourgeois and friend, on an excellent day; photo, Alice Bourgeois

            Sunday was considerably better.  I went to an early eucharist to be sure that I would be on time to be picked up by my friend Guillaume Bourgeois, who had proposed a picnic.  One of the writers I dealt with in The Anti-Communist Manifestos was Richard Krebs (nom de plume, Jan Valtin).  Not many people know about Krebs, but one who does is Guillaume, who is an historian at the University of Poitiers and an expert on such topics as the early history of the French Communist Party and Cold War espionage.  A friendship developed, and from that a proposal for collaboration: we want to organize a small international “Jan Valtin Colloquium,” and the ostensible purpose of our picnic was to do some preliminary planning.  He brought his daughter Alice, a recent graduate who is now working in publishing.  She has been working on translations of Virginia Woolf.

not much, but he called it home

            We drove to Vaux-le-Vicomte, some distance to the southeast, the stateliest of stately homes.  (Eat your heart out, “Downton Abbey”!)  It was an absolutely beautiful day, and half the Isle de France was there, though the gardens are so enormous that you would never notice.  Vaux-le-Vicomte is said to be the finest of the seventeenth-century chateaux in France. Certainly I have never seen anything that would gainsay the claim.  It was built in the 1650s for Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances for Louis XIV, but if you’re thinking Timothy Geithner, you’re not even close.  In addition to being richer than God, Fouquet was a scholar, a musician, an amateur of the arts, and the patron of important writers.  La Fontaine was a close friend and frequent house guest.

            Fouquet engaged an art historical Dream Team to do the work.  The project began with the brute labor of flattening a few hills so as to create an absolutely flat surface necessary for the desired view of the long gardens.  In the actual building Louis Le Vau was the principal architect, and Charles le Brun supervised all the decorative artwork.  The landscape architect was André Le Nôtre,  who aimed to make the job his masterpiece.  The chateau survived the Revolution, but naturally practically nothing of the original fabulous gardens remains except the general plan.  Stately homes are expensive things, and Vaux (still in private hands) is a tourist business with some striking photographs on its website.

            Of course building a pile like Vaux was hardly a move designed to keep its owner below the radar of the envious and the ambitious.  In particular, it is not always a good idea to be richer, smarter, wittier, better-looking, more competent and above all better-housed than your monarch if your monarch should happen to be Louis XIV.  If the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is not sufficient evidence for you to form an opinion of the intelligence and morality of the Sun-King, you may want to consider also his treatment of Fouquet.  The king, who had long distrusted Fouquet’s own huge ambition, cooperated with other powerful conspirators in destroying him.  In a trial that was otherwise fair and above-board he was arraigned for gross malfeasance on trumped-up charges and convicted by coerced judges on the basis of perjured evidence.  He spent the last nineteen years of his life in prison, where he died in 1680.  Apparently fouquet was a local dialect word for “squirrel”, explaining the prominence of that notoriously unferocious animal on the family coat of arms.  You can actually buy a squirrel-pad for your computer in the Vaux gift shop!  Poor Fouquet—the unkindest cut of all.  His is a sad tale that leaves us pondering the vanity of human wishes, as well as wondering, of course, whether the odd phrase “trumped-up” is ever followed up by anything but “charges”.

 

Fouquet's other pad

Cousins' Reunion

The abbey of Saint-Savin sur Gartemps

            We arrived in Paris on the morning of Friday the thirteenth in the midst of a transportation strike, but were caught up immediately in such a swirl of activities as to leave no moment free to fret about any possible inauspiciousness of date.  Within forty-eight hours we had caught up with our oldest French friends, partied with a number of my international medievalist friends, and seen miscellaneous friends at the American Cathedral, our local parish home.  We are nicely re-established in “our” apartment on the Avenue Suffren—it is a mere technicality that it actually belongs to our daughter—and I have reconnoitered a few favorite haunts, including the large second-hand book market in Georges Brassens Park.  But then Paris was put on hold while we made a two-day trip to Poitiers to see Joan’s favorite cousin from childhood days, Gavin Brown.   The two had not seen each other in half a century.

            I was not actually too keen about going.  I have a lot of work to do here, and not a lot of time to do it.  Furthermore, long-lost relatives have sometimes been lost for a good reason.  I tend to associate myself with a light-hearted maxim of my father’s: Of all my wife’s relations, I like myself the best.  I was in for a delightful surprise.

            Cousin Gavin and his wife Valerie are ex-pat Brits who for the last twenty-five years have been living in a deep rural commune of Poitou called Brux, about twenty miles south of Poitiers.  There they have transformed a large, eccentric old farmhouse and its extensive grounds into a Bower of Bliss of luxuriant climbing roses, bird song, and wild strawberries.

            Valerie is a former television writer who has also published several novels.  After a lengthy hiatus during which she was occupied with other demands, and especially the protracted care of an ailing mother that involved much commuting between France and the north of England, she has now returned to her writing with renewed purpose.   Gavin obviously has had an interesting life, but during our short visit I learned little of the lengthy period between his excellent education (Saint Paul’s School and Cambridge) and his rather astonishing (to me) current situation.  He is a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and divides his time between maintaining his rustic acres, a serious job in itself, and marrying and burying people.  The Catholic clerical shortage evident even in America is acute here in France.

            He is also tasked, in his own humorous phrase, with “the mission to the English”.  I could get no agreed-upon number for the British expatriates living in various parts of the countryside of central and southern France, but it is very large.  Mostly these are retired people, many of whom, like the Browns themselves, began with a summer retreat that became a year-round abode.  There are many villages and hamlets in the Poitou that are now majority Anglophone!  The phenomenon has been called, not always with entire good humor, a “second Hundred Years’ War,” referring of course to the devastating English invasions of the fourteenth century.

            Anyone who has travelled much in rural France must be at least vaguely aware of the situation, but our trip to Poitiers gave me an entirely new perspective on it.  It is not what French people have in mind when they speak of the “immigration problem”.  One could plausibly argue, indeed, that the Brits are saving the French countryside.  The exodus from the agrarian to the (sub)urban has been particularly dramatic in France.  Not too surprisingly, perhaps, most young French couples prefer to live in a new, nicely stuccoed cinderblock “villa” with plumb surfaces and square corners than in picturesque converted cow barns with plumbing from the age of Louis XV.  Mostly they don’t like to have to drive fifteen miles to a grocery store.  Mostly they like to live somewhere with plausible possibilities of gainful employment.

 

Animal House: Noah's Ark at Saint-Sevin

            We were with the Browns for scarcely twenty-four hours, travelling around the edges of a railway strike.  Even so, we had a few hours of quality medievalism.  Gavin had an obligation to meet with an English couple who were planning to be married in the fabulous abbey church of Saint-Savin, and we were able to spend an hour examining the building and its wall paintings, which are among the oldest and best preserved in all of France, where the unpleasantness of the Wars of Religion and the Revolution tended to wreak havoc with such art.  The narrative sequence of the ceiling (roughly the history of Salvation from the Creation to the Exodus and the march toward Canaan) is absolutely extraordinary.

 Notre-Dame la Grande, Poitiers

            We then had an hour or two in Poitiers before our Paris train.  This allowed us time for a rather breathless progress through the city, which preserves a good deal of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century domestic architecture in addition to the more famous medieval churches that were our main goal: the great church of Saint Hilary (the town’s most famous local boy made good), the Cathedral, and Notre Dame la Grande, a Romanesque jewel-box.  We even got seats on the train, despite the crowding caused by the strike. 

Here's Hazel

         

           The simple and pleasant purpose of this brief post is to introduce my readers to the future in the most attractive form of Hazel Elizabeth Fleming, my newest granddaughter.  Yesterday we flew to Montreal, where Hazel lives with her mother and father and brother.  The journey seemed to have an allegorical dimension, moving from an almost fetid over-ripeness to a revivifying freshness.  Technically, we are still in spring, but it was one of those hot and saturated mornings that suggest the New Jersey state motto (The Garden State) ought, to accord with federal “Truth in Advertising” laws, be known as the Jungle State.   Here in Canada we found a perfect early summer day, its air soft but also fresh and dry, with every green leaf bright and articulate.  In school I was made to memorize some lines of Lowell—a poet from whom I probably could quote no others—and they now came to mind. “And what is so rare as a day in June?   Then if ever come perfect days…”  That was the feeling as, by mid-afternoon, we were all sitting on the stoop of our son’s house chatting and watching the neighborhood children play, as Hazel snoozed in her little carry-crib.

            Snoozing is young Hazel’s principal occupation at the moment.  Eating is a fairly distant second.  Of fussing and crying there is very little.  Augustine took the view that the doctrine of Original Sin was empirically demonstrable in the naked self-centeredness of infants.  If only he had had the chance to meet Hazel Fleming, the whole history of the Pelagian controversy might have been different.  Surely she merits the adoring attention, stopping only short of babyolatry, of all those surrounding her?  Or nearly all.  Her brother John Henry (æt 2) reserves the right to evidence occasional ambiguity toward the new and minute person whose arrival has inevitably caused such a major revision of his Weltanschaung.  But on the whole his chivalric instincts prevail, and he often joins his elders in the prevailing reverential fascination.

            Here she is, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, yet distanced from me by a vast, intriguing alterity.  Hazel is 195 pounds lighter that I, and four and a half feet shorter.  She is seventy-eight years and three days younger.  I lay my hand next to hers to find hers the size of two joints of my little finger.  Was my crinkled old skin, tanned and spotted with purple blotches, ever so smooth, rosy, creamy as hers?  I myself can barely credit the world into which I was born.  How astonishing would it be to her?  How more astonishing yet will be the world in which she will find herself when she is my age?  All newborns are, or should be, children of promise.  Hazel’s promise practically glows from her crib.  She sets out in life endowed with the priceless capital of a splendid mother and a spendid father.  May this beautiful child, who brings joy to all who look upon her, who has already improved our needy world simply by coming into it, thrive, growing in grace day by day.

           

           

Just þe þing

Home of Iceland's law-makers

            I am in the midst of preparations for departure for France, with a quick detour to Montreal to meet the newest Fleming, Hazel Elizabeth, born on May 23rd.  For the latter weeks of June I shall be in Paris, all too briefly, where I shall mostly be chained to a library desk while my spouse is at a violin boot camp for string-quarteters in the Rhône-Alpes.  Still, it’s not exactly hardship duty, even if I must gird my linguistic loins.

            In this blog I occasionally refer to myself in the third person, in a light-hearted and self-deprecating way, as your bloguiste.  And about one out of three times that I do so I get an email from France, seldom light-hearted in tone, telling me that bloguiste is not an actual French word.  Though I am prone to blunders and hilarious mistakes in French, I actually knew all along that bloguiste is not an actual French word.  But I try to take a view to language analogous to Marx’s view of the world.  “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” he writes; “the point is to change it.”

            In the early years of my professorial career I used to teach a course in Old English.  I don’t need to remind this audience that Old English is not the language of Chaucer—that’s Middle English, with a lexicon that is already bloated with Frenchisms—but a family of early Germanic dialects that would require nearly as much work for Chaucer to comprehend as it requires of us.  Old English is the language of Beowulf.  To make significant progress in Old English in one semester is an ambitious goal, and a teacher does well to sugar-coat the pill.

            Hundreds of beautiful and useful Old English words have been lost to us.  I wrote a post about this some years ago.  In my Old English course we addressed this situation in the following way.  At the beginning of each semester we would select an attractive obsolete English word.  Members of the class were then asked to start using this word in their ordinary conversations. They could define it if people asked, but were not supposed to say anything about the Old English class.  The idea of the experiment was to see if a small number of trend-setters could make an impact on the campus vocabulary.  We had pretty good success with gnorn (sadness, sorrow), hwosta ( a cough) and sele-dream (gleeful party noises).  We managed to infiltrate these words into the campus vocabulary for a time—so if you want bloguiste or any other word to become “real,” just start using it.  “That isn’t in the dictionary” is a pauper’s argument.  The dictionary is not the language; it is a treatise upon the language.

            We really hit pay dirt with the risqué rarity wifcuþu, which is roughly the equivalent of the current campus slang “hook up” described from the male perspective, and of course much classier.  In the link given above I go into the tragic-comic context of its appearance in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  Here I have other things on my plate.  The old meaning of wif was simply “woman”, as in the Wife of Bath, meaning a female resident of that watering hole.  The most common occupation of women being marital, it came to mean “married woman”.  Mann still has an analogous meaning in German and in the archaic English of the Prayer Book’s marriage service: “I now pronounce you man and wife.”   The verb cuþan meant “to know” or “be familiar with”.  Xenophobia explains the still current meaning of uncouth, as what is unknown or unfamiliar may seem uncomfortable to the unsophisticated.  It is unfair that only the negative form is in widespread use, since couth itself would be a most useful term.

The Old English alphabet

            The odd-looking letter in cuþan, something like a b superimposed upon a p, was called thorn.  It was one of two lost Old English letters with the value of modern th.  By Chaucer’s time scribes were often using þ and th interchangeably, but in highly conservative forms of writing, such as some legal documents and pub signs, the graphic form outlived people’s comprehension of it.  It looked a little bit like a y—so folks started pronouncing it as one!  That is where all the cutesy “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” stuff that one finds in colonial towns on our eastern seaboard comes from.  The next time you see one of these yee-oldies,  read þe and pronounce it, unstressed, the.

From the Wycliffe Bible (late 14thc) : In the bigynnyng was/the word & the word...

old and not so old yee-oldies

            Perhaps if we tried hard enough we could reclaim the thorn as well.  I am sure the Icelanders, who have thorns galore, would be happy to let us have a few fonts on credit.  An Icelandic legislative council is a þing and the national Parliament the Alþing or “all-Thing.”  They have been doing their þing since the tenth century, more than two centuries before the British Magna Carta.

            Westminster may be "the mother of Parliaments," but "parliament" itself is manifestly a French word.  And "Congress" (Latin, obviously) is not much better.  Surely Anglo-Saxon sensibilities demand something a little more yee-oldy and Englishy?  Perhaps Milton can show the way.   The All Devils’ Parliament in Paradise Lost is called Pandemonium. We might render that in early English as the helle-þing and relocate it from the Styx to the banks of the Potomac.

Trigger Happy Academics

A month ago I had never heard the phrase “trigger warning”, but now that I am up to speed, I am ready to issue one myself.  I must alert my readers that it is conceivable that this post could excite stupidity in stupid people.  So if you are stupid, you may wish to quit reading now.

            I doubt that any reader is in the dark as to my allusion, but just in case…One of the moment’s most publicized campus issues—which is rather different from saying most important--is the proposal that professors should preface their course syllabi, or perhaps even their individual lectures, with warnings to students that they may find parts of the course or lecture so disturbing, offensive, or even traumatic, that they may choose to avert their psychic eyes, so to speak.  Sexual violence is repeatedly mentioned as being particularly triggerable, but in general so are, potentially, all episodes of “sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism…and other forms of oppression”.  Oberlin College, which has been something of a barometer of advanced academic sensitivity in recent years, has been teased, perhaps unfairly, for floating a proposed trigger warning policy now hastily recalled for further study.

            It seems a vapid truism that education is likely to be challenging; so maybe a single alert to that effect, carved in marble at the college gate, might be sufficient?  Certainly any literature professor knows that the stuff they read in college can really be disturbing—such stuff, for instance, as the dismemberment of Grendel, the blinding of Gloucester, the harpooning of Moby Dick, or Bill Sykes’s murder of Nancy.  Only a few writers are sensitive enough to give their readers a heads-up.  Chaucer, in introducing the “Miller’s Tale,” a narrative positively reeking of sexual violence, sexism, ageism, geezerism, undergraduatism, Biblicism, dandyism, and flatulentism, gives a trigger warning, and even recommends that the sensitive reader should “turn over the leaf and choose another tale,” one free of oppression and positively oozing with “morality and holiness”.  Of course, the only result, so far as I can tell, is that the Miller’s Tale is the best known part of Chaucer’s oeuvre. 

            God knows, I could have used a few trigger warnings myself with regard to my undergraduate courses, especially as regards ableism.  My college career might have been measurably less stressful if only my math professor, on the opening day of the calculus course, had said quite openly: “Fleming, I have to give you fair warning.  I don’t think you are going to be able to do very well in this course.”

 

No trigger warning: May 4, 1970

            Serious matters do call for serious discussion, though they don’t always get it in the academy.  On May 4, 1970, incompetent and undisciplined soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot to death a number of students on the campus of Kent State University.  Protest demonstrations sprang up at colleges and universities throughout the country.  At Princeton there was an emergency faculty meeting so well attended that it had to be relocated from the hallowed Faculty Room of Nassau Hall to one of the largest lecture rooms on campus.   The President and Clerk sat on a spare, raised stage that looked like a set for Waiting for Godot, with the faculty before them in an amphitheatre of rows of fixed chairs in graduated ascent.

            There was only one practical action that our faculty could take, and that hardly a potent one--to pass a resolution about the Kent State shootings.  Almost immediately, however, the greatest minds in Mercer County seized upon an adventitious, peripheral issue and shook it like a ferret.  The undergraduate managers of the campus radio station, WPRB, were at the gates, petitioning to be admitted in order to broadcast the faculty meeting live.  The request was unprecedented, but so also, it seemed to many, were the circumstances that had triggered, so to say, the demand.  Should the faculty’s deliberations, by long tradition held in camera, now be broadcast to the world?

            The question was subjected to a searching debate of Talmudic complexity and Jesuitical subtlety.  There was thrust.  There was parry.  All points of view were carefully considered, especially those having nothing to do with faculty meetings or radio broadcasts.  There were more on the one hands, and on the other hands than one might find in a large colloquy of Hindu deities.  I need hardly add that intellectual scrupulosity is seldom briefly displayed.  The discussion went on, and on, and on.

            At some point the late, great Professor Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the father of the “paradigm shift,” sought and gained the recognition of the chair.  I shall remember what he said to the grave.  Indeed, I believe I can give you his exact words.  “Mr. President,” he said, “I submit that if the next hour of this discussion is as stupid as the first hour, exposing the deliberations of the Princeton faculty to any wider audience whatsoever could inflict irreparable damage on the institution.”  It was actually an hour and twenty-seven minutes, but let that pass.  The faculty voted not to go live.

 Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

A Whiff of California

 Palm Drive, from the entrance of the Stanford University campus

           We just returned from Palo Alto where I participated in an academic conference that had been to some degree inspired by my recent book, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  This fact would have been rewarding enough even had the papers not been, as they in fact were, so rich in their variety and so impressive in their quality.  I really ought to report to you on some of them.  Did Comenius compromise his Enlightenment credentials with his embarrassing interest in popular prophecies?  Did Pope Benedict XIV succeed in bringing “enlightened” standards of anatomical and physiological science to the Church’s medieval process of canonization?  But instead I am choosing another topic, the vagaries of unbidden memory and the remarkable role played in the mechanism of memory by the olfactory sense.

            I had a wonderfully happy childhood on the whole, considering.  For only a period of about three years—roughly late-1945 to early-1948—was I sometimes consciously aware of being unhappy, even if fearful of admitting it.  My father, returned from long absence in the war, took us all to California, where Okies and Arkies had been going since time immemorial for all I knew, in search of an obscure destiny.  He was animated by the fantasy that the unique camaraderie and competence of men fighting for their lives in the malarial jungles of the Solomon Islands could be transferred to a civil partnership of house-builders in the East Bay.

            We landed in a grim place called Richmond.  At first we were in a housing project shoddily built for shipyard workers late in the war.  Later we moved to a modest rented house in what passed for the nicer side of town.  The school was an ordeal, crowded, full of mean, dumb kids and bullies and what are usually called “racial tensions”.   The enterprise of my Dad and his friends began foundering immediately on the shoals of selfishness, indiscipline, and alcohol.  I was ten years old, and I could figure it out.  Why couldn’t they?  I don’t think that those popular historians who talk so blithely of the “Greatest Generation” have taken adequate account of the war’s terrible trauma as evidenced among its veterans.

            My elder brother and I sought spaces of our own.  He was six years older than I, which meant his susceptibility to dangerous distractions was much greater than mine.  What I did mainly was take very long walks, sometimes with Pete but more often alone or with a like-minded school friend.   In those days the rising steeps of Contra Costa County from El Cerrito to the Berkeley Hills, today a Gold Coast of five or six miles of million-dollar houses, were almost entirely open country.  In spring the profusions of eschscholzia (California poppies) was magnificent, but the poison oak was everywhere.  The views could be great.  I actually saw part of the action in the so-called “Battle of Alcatraz”, a spectacular failed prison-break attempt of May, 1946, from a perch high above El Cerrito.

            Toward the Berkeley side of this expanse were two or three small plantations of eucalyptus trees with their distinctively semi-medical aroma and their weirdly peeling bark.  I loved one of these little groves in particular.  I would lie in the sweet grass on my back in the half-shade looking up through the trees to the blues and whites of the sky high above.  I had not yet read Wordsworth, but I was prepared, when I did meet him, for the meaning of “the bliss of solitude.”

A eucalyptus grove

            The Enlightenment conference began with a session late Friday afternoon, and we had most of the earlier part of the day to knock about.  Our only definite destination was the University art museum (vaut la visite, incidentally).  We had assumed it would open at ten, but arriving there at ten forty-five discovered that we were still a quarter of an hour early.  The bright, cloudless day had begun almost cool, but by now, with the sun already high in the sky, it was almost hot.  Some other early arrivers sat waiting in the full sun, but we looked around for some shade.

            One of the striking features of Stanford’s magnificent campus is the lavish open space at its entrance.  From its architecturally imposing front gates where University Avenue and the town of Palo Alto begin, there is a straight broad avenue, aptly named Palm Drive, that in the other direction runs for the better part of a mile down to the main old quadrangle and its imposing neo-byzantine church.  On either side of Palm Drive are many acres of open ground, tended with that exquisite care that alone can leave the impression of being untended, of distinctive northern California semi-desert.  Looking out into this artful wilderness from the museum steps we could see, perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards away, a couple of shaded rustic benches.  Thither we repaired.

            It is fortunately not necessary to have read every word of Proust to know what a Proustian experience is: a sharp, unanticipated attack of memory triggered by sensory experience.  In this instance it was the aroma of the eucalyptus combined with the faint brittle rattle of the breeze blowing through pin oak leaves, the synaesthesia of a peculiar geography, that instantly transported me back more than six decades to a world that no longer exists and to thoughts that I would have imagined had been so deeply buried as to be beyond mental excavation.

Let Us Commence...et caetera

 I just work here...

            On campuses all over the country it is Commencement season.  Even at Princeton, where the graduation comes late, there are clear signs that it’s arriving soon.  The little pointed stick fences that define the precincts for the class reunions, stored in some unknown warehouse for eleven and a half months of the year, have been up for a week or more.  And if it is Commencement time it naturally is Commencement speaker debacle time.  I speak of the world at large.  On this campus there is, by laudable ancient custom, no Commencement speaker.  Instead, the President makes brief remarks.

            The Commencement speaker debacle takes a couple of forms, with the first and most obvious being inherent in the dubious genre of the academic oration.  There are simply a lot of really bad Commencement addresses, and if one thinks about it for a moment it is probably surprising that there are not more.   The reasons for this situation will be found in the want of consensus concerning what a commencement address should be.  Many institutions, hoping of course to honor their graduates but hoping even more to achieve something of a public relations coup seek out popular celebrities, and in our country such celebrity is but rarely combined with intellectual distinction or oratorical ability. 

            I well remember the Commencement speech at my own graduation from Sewanee in 1958—meaning that I remember that I couldn’t remember one thing the guy had said the next day.  The guy in this instance—and I think I do remember this part—was the CEO of the United States Steel Corporation.  We were all puzzled why this captain of industry should be addressing the graduates of our little liberal arts college.  In those days I was so innocent about the realities of governance and finance in American higher education that I did not realize that struggling colleges need rich people and seek them out in oblique ways and try to shake them down with such flattery as they command.

            The actual close connections between the ivory tower and the workaday world are highlighted by a second kind of Commencement Address debacle, that of the Commencement speech that never gets delivered on account the disinvitation or coerced withdrawal of the featured speaker.  In general it may be said that the undelivered Commencement address gets a good deal more public notice than it ever would if delivered.  “Heard melodies are sweet,” writes Keats, “but those unheard are sweeter. 

            Since the Campus Culture Wars began in earnest in the late sixties there have been quite a few such episodes, and this spring we have already had a bumper crop.   The three most prominent instances that have come to my attention so far involve some serious institutions of higher learning: Brandeis, Rutgers, and Smith.  All three of the distinguished dissees have been women: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (usually categorized as a “feminist activist” but occasionally as a “celebrity atheist”), Condoleezza Rice (one-time Provost of Stanford University and a former Secretary of State) and Christine Lagarde (the current head of the International Monetary Fund). 

            On what basis the powers that be at Brandeis decided to offer Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree along with her speaker’s gig would be difficult to say.  She has been quite voluble and on the whole rather negative concerning the religion in which she was raised and genitally mutilated; but the Brandeis board had apparently not heard about that part.  When they did, they concluded that she did not share Brandeis “core values” and therefore did not merit a Brandeis degree.  One cannot discern whether President Frederick Lawrence of Brandeis is at all shamefaced about this, since his face is thickly covered with egg down to about the level of the knee cap. 

            Had the Rutgers power structure consulted me early on about their proposed invitation to Condaleezza Rice I might have been able to warn them.  Shortly before I retired from Princeton our Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs was celebrating its dequascentennial.  (You don’t get a chance to use that word every day, so grab the chance when it comes!).  The dean issued an invitation to Dr. Rice to give a talk at the event.  From my obscure point of view an invitation from a school of public and international affairs to a professor of public affairs who happened also to be a Secretary of State seemed at the very least plausible, but it was bitterly opposed by a faculty petition.  The dean, I am proud to say, ignored this collegial gnashing of teeth.

            My ignorance of the dismal science, so fatal to my understanding of the modern world generally, prevents me from knowing why Smith College sisterhood proved so weak as to weasel out of an invitation to Christine Lagarde, the French antitrust lawyer who is now head of the International Monetary Fund.  I know little about her except that she replaced Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which has to be a good thing, and that her English-speaking voice is very appealing, especially when compared with that of Janet Yellen, the American native-speaker who is another eminent female economist of the moment.  True, I have difficulty imagining the degree of undergraduate excitement spurred by this invitation in the first place.  “Guess who our Commencement speaker is going to be!  The head of the IMF!”  But Smith has ordered things in a way sufficiently disgraceful to allow the Huffington Post to huff and the Wall Street Journal to wail.