Top Colleges

 

 

Fairly recently the U.S. News and World Report published its annual rankings of American colleges and universities.  Within days the New York Times (Sept. 19, 2022, “U.S. News College Rankings Live On, Despite Criticisms”) published its annual critique of that annual report.  I have not seen a copy of the U.S. News and World Report in many years, if indeed it is still even published as an old-fashioned news magazine, a genre long since rendered anachronistic by cyberism.  But like most college professors, and certainly all college administrators, I am quite aware that, in the words of the Times article, the magazine’s rankings “continue to be a dominant reference guide for families evaluating colleges…”

 

Somewhat to your blogger’s embarrassment, his own institution, Princeton, currently holds the USNWR Numero Uno rating.  I do take pride in the university from which I hold advanced degrees and where I taught for many decadees.  But is Princeton really the best college in America?  Sure.  It’s right there in so many words in our barely musical alma mater: “It’s the best old place of all.”  Strangely you can find very similar phrases in other college songs, maybe most of them.  But uneasy is the head that wears the crown.  This year’s listings fluttered the dovecotes by demoting Columbia University from Number Two to Number Seventeen.  If the claim to be able to identify the best college in America is merely fantastic, the claim to identify the seventeenth-best is wholly preposterous.

 

There are of course variations in quality among institutions of higher learning, and hence sensible and defensible distinctions to be made among them.  But the USNWR ranked list is a gimmick, not a reliable data sheet.  The vast majority of college administrators surely realize that.  Most college presidents will even say that.  But then the whole lot of them sweat blood for the week before the rankings appear.  That is because college trustees, many, many parents, some unsophisticated high-school counsellors, affluent applicants on foreign strands, and indeed the general public are in its thrall.  I suppose these same people must spend a certain amount of time on the Internet engaging meaningless lists of “Ten Hollywood Starlets Who Used to Own Poodles,” or “The Twelve Greatest Rutabaga Dishes of All Time.”  My remarks imply no denial of reasonably objective standards or the qualitative comparisons among institutions.  But we might be a little clearer about what we think we are comparing.

 

What is the best fish in the sea?  It’s got to be the Norwegian salmon, right?  And what’s the best tree in the forest?  That would be the white oak, of course.  There’s got to be general agreement about that, but now comes the hard part.   Rank in order of superiority, the Norwegian salmon, the white oak, and Calacatta marble.

 

In order to offer a convincing list of top colleges, it is necessary to agree upon some generally applicable criteria.  There are fewer of these than one might think.  It is probable that American higher education remains the envy of the world.  If so, that high regard reflects the appreciation of its extraordinary diversity—a concept sometimes overhyped when talking about student body composition but undervalued in terms of the shape of higher education as a whole.  The American model is anything but unitary, featuring excellent institutions of many different kinds.

 

Many years ago I served on a commission engaged by the State of Florida to assess and report on the general state of higher education there.  It was among the more illuminating assignments I ever had.  A week-long glimpse is not a deep study, but you can learn a lot.  Florida is a highly populous state with lots of money inequably distributed among its population, little of which is seriously taxed for educational purposes.  Nonetheless it has a highly enrolled range of state colleges and universities, and several reputable smaller liberal arts colleges.  Their premier institution, the University of Florida at Gainesville, now twenty-ninth on the USNWR “national” list, has several strong departments.  That it is not in the league with some of the great midwestern schools has to do with sectional differences between north and south in the mid-nineteenth century.  The first sitting of the Michigan State Assembly (1837) established a university.  At the first sitting of the Arkansas legislature (1836) the Speaker stepped down from the podium to attack an opponent with a Bowie knife.  Autres pays, autres moeurs.   There is nothing in the Sunshine State approaching a great private institution like Stanford, Duke, or those of the Ivies.  Yet Florida has one of the most extraordinary educational institutions in the country: the Dade (Miami) Community College.  This huge enterprise enrolls more than a hundred thousand students, many of them from modest backgrounds--immigrants, the children of immigrants, and other aspirational and practically focused learners, young and not so young.  It is not MIT, Cornell, or Reed; but it has clarity concerning its own crucial institutional mission.  You can study practically anything at DCC, but one overarching strong component  is a focus on the skills of literacy and mathematics frequently short-changed by our more mediocre high schools.  I had the sense of an extraordinary institution that knew what it was trying to do and by and large does it.  I would have to call it a “great” institution even if nobody from Choate has ever applied to it.

 

There is no longer a broad humanistic agreement that the purpose of higher education is to broaden a student’s intellectual, cultural, and ethical horizons to enhance personal character and enable effective social engagement and service.  The purpose is to be able to get a good job.  There is nothing contemptible about this realization.  Our economic world has been in rapid change for at least a generation.  Our high schools produce fewer and fewer young people prepared to enter careers offering entry to even that modest middle-class life that was once the reasonable aspiration of all socially stable, family-centered people willing to work diligently and productively.  But the educational paths to such goals are now perhaps more varied than ever in the past.  Among professionals in higher education, “diversity” is now spoken of as a terminal good.  Without interrogating that assumption, I would hope it could be extended to embrace the remarkable and remarkably positive diversity of our American institutions of higher education.  That diversity does invite qualitative evaluation, but not from a single list of supposed “top colleges”.  Before you can responsibly say that an institution is more or less “good,” you need to know what it thinks its mission is, whether that mission has genuine value for individuals and society, and how well and faithfully it seems to be fulfilling it.  Very fortunately we still have a sizable number of very different “top colleges.”

 

Richard Francis Burton

   

Sir Richard Francis Burton on a good day

 

Not all Renaissance men lived in the Renaissance.  In fact I am beginning to believe that compared with nineteenth-century London, fifteenth-century Florence looks pretty monochrome.  The common belief seems to be that most eminent Victorians, including the four treated in Lytton Strachey’s classic book of that title, were uptight conformists.  It’s hard to know where that idea came from—not from Strachey, certainly.   All four were Renaissance men, including the one who was a woman, Florence Nightingale.  (“Renaissance man” is a state of mind, not a gender identity.)  For the past few weeks I have been intermittently caught up with a sensational example of the Victorian Renaissance man: Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890).*

 

I was vaguely aware of this man’s name at least—probably through its association with an early translation of the tales of the Arabian Nights—but my real introduction to his genius grew out of an association with a former student.  I suspect that the principal pleasures of most teachers’ lives derive from informal experiences, and outside the classroom.  

 

Though not exactly an established custom, it is not uncommon for graduate students, upon completing their dissertations, to present their professors with a parting gift.  This often may be simply a bound copy of the dissertation--not that there is anything simple about writing a dissertation--but sometimes it is some other kind of gift.  About fifteen years ago, not long before my retirement, I received from a departing graduate student a gift that I have particularly treasured.  In my own researches I was at that time beginning serious work on the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões and even beginning to contemplate writing a book about him.  This poet is best known for his epic poem Os Lusiadas, first published in 1572, which deals with the voyages of Vasco da Gama between Portugal and India in 1497-99. The poem’s name derives from the old Latin word for Portugal.  My student—whom I shall not name only because I have lost track of him and been unable to secure his permission to publicize his gift—presented me with the two-volume edition of Richard Burton’s Camoens: His Life and His Lusiads: A Commentary, (2 vols, London: Quaritch, 1881).  This is a work of enormous if often eccentric erudition written by a man who must have known, as well as any other mariner of his day, the maritime route that Vasco da Gama had taken four hundred years earlier, including the populations of East Africa and Goa and the Malabar Coast of India.  Working on Camões was the man’s hobby for twenty years; yet so broad and varied were his interests and accomplishments, his Portuguese studies are barely mentioned.

 

Burton, though a considerable amateur scholar, had little regard for institutional academia.  He was an Oxford drop-out, with Oxford doing the dropping.  But he was an amazing linguist, having about thirty tongues on his palette, and a voracious reader.  He was not a scholar, but an adventurer with scholarly interests.  His principal enthusiasms were sex, travel, exploration, military derring-do, sex, cartography, comparative religions, sex, horsemanship, espionage, and poetry.  His essays in Portuguese philology were merely a twenty-year hobby.  His checkered career as a British army office (he was Captain Burton, eventually Captain Sir Richard) offered him opportunities for frankly self-indulgent adventure.  He was married to a super-wife, Isabel Arundell (Lady Isabel), who not only put up with and enabled him, but edited and defended his work, and wrote his biography.   She has her own  biographies, and merits a blog essay of her own.

 

Burton’s most famous exploit came early (1853): his successful pilgrimage to Mecca in the disguise of an Afghan Muslim.  This potentially fatal deception was at the very least culturally insensitive, but is an extraordinary testimony to his courage and his linguistic and thespian skills.  Perhaps, dangerously, it may have encouraged him to think he could get by with anything.

 

I have insufficient room to do justice to Burton’s other travels.  He did major exploratory work in both East and West Africa.  He is credited with being the first white man to lay his eyes on Lake Tanganyika—“first white man” being an important category for the Imperial Book of World Records.  Often he was ill, injured, or wounded, several times on the verge of death, especially in a particularly disastrous episode at Berbera on the Somalian coast.  The Crimean War (1855-56) gave him the false hope of much desired military glory.  The highly effective officers of the Indian Army in which he served seemed like a ragtag Wild Bunch to the spit-and-polished bluebloods so incompetently led by the Crimean Supreme Commander, Lord Ragland, infamous for ordering the charge of the Light Brigade.  Burton barely got a look in from him.

 

and a bad day

 

I mentioned sex as among Burton’s interests only three times, as I feel constrained by self-imposed word limits for my essays.  One of his fantasies had to do with nuns.  This one had a long literary run beginning at least as early as Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century and Boccaccio in the fourteenth, but it really took off in 1669 with the anonymous publication(in French) by the Comte de Guilleragues of his steaming if pretended Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Contemporary readers pretended they thought the letters were genuine, and until fairly recently too many modern scholars really thought they were.  If I ever get sufficiently desperate, I could perhaps write an essay on this subject too.  I have to believe Burton’s interest was entirely academic, as he was bolstered by so many moralities.  He was married to a serious Roman Catholic, and he himself was a devout Muslim-Buddhist-Confucian-Catholic-atheist Anglican.  In his anthropological ventures, he often sought to measure the penises of the males of the tribes he investigated.  One of those times one might wish to be a fly on the wall of the hut.  He translated the Kama Sutra and several other Oriental sex guides that offered his contemporaries in England wonderful opportunities to be shocked, titillated,  and officially disapproving of the translator/scholar.  He had a strange episode of recuperation in America, on the eve of our Civil War, checking out the Mormons on the Great Salt Lake.  Several of his greater adventures were subsequent to his late marriage in 1861 at age forty.  “The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late,” says Mencken. The formidable Isabel was often with him in his important years in Brazil (1864-60) and later in Damascus, India, in his English homecoming, and in Trieste.

 

Burton spent his final years trying to finish several writing projects and to organize many earlier ones, though much would be left to his feisty widow.   Altogether he published more than thirty books, several of them multi-volume like the Arabian Nights, several doorstoppers.  The biographer, Farwell is a marvelous writer himself.  On October 20, 1890, Burton was seriously ill in his lodgings in Trieste.  “And there came to him then the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies.”

and a really bad day

*My principal source is Byron Farwell: Burton, A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Longmans, Green, 1963).  I recommend the Penguin edition,  in many printings and cheap on the second-hand market.

 

Lake Tanganyika

 

 

 

Elizabeth II Regina, died 8 September 2022.  May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

 

 

 

Death of a Great Lady

 

            We landed at Newark Liberty Airport on Monday, after a nine-hour  flight from Nice, precisely at the advertised time of 4.30pm, there to be picked up by our friend and former USPS letter-carrier, Mike Downes.  When a few months ago he retired from the postal service and quit delivering mail, it left him more time for his avocation of operating a boutique limousine service delivering people, mainly to and from airports.

 

            There is always comfort in returning to home base, though our minds remain full of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and tastes of Provence.  Some famous historian or another famously said that the most important event in eighteenth-century England happened in France.  The reference, of course, was to the French Revolution.  So I suppose it is not extraordinary that the most important event of our French vacation happened in England: the death of the Queen on September 8, four days before our return.  Of course, the death of a personage of such importance would have claimed international attention under any circumstances.  The political and cultural significance of the Queen’s reign has been endlessly discussed by experts in the press.  What has captured my own attention is the operation of social memory.   Few world leaders have been on the scene for seven decades, and few have been the objects of the evident admiration and respect of so many for so long.  But our group gathered together for the house party in Salernes—eight of us briefly, and six of us for most of the time—perhaps had its special reasons.  With the exception of myself, everyone there was a native-born Briton who had come of age in the early years of the Queen’s reign.  Five of us had been students together at Oxford in the late 1950s.  My one and only “meeting” with the Queen and Prince Phillip took place there, when I was rounded up by some desperate college administrator trying to put together a panchromatic group of foreign students for royal review.  The Duke of Edinburgh made a quip about the insufficiencies of British central heating. 

 

Halley's Comet smiles on William the Conqueror 

 

            Rarely enough are we self-consciously aware that we are experiencing something “historic”, but the death of magnates is an occasion when many do.  In earlier centuries people believed that the very heavens proclaimed the birth and death of great princes, as well as their great deeds, in meteor showers and comets.  What we now know as Halley’s Comet smiled on the Norman Conquest of Britain, and is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry.  As we sat around the table hearing the news, somebody said, “I will remember where and when I was when I first heard this news--forever.”  This was an almost theatrically solemn remark and solemnly delivered.  But it was a sentiment we all understood, and one frequently commented upon in the press, as it seems to be commonly shared.  Liz Truss, who had been invited by the Queen two days before she died to form a government, had been the subject of much conversation—not all of it complimentary—in earlier days.   The whole period of our stay was a kind of running feast and symposium—wonderful conversation, much of it over wonderful meals.  We all have vivid memories of the circumstances in which we learned of certain private events.  But there is a very limited number of public events that command an almost universal racial memory.  The analogy frequently drawn in my age group was with the death of President John Kennedy by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963.  If you were alive and sentient then, you almost certainly remember, and vividly, the circumstances of where and when you heard of it.  The more recent event seared forever into our memory, and especially the memory of younger people, is learning the  news of the Twin Towers attack on September 11, 2001.

 

            I heard of Kennedy’s assassination as I was walking up a hill between classes on the campus of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.  I was in my first semester as a college teacher.  I was twenty-seven years old.  In the buzz of the crowd moving up the hill, a graduate student was loudly finding a silver lining in his reported news: this unthinkable event would permanently discredit the right-wing fanatics of the John Birch Society, the MAGA-monsters of that age.  Who could have suspected Kennedy was killed by the only Communist in Texas?  Like most of my friends I greatly admired JFK.  I also fancied that I had a personal connection with him.  After all, in the middle of  a hot, muggy day in July of 1958, as I sweated on the pavement in a coat and tie, I had seen the man himself in the flesh as he wheeled around the  circular drive of Columbus Circle abutting Union Station in Washington.  His open red convertible passed within ten feet of me as I stood waiting for the light to change.  There was a good-looking blonde woman laughing in the passenger’s seat.  It was all too perfect.  Golden youth.  Camelot.  I could not have invented it if I tried.  And now on Bascom Hill I suddenly learn he is probably dead.

 

            But that was already the second presidential death announcement that I shall never be able to forget.  On an April day of 1945, still a month short of my ninth birthday, I was walking through an alley shortcut in east Denver on my way home from school.  I was in the company of a contemporary and neighbor whose name, I regret to say, has long since disappeared from my memory.  But I shall never forget the encounter we had along the way.  A woman was standing in the middle of her small, tidy back lawn, separated from the alleyway by a likewise tidy white picket fence.   She was weeping profusely, and not very quietly.  She was surprised to see us, and the sight of us seemed only to intensify her distress.  “Boys,” she said, “boys!  Boys…I have to tell you.  Boys, our president is dead.”  We knew who the President was and what “dead” means.  But the news itself made less impression than it should.  What I mainly grasped was that a woman was weeping uncontrollably.  So far as my grasp of world events was concerned, the war news was all good.  Hitler was “finished” according to a pontificating next-door neighbor.  Soon we would “finish” Japan.  Then my dad would be home from fighting in the Pacific.  But I shall never forget that weeping woman.

 

            I say “never forget”, though can I trust memory?  Already Joan and I have somewhat differing accounts of learning of Queen Elizabeth’s death.  We can agree that we were all gathered around a table when we heard the news, but disagree as to which table.  In any event, the associations of the event will always be complex: the jarring intrusion of the news of death into a Provençal idyll.

 

                Entrecasteaux (Var): garden by Le Nôtre (1613-1700), photo by Joan, backside by blogger
 

Salernes Market

        Years ago when I was studying the Journals of Christopher Columbus, I found myself rather shocked by the feebleness of his powers of description. Here he was sailing about the Indies seeing strange and wonderful things entirely unknown in Europe, assigning them all to two unhelpful categories: “like what we have in Castile” and “not like what we have in Castile.” Yet here I sit at a verandah table looking eastward into the lightening dawn across a little valley to a range of low, green hills thinking “How like an early autumnal daybreak in the Ozarks”. Fog obscures all in the first low bottom. Behind it, rising from the second, it forms a kind of ghostly backdrop or theater flat to a ridge of hilltop trees, then behind that a dark green mass of undifferentiated forest on a hill almost of sufficient size to be called a mountain. Above all this the sky is of that blue inevitably called cerulean, though streaked with long, thin trails of cloud rendered golden by a rising sun, of which my vantage point allows me only the glimpse of a glow atop another large hill.

 

        One remembers landscape vividly but imperfectly. We arrived at Nice airport a little ahead of schedule. It seemed to be the right place except for one thing—it was virtually empty. Instead of forty car drivers holding up their signs, there were two. One of them had our name on it, and the person holding it was an attractive, petite young woman who leapt for our luggage and led us a few paces to a black Mercedes. The first week of September is a very good time to arrive in the south of France . The Parisians are back in Paris. The roads are empty—well, not quite empty, but far from the vibe of the Atlantic City Expressway. The drive to Salernes, though brief, is sufficient for one to experience most versions of the generally superb French highway system from super-highways to country roads. And all along the roads dozens of those little things you hadn’t remembered perfectly—the miles of expertly constructed stone wall, the peculiar dry greens of certain vegetation, the characteristic elegant road signs, the sometimes hideous commercial signage, the huge open warehouses of tiles and ceramics. And everybody driving new cars. Our first memories of the Provençal countryside go back to the early 1960s, when vehicles were fairly sparse, and every other one was a tired gray rattletrap Citroën utility truck, the farmer’s version of the classic Deux Chevaux that we ourselves were driving. Salernes is a bit over an hour from the Nice airport, but the only really challenging driving Ms. Celine faced came in the last two hundred yards of the trip. As it nears our friend’s house, the long private driveway features a dramatic curve on a sharp rise with a rough masonry wall on one side and on the other a drop into a mini-gorge. So far as I know, nobody has ever actually driven into this chasm, but the possibility does come into one’s mind while driving by. When you get to the straight and flat at the top, you are quite near the house, Saint Michel, and you have a clear view of its side and one of its most delightful features, the long stone patio or verandah that fronts the house’s broad side, overlooking a delightful view, and on which its inhabitants spend a great deal of time lounging, loafing, reading, conversing and most especially eating. It must have been close to two in the afternoon when we arrived to find our hosts seated around a table with other guests who had arrived before us lingering over the remnants of what they described as lunch but seemed to feature glasses of orange juice and the crumbled flakes from croissants. Just saying. 

        Even “luxury” air travel, with which we had indulged ourselves, left me exhausted and with the feeling that I had little furry sweaters covering my teeth. The rest of Saturday, after a fairly brief period of joyous reunions, was mainly sleep. But Sunday, the beginning of a new week, offered the opportunity for the distinctively French experience of “market day”. Throughout the rural areas of France, and especially in the south, regionally itinerant merchants set up their tented or canopied outdoor stalls in prominent public places and hawk their goods for half a day. Each town has its market day, and the merchants make the rounds. The weekends are particularly choice from the commercial point of view, and the comparative regional prominence of Salernes is signaled by its Sunday morning assignment. The dramatic decline of Catholic observance is likewise obvious in the arrangement. Fewer and fewer people attend Mass, and there are fewer and fewer priests to perform it. At Salernes the town square is briefly turned into a magnificent food bazaar: table after table of high quality vegetables, charcuterie, seafood, steaming cauldrons of couscous and paella, every variety of sausage and olive known to the race, cheeses, bakery goods, novelty sweets. At a lower level of the town, in space normally reserved for parking, is the market’s textile section. I did not visit it personally on Sunday, but if the experience of previous years can be trusted, it increasingly approaches the style of an American flea market rather an actual dry goods mart, with lots of cheap Chinese stuff of the Dollar Store genre. But of course you still find gorgeous Provençal tablecloths and some occasional nice handwork, and everything has today’s engagingly multicultural French accent. I went home happy with my purchases: mainly sausages. Joan was less happy. One man’s meat…But what a great beginning to a week away.

                                             Salernes Market on the town square

Educational Loan Forgiveness

 

I suppose it was to be expected that President Biden’s initiative on some debt forgiveness of educational loans would stimulate superficial and partisan reactions, but I am nonetheless disappointed by the response.  Depending on which superficial view one favors, the proposed loan cancellations are either a boondoggle give-away half-way to being a bribe for potential Democratic voters or a significant progressive step toward social and racial justice and the razing of at least one small mole hill on the famously uneven playing-field.  The nation is already at political war, and if truth is the proverbial first casualty of war, subtlety and nuance follow very closely in its wake.

 

The student debt crisis is a national emergency.  Admittedly it is not the only national emergency, or even the most threatening.  But it does in my opinion need to be addressed.  The fashion in which the Biden administration is addressing it not surprisingly has some good aspects and some bad aspects.  The muddle is not uncharacteristic of most of the generally meager results achieved in a government so narrowly divided and so ferociously animated by partisan spirit.  In my opinion the package is not one deserving more of either praise or blame than at about the sixty percent level, but of course we live in a world of hundred-percenters.  Hundred percentism is seldom nuanced.  The issues involved here are many and complex.  And since President Biden’s action is easy to praise and easy to attack if one seeks to make selective partisan and  polemical points, I suppose the discussion is likely to remain at that level.  The cost is the loss of an opportunity for a thoughtful discussion in which any just observer is likely to be of at least two minds.  In this brief blog essay, I can touch upon only one or two of many thoughts that come to mind.

 

One of the first points to make, because it is so often denied or doubted, is that the costs of higher education are real costs.  Not that skepticism is entirely unwarranted.  Like other real costs, some of them can also be inflated.  But almost everything about higher education, and certainly everything about residential institutions with serious scientific ambitions, has become increasingly expensive.  The principal ongoing task of administrative officers in all but a fairly small segment of American colleges is constricting often good educational ideas to the constraints of limited and unpredictable budgets.  Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most obviously inflated costs of higher education is bloated administration itself.  In many places there are whole offices devoted to helping students negotiate and navigate government loans!    Because if you build it, they will come.  The vigorous encouragement to borrow educational funds, especially under the Obama presidency, not surprisingly found takers, both among prospective students and start up educational ventures.  Even in the shadow of the crisis, the “demand” side—high school graduates assuming they will go to college almost as a matter of course—remains very strong.

 

Public subsidization of expansive higher education, one awkward means of which is student debt cancellation,  is one solution, but hardly the most efficient.  Somehow, it seems to me, the college problem has been separated in the public mind from the high school problem.  There are numerous facets of the high school problem, one of them being the dramatic discrepancies among high schools in terms of what they teach and how effectively they teach it.  This is one of several serious social issues apparently unapproachable with a liberating honesty and freshness.  Is there anyone in America who does not know what a “good school” is?  There certainly cannot be a real estate agent in the country who doesn’t.  The lives of millions of parents are organized around a belief in and search for a “good school”.  And if you know what a good school is, you perforce know what a not so good one is.  I will not say a bad school, though the laws of thought do make one think there must be such things.  One rough-and-ready parental definition of a good school is a school that gets your kid into college.

 

I graduated from high school in 1954.  I was a good student, supported by good teachers and encouraged by my parents, and I did take applying for college more or less for granted.  But this was far from a universal expectation among my classmates, of whom I would guess about half planned to go immediately into the work force.  Already the percentage of college applicants was a large increment from prewar years.  My parents did not go to college, and very few people in their extensive social circles had gone to college.  But my parents, though not highly educated, were well educated in useful fundamentals.  They were high-school graduates, a term they rightly claimed with pride.  That is because an American high school diploma in 1920 was considered a reliable warrant that its possessor was adequately prepared for civic engagement and a sound candidate for meaningful employment in the industrial, commercial, or artisanal worlds.  That is, they had skills of literacy and numeracy at a significant level, some fundamental scientific knowledge and a familiarity with “civics” that were a foundation for intelligent social and political engagement.

 

We no longer live in the world of 1920.  In today’s plugged-in, frothy post-manufacturing America our high schools produce only a limited number of graduates capable of doing jobs for which employers are willing to pay decently and which offer actual “career” opportunities.  This is a problem certainly destined to get worse, and certainly destined to widen yet further the very troublesome “wealth gap,” which is not unrelated to a “skills gap.”  Right now the first two years of “college”—and especially many of the colleges most subsidized by borrowed money—often deal with materials that rightly belong in well-funded public high schools.  Surely today’s students should have the opportunities, and the challenges, W. T. Sherman had in his backwoods Ohio school in the 1830s?  Is there a reason that American high-school graduate should not be able to read and write the English language competently, or have a grasp of mathematics to the threshold of pre-calculus, or have had a course in a laboratory science (including computer science), or make real progress in acquiring a foreign language, and enjoy some exposure to the serious study of history, social science, and the arts?  That is not too much to ask for four years of study, and no student would have to spend a dime to achieve it.  But it would require a lot of what my grandmother used to call “elbow grease”—both on the part of our students and that of our educational authorities.

 

 

 

NEXT WEEK

 

We are very much hoping that next week we shall be relaxing with old and dear friends in a Provençal farmhouse.  Travel arrangements are a little complicated, and I am not entirely sure that I shall have access to the means of mounting a post on Wednesday, September 7; but even if not, if all goes well, regular postings should resume no later than the following week.

 

Passenger Locator Form

 Nice Airport; 'twould be nice to get there

Only as the summer approaches its end do I fully realize how much fun you can have simply sitting at home and letting the world come to you.  That pretty much describes the summer.  Well, “world” is a bit over the top.  I really mean a microcosm of family and friends.  It began with a loud bang early in June (granddaughter Sophia’s wedding) and continued with generously timed visits from all our children and, at one time or another all our other grandchildren.  Last week we had the stimulation of a wonderful houseguest—once a student here, now a very senior professor at Stanford and expert on ancient Greek drama—whose wide-ranging conversation was an intellectual battery charge.  We were not absolute stay-at-homes (stays-at-home?), as we did venture forth in a minimal way for a couple of great museum visits thanks to our local great friend Frank.  But there’s lots to do around home.   Right now, I find myself immersed in a challenging research project in a field far from my alleged specialty.  As it keeps expanding, and as I work so slowly these days, I may never get so far as defining my actual topic.  Remember: it’s the journey, not the destination.

 

We are now in the countdown to the summer’s capstone event—a repeat trip to the Provençal house party of our great English friend Andrew, whom we have known since our Oxford days in the late 1950s!  I have written about earlier trips to Salernes before, and I hope I shall be able to write about the delights of this year’s French trip soon.  Just at the moment what is on my mind is bureaucracy, which is at least French by way spirit and etymology.  I am aware of the risk.  Talking about bureaucracy may be as boring as experiencing it.  Bureaucracy has been a French specialty at least since the time of Henri IV.

 

It is not simply that we have become elderly fussbudgets, though I acknowledge that is part of it.  (Whether I “own” or even “embrace” fussbudgetry, as the online gerontologists insist I must, is another matter.)  Travel really is pretty difficult for most people these days.  We are scheduled to fly to the south of France on a semi-luxurious French “boutique” airline, La Compagnie, on whose direct flight from Newark to Nice we have semi-luxuriated a couple of times in the past.  We are also enjoying the professional services of a travel expert who has been a personal friend of many years.  And as always we enjoy the help and support of our solicitous adult children.  I am hoping that with all these resources we shall be able to overcome the crisis of the PLF, which is to say, the Passenger Locator Form.  We have been seriously instructed by our airline that our permission to fly to France depends upon our filling out a digital PLF correctly no later than forty-eight hours before our scheduled departure.

 

            It is quite understandable, and also laudable, that in the midst of a pandemic the French government, or indeed any other, would like to keep track of visitors to French soil and to ascertain, in addition to their actual “Covid status,” the places these people are coming from, the specific seats they occupied on the plane, the address within those places where they are planning to hang out,  and when they plan to do the hanging.  The aptness of the phrase passenger locator precisely identifies the purpose of the form.

 

I have had enough experience living in France, that when its Bureaucracy says “Frog”, or even “Grenouille,” I jump.  Resistance is generally futile, leading only to further delay and unpleasant conversations.  So I went to the link to the Passenger Locator Form provided by La Compagnie.  It was actually very simple.  The first thing one had to do is choose one of the three destinations in which the bureaucrats are interested: France, Malta, and Slovenia.  That was a piece of cake.  I’m going to France.  Click.  The rest of the form was nearly as simple.  I finished it in five minutes.  Five minutes after that I had received my digital confirmation and printed out a copy.

 

About a week or ten days after that we got around to Joan’s form.  Expert that I now was, I was eager to show her how easy it was it to get located.  Go to the airline’s website, follow its link to the PLF form, and Bob’s your uncle.  The form was indeed there, but it had been dramatically altered since my last visit.  Your obligatory first step was still to identify your country of destination, but now there were only two possibilities, neither of which was France.  I was now faced with two singularly unappealing options.  I could try to find a last-minute AirB&B accommodation in Malta or Slovenia and simply suck it up.  After all, nobody’s life is an endless succession of first choices.  But we really wanted to go to Nice, and truth is, I wasn’t even entirely sure where Slovenia is.  The other option was to try to sort out the conundrum by personal telephonic communication with a human being at the “Customer Service number” of La Compagnie.  In the Internet Age no three words hold more terror than Customer Service number.

 

I hardly need tell you of an ordeal with which you yourself are doubtless intimately familiar.  It begins with sounds of a telephone ringing for five minutes or more followed by the solemn but recorded assurance that your call is very important—though, one must conclude, just not quite important enough actually to answer.    Please stay on the line…the next available agent…etc.  You then advance to the Musak stage, which is essentially a progression from passive to active aggression.  But at La Compagnie—boutique and semi-luxurious, remember—a very suave person does eventually pick up the phone.  Over several attempts we have had both suave men and suave women.  To none of these persons, however, has it proved possible to convey the subtleties of a situation not in fact resolvable by clicking the “little blue link” on their “easy-to-use form”.

 

The situation remains unresolved as I write this, but we remain hopeful.  I noted that the Covid travel requirements fall under the portfolio of the French Ministry of the Interior.  Searching the Ministry’s website, I found a document entitled “Covid 19: International Travel.”  In it I read: “In light of the latest developments in the pandemic, the port health control system has been discontinued, pursuant to the law terminating the emergency measures instituted to combat the COVID-19 outbreak…Accordingly, the rules previously applied to travellers to France no longer apply effective from August 1, 2022.  Travellers are now exempt from any formalities prior to entry into France, be it in mainland France or overseas, and no longer required to present a health pass, regardless of the country or place of departure.”  If that’s not a smoking gun, it’s at least a steaming pea-shooter.

 

What seems to have happened is this.  Between the time I filled out the on-line form about two weeks ago and the time Joan tried to do the same about a week later, the IT folks at the French Ministry of the Interior discovered either (1) their own recently published policy that “The rules previously applied to travelers to France no longer apply effective from 1 August 2022” or (2) that they had forgotten to make changes to their website reflecting the policy changes of which they were in theory aware.  Bureaucratic change, which can be implemented at warp speed high up, at times may take a long time to soak into the consciousness of those appointed to implement it.  So they simply struck France from the list, but perhaps failed to send a memo to the airlines?  If any of my world-traveling readers knows anything about this, I’d love to hear from you, and soon.

Our Continuing Education

Poster advertising appearances of LaFolette and Debbs

Among the horrors of the past week’s news, the one that really appalls me is the atrocious assault on the writer Sir Salman Rushdie as he was about to begin a public lecture in Chautauqua, New York, not far from Erie, PA.  The medical reports concerning Rushdie’s condition as they have appeared in the press are encouraging.  He has been gravely but not fatally wounded.  It is impossible to imagine that ten forceful knife wounds to neck, throat, or abdomen could be anything other than “life threatening”.

 

There are many reasons to be shocked by this horrifying attack.  The tangent I am choosing is a minor and eccentric one.  (Speaking of eccentricity, the authorities addressing the crime profess to be puzzled as to the attacker’s motives.  According to the Times, “The New York State Police said at a news conference on Friday afternoon that there was no indication of a motive, but that they were working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”   Two major investigative bodies between them might eventually discover a possible clue: Rushdie has been under a highly public sentence of death in a fatwa pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran since 1989.)   

 

 In my role as a literature professor, I am not among the most ardent admirers of Rushdie’s novels.   That is a statement about personal literary taste.  But who could fail to admire the man’s brilliance, his courage, and his embodiment of humane and humanistic virtues?  Not the least of these is the willingness of a highly cerebral novelist to speak to general audiences of what are usually called “mature students”.  That is exactly one of the things I myself have enjoyed most in my retirement years.  So-called “adult education,” though hardly an American monopoly, has been an American specialty with origins in an earlier and more robustly democratic phase of our history.

 

Some years ago, in doing the research for a study of influential anti-Communist  writers of the mid-twentieth century, I discovered Richard Krebs.  To the degree that he is still known at all today, it is under his pen name of Jan Valtin, author of an extraordinary book entitled Out of the Night, which was the best-seller of the year in this country in 1941, just as America was about to enter the War.  Krebs was born in 1905, and he had an adventurous and somewhat mysterious life.  By the time he was thirty-five he had travelled the world as a  sailor in the German merchant marine and been a Communist agent, a prisoner in San Quentin, a probable Gestapo informer, an illegal immigrant to the United States (twice), and an aspiring writer who supported himself by being a janitor in a yeshiva and a house painter among other things.  It is not easy to stay under the radar when you are the best-selling author in the country, and his chameleon politics guaranteed him controversy, passionate enemies, and passionate friends.  In what seemed at first a Mission Impossible he and some influential friends set out on a successful campaign to keep him from being deported as an illegal alien—a category soon enough upgraded by history to “enemy alien”.

 

A major event in this campaign was Valtin’s publication of a hugely efficacious essay in the May, 1941, issue of Readers’ Digest.  It was called “American Dawn,” and surely must be one of the more successful pieces in the history of political propaganda.  It is the saccharine account of the conversion of a Communist thug and hit man to the enlightenment of American democracy.  Sure, he broke a few bureaucratic immigration rules and did a little time for an atrocious assault here or there, but he now recognizes the shining superiority of the American way of life!  One point he made in this essay stuck in my mind.  In Europe, he claimed, a university education was the exclusive privilege of the upper classes, whereas he as an incarcerated felon had been able to take extension courses at the University of California!  (He also said the San Quentin cuisine was superior to that in the messes of German merchant ships.)

 

Furthermore, the educational claim was actually true in spirit as well as fact.  America has been a leader in many different forms of “adult education,” one of the earlier manifestations of which was the Chautauqua, a kind of secular, educational tent meeting that took the name of  the upstate New York town of its first appearance.  These meetings could mix the atmospheres of classroom and county fair.  The lecture Salman Rushdie was about to deliver was at the site of the first Chautauqua in a modern auditorium of the Chautauqua Institution built to commemorate the founding of a popular form of continuing education that, according to Teddy Roosevelt, was the most American thing in America.  As a politician, he saw the Chautauqua primarily as an arena of American democratic culture in which new and differing views could be advanced in civility and civil competition.  The ironies of history are more morbid than those dreamed up by novelists.  The “dialogue” lecture Rushdie was about to deliver was on the subject of America as a refuge for persecuted writers!

 

 “Continuing education” of course is as broad as education itself.  In the old days, meaning before the triumph of electronic media in the later twentieth century, there were numerous “lecture agencies” whose agents brokered interesting talks by interesting people for a wide variety of eager audiences.  At the height of the controversy about his book in 1941-2, Jan Valtin made a pretty good living for a while giving lectures (or rather variations on a lecture) for which he was paid $100, a princely sum in those days.  There are still celebrity public speakers for hire, but in today’s cultural landscape they constitute a small part of adult education.  In contrast, there must be many hundreds, and for all I know thousands, of active “adult schools,” “senior colleges,” learning tours and cruises organized by educational institutions (“alumni colleges”), general interest lecture series sponsored by civic and religious groups, Ted talks, Renaissance Weekends, and so forth.  In my own town of Princeton there are at least half a dozen such enterprises.  I have myself taught in four of them.  In the significantly named Evergreen Forum, in three sequential years I was able to offer a course on Dante’s Comedy, teaching the three sections (Hell, Purgatory, Heaven) in their artistically incremental order.  What an opportunity and privilege—and a gift of retirement!

                                             

Chautauqua tent 

Not all the problems we face in the world or indeed in our personal lives are the products of ignorance or misunderstanding, but a sufficient number of them are, for me to persevere in my belief that formal education and personal intellectual growth—two sides of the same coin—are primary requirements of a healthy society and a happy life.  They are certainly a great solace of advancing age.  That an eminent author should expose himself to a murderous attack by a fanatic for his willingness to advance the old goals of the Chautauqua is sad beyond belief.

 

Cruise course