The End of Merit?

Meritorious striver and his creator, Horatio Alger
 

“DEI” is hot—or perhaps the verb should be plural, DEI are hot, as each letter stands for its own nominal concept: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  This trinity of fair dealing designed to limit the damage inflicted by decades of white prejudice  is potentially applicable to many aspects of personal and social life; but just at the moment it is especially current in discussions of higher education, and more especially in relation to the racial categories of students accepted by institutions of higher learning and to the racial compositions of college faculties.  Oversimplifying only slightly, the aspiration of the DEI regime would be to achieve a social mix of both students and faculty that would reflect approximately the same ethnic profile on campus as is to be found in the general population.  At the moment roughly 14% of our American population is of African and 6 or 7% of Asian ancestry.

 

I would be happier with the slogan if its last term were to be inclusivity rather than inclusion.  My preference is not wholly based in euphony.  That slight change would underscore the revolutionary aim of the project by echoing the rhythms of the motto of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité—an inspiring motto still prominent on thousands of public buildings in France.  But the really problematic English term is equity, a word used with differing connotations.  Its most general sense, fairness, is one to which we can all subscribe.  But to some who are advancing the DEI regime equity is taken to promise equality of outcomes.  It is one thing to guarantee an equable opportunity of access to an open competition and another to foreordain the results to conform to skin-color statistics.

 

The latter, mind you, is by no means an indefensible position.  The dream of absolute social equality, though never achieved, lies latent in the democratic dogma. The distribution of physical prowess, mental acuity, skills and talents is not uniform among the human race; but it would be at least theoretically possible to make a social division of the world’s material goods on grounds of strict equality.  One of the famous apothegms of Karl Marx is that allotment of resources should be made on a socially equable basis: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  Such a revolutionary redistribution of material resources might seem to guarantee that no one could be “born on third base” because there would be no bases.  That situation might last as long as fifteen minutes.

 

The History of the French Revolution by Jules Michelet, still among the most famous books devoted to what is probably the defining cultural event of Western modernity, surprisingly begins with an essay in historical theology: “Concerning the religion of the Middle Ages”.  This may seem curious.  The historian had abandoned Christian belief  early and was a ferocious enemy of the Jesuits.  In his introductory chapter Michelet contrasts the discarded medieval world as a regime of grace (as in “grace and favor”) with a regime of revolutionary justice.  Many well-meaning enthusiasts of DEI seem to think of equity as justice in Michelet’s sense.  But for me the historical evidence of the results of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions suggests that the theory leads to neither equity nor to justice but to the annihilation of the specific individual in the sea of statistical abstraction.  Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, one of the truly consequential novels of the twentieth century, is perhaps the most forceful literary amplification  of the idea in practice.  Koestler’s French publisher changed its title to Le Zéro et l’Infinie—Zero and Infinity--the individual being nothing, and the “masses” everything.  This is a point developed in one of the more philosophical moments in a dialogue between the doomed central character and his NKVD interrogator.

 

I stick with the now embattled idea that when all is said and done, human beings are to be judged, in Martin Luther King’s famous phrase, “on the content of their character.”  To do so is to acknowledge individual merit.  One of the best-selling American writers of the later nineteenth century was Horatio Alger, and although few people today have read any of his books, his name is still known by many as a specialist in the rags-to-riches plot.  The typical Alger hero was a young man who by his pluck, talent, and industry overcame the disadvantaged circumstances of his origins to achieve material and social success.  This has been called “bootstrap capitalism,” but it always depends upon a Helping Hand.   The Horatio Alger template is partly hokum, but only partly.  In my experience it is more convincing than the oppressor-oppressed model.  But of course we all tend to turn our individual life experience into a useful social template.  I want to consider myself a meritocrat.  Surely we all want to consider ourselves meritocrats.

 

   A great deal has changed since I was young.  To judge from the press it is now something newsworthy to be the first college graduate in your family.  It was common among my contemporaries.  The “GI Bill” alone must have expanded the sociology of American college graduates hugely.  I remember being at a conference of Danforth Fellows in the late 1950s.  This was a group of highly select doctoral students in the humanities bankrolled by a midwestern foundation established by an agricultural tycoon.  At our conference the Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences (a job of storied eminence later held by Claudine Gay on her rise to the presidency) said in a lecture to the  assembled fellows that the great challenge facing American higher education in the 1960s and 70s would be producing PhDs rapidly enough to meet the ever-expanding need for more college professors.  Could this be done at scale while sustaining true standards of excellence?  We felt we were part of a large wave of dynamic, positive social change.  Even Homer nods, but I personally still feel that way.

 

In the polemical atmosphere both evidenced and exacerbated by the de facto firing of Harvard’s president it is not surprising that academic DEI regimes are loudly defended as effective instruments of social justice by one group and decried as gravy trains for race hustlers by others.  But the debate, if one can dignify it with that name, is likely to be unproductive so long as the credentialed proponents of “diversity” think that word means “more people who think just like me.”

 

 

Harvard, Humiliated

 

It has been a month since I wrote about the disastrous Congressional hearing at which the presidents of three of our most prestigious universities gave testimony.  I concluded that essay with the following sentence.  “It is possible, barely possible, that this debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to some good.”  This is hardly a confident or optimistic remark, but as things are turning out it is not nearly sufficiently tentative or guarded.  For it now seems likely that far from lancing the boil, this episode is likely to inflame it further.

         The presidents—all of them highly accomplished, credentialed, and experienced —testified in a fashion at its best disappointing and at its worst disastrous concerning the intellectual health of their institutions.  Let me expand that sentence.  Their testimony had to do with the intellectual and spiritual health of their institutions.  For though education is no longer frequently a religious enterprise, at its best it is often a spiritual one, especially when its subject matter is the modern versions of the “liberal arts”, the old trivium and quadrivium of the medieval schools.

Here the word spiritual is being used not in distinction to secular, but perhaps to material.  All our earliest universities were born as religious institutions; the evolution of all of them has been secular.  But they all continue to claim, and rightly claim, intellectual and cultural aspirations beyond the utilitarian and the vocational.  The implicit acceptance and valorization of this claim by society at large forges the bond uniting it with the higher education “industry.”  Ordinary folks may be nearly wholly ignorant of the “ivory tower” or bemused by its eccentricities, but they have been at least subliminally convinced of its important social role.

During the forty years of my own teaching career, despite all the minor league drama that comes with dealing with a large variety of often temperamental people on a regular basis, hardly a day passed without my pinching myself to make sure I was immersed in real life rather than a dream.  Was it really possible that I was being paid good money to do something that wild horses could not prevent me from doing for free?  Not everyone gets to follow a vocation, carried out among ever-changing throngs of exciting and often inspiring young people, that is so plausibly useful as well as pleasant.

The tardy resignation of Harvard’s president, a resignation at least tacitly demanded by her employers, dissolves the bonds of an unwritten contract.  I call it “tardy” because the first response of the Harvard Corporation was an imprudently strong affirmation of seemingly enthusiastic support.  This essay is not about the ex-president personally, but about how the “question” of American higher education has instantly been transformed into a major battlefield of our culture wars.  News from our universities seldom makes a big splash in the press.  But on page 2A of today’s (Tuesday’s) paper, the “Inside the Times” page, there is a whole article detailing the extraordinary interest that recent events in Cambridge Mass have garnered far beyond the Harvard campus.

For Harvard is special.  I called it the greatest university in the world, and I am willing to stick by that for purposes of convenience, despite the fact that the genius of our higher education is the variety which renders such a judgement symbolical if not meaningless.  At least let us agree that Harvard is “iconic.”  When  average Americans think of the acme of higher education in this country—you must grant my premise that average Americans do exist and that some of them from time to time might think about higher education--they are likely to think “Harvard”.  I am old enough to remember when President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State caused a bit of a stir by suggesting that what was good for General Motors was good for America.  In this instance I have to think that what is bad for Harvard is bad for America.  And I think what has just gone down in Harvard Yard is likely to be quite bad.  There are not too many large institutions in this country that command wide-spread admiration or even respect.  Our Congress is a disgrace.  Our system of primary and secondary education, though impossible to categorize easily, is generally mediocre when compared with world leaders.  The distribution of the nation’s nearly incalculable wealth, which is mainly managed by people whose job is to make rich people richer, is grossly, possibly dangerously, uneven.  Religious institutions and their leaders no longer play a major role in our national life.  Our great universities have been the world’s envy.  We could do without thrusting them into the vortex of nasty polemic.  And it has immediately turned nasty. A good deal of the fault lies with the Harvard board whose investigative diligence has been less than keen.  It was perhaps imprudent to endorse the embattled president so fulsomely.  The not-so-subtle volte face, when it came, smacked rather of the G-men determined to get Al Capone at any cost.  Fortunately for them Capone hadn’t been paying his taxes.  Who could have guessed that the wild card in Cambridge would be pre-presidential plagiarism?  The origins of plagiarism are not always sinister, but they are never wholly innocuous, let alone flattering.  And in the academic context plagiarism—and what you have here is, yes, plagiarism—has to be taken seriously.  It is a gross offense against fairness or what they call “equity”.  It is not to be judged non-existent because the whistle-blowers are your political enemies or simply strike you as unpleasant people with bad motives.  And as this plays out, it is very disappointing that among the first cards to be played is the race card—disappointing, but sadly probably inevitable. 

 

From the Irresolute Desk

Jacob Bryant

 

    My possibly cryptic title invokes a famous piece of nineteenth-century furniture, somewhat reminiscent of a small, beached whale, that adorns the office of the President of the United States in the White House: the "Resolute Desk."  Unfortunately I sit behind an Irresolute Desk.  I am good neither at the making of resolutions nor at the keeping of those made, but since I write this on New Year’s Day, the pressure is on.  So, while I am not resolving actually to do anything except think about something I might do, I intend in this new year to dip a toe of pussy-footing possibility into the shallow end of the kiddies’ pool.  To be a little less oblique, I am thinking about undertaking another book.  I guess I am in the situation of one of our obscure politicians who announces at a sparsely attended news conference that he is establishing an “exploratory committee” to look into his possible prospects as a presidential candidate.  As you read the newspaper squib about this on page seventeen, you are already pretty certain the squib is the last you will hear of it.  So I am appointing myself an exploratory committee of one to consider the wisdom of an eighty-seven year old man undertaking a major writing project still needing significant primary research.  With artful procrastination I probably can take up the whole year with committee meetings.

 

    During the pandemic, to improve the unshining hours, I put in a lot of time on a Duolingo Portuguese language course.  My studies eventually led me—as I have explained before in this blog—to discover a major novelist  whose very name I cannot remember having encountered earlier: José Maria Eça de Queiróz, or Queirós (1845-1900).  Eça was the conduit by which I became usefully sidetracked into the fictional manifestations of developments in biblical criticism and interpretation as reflected in some major European writers, in the century between the birth of George Eliot (b. 1819) and the death of Mikhail Bulgakov (d. 1940).  That is roughly speaking my proposed topic, and it is of course enormous.

 

    How to share with you some sense of what I have in mind?  I might well begin with the most famous novel dealing with my chosen theme, as it is also a strong competitor for the rank of greatest novel in the English language: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, first published in 1871/2 but set in the era of the Reform Bill of 1832.  This is a book with many plots, perhaps too many, but the “through line” is the history of a remarkable woman named Dorothea Brooke, a provincial orphan, and the ward of an uncle whose affable pomposity at times invites our affection and at others our derision.  A major theme of the book is the clash of  older and newer modes of social, political, scientific, and religious thought.  The book begins with Dorothea, not yet twenty, naively accepting a marriage proposal from the Rev. Edward Casaubon, a country parson of considerable means and an erudite amateur scholar.  Casaubon is bogged down in apparently endless research for a vast literary, historical, and theological study called The Key to All Mythologies.  The conclusion of his vast researches (determined long before he has concluded them), will prove that all the great myth systems of the ancient world are but distortions or mangled memories of the true revelations of Moses in the Pentateuch: in other words a “fundamentalist” (as we might now call it) defense of the historicity and inerrancy of the Bible.

 

George Eliot

 

            “George Eliot” is of course the pen name of a woman named Mary Ann Evans who was not merely a Bible reader, having been raised in Evangelical piety that she later abandoned, but a real Bible scholar, the translator of revolutionary works of German theology such as D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835/36) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841).  Her abandonment of orthodox Christian belief, though it scandalized many of her contemporaries, did nothing to qualify her life-long admiration of the literary qualities of the Authorized English Bible.

 

            There are many dimensions to the literary exposition of the sterility of Dorothea’s relationship with her considerably older husband, who sees in her a subservient research assistant rather than anything approaching an intellectual partner.  But his vast and wacky Key to All Mythologies is itself a major load-bearing pillar of the novel.  It exemplifies  in intellectual terms the “dead hand” with which Casaubon would seek to crush his wife’s spirit and control her even from his grave.  Casaubon’s erudite stultification would renew and expand the enterprise of numerous episodes of intellectual reaction of the eighteenth century.  Specifically, it is clear that his magnum opus  in endless progress  is a fictional  extension, expansion, or imitation of the work of the Cambridge antiquarian  theologian Jacob Bryant (1715-1804) entitled A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–76).  Motivated by the same aims pursued by  Casaubon—to defend supernatural Christianity and biblical inerrancy—Bryant erected one of history’s more amazing piles of learned nonsense.  His method was pseudo-philological, consisting mainly of the etymological reduction to three- or four-letter “roots” of personal and place names found in ancient Near Eastern and classical texts.   These roots he presented  as crucially related to vaguely similar forms to be  found in the Pentateuch.  The relevant part of his lengthy article in the Dictionary of National Biography can be summarized in one sad sentence: “His research is remarkable, but he had no knowledge of oriental languages, and his system of etymology was puerile and misleading."

 

Eliot critics, especially the female ones, are wont to beat up on Casaubon, and Lord knows, he deserves it.  He is prissy, pedantic, emotionally stingy and as we now say “controlling” to an extreme degree.  His treatment of his young wife is one of literature’s more convincing depictions of domestic emotional cruelty.  Graduate students of English literature long ago found in Casaubon and his monstrous Key to All Mythologies the archetypes of pedantic futility that too often haunt their nightmares.

 

            We can all endorse the condescension with which Eliot’s readers have scoffed at the wrong-headedness and futility of his white-elephant scholarly enterprise.   Will Ladislaw (Casaubon’s younger cousin, a spirited modern idealist with modern ideas and a modern temperament, who eventually marries the widowed heroine) does so within the text of Middlemarch itself.  Ladislaw  specifically alludes to Bryant’s works—part of the sluggish pond of the past that in the novel the wave of political Reform promises to refresh--as the emblems of an antiquated intellectual order.  But we can scoff at his biblical studies only in the same way we can  scoff at the adepts of alchemy, who, believe it or not, were still fairly numerous at the dawn of the nineteenth century. There is scant philological difference in English between alchemy and chemistry, save that the latter has shed its Arabic article.  The  project of the alchemists, however, was a fantastic and sterile one in terms of its stated goal to transmute base metal into gold.  Even so, through the centuries of the Renaissance and early modernity the alchemists perfected many of the techniques crucial for the emergence of real chemistry.  I find here an analogy with numerous episodes in intellectual history.  The shining pearl is the oyster’s response to the irritating grain of sand, and that fact makes the sand of interest in itself.  All of this calls for exploration with or without a committee. But is the world really in need of a Key to the Key?

 

 

Langone Christmas

Life is sort of like a box of chocolates--but not really very much like one. But the sharp edges on the box may come to mind. On Christmas Eve Joan and I were lyfted into New York City to celebrate Christmas with our daughter's family.  By late in the afternoon I was feeling rather lousy.  I had to struggle through an excellent dinner, went to bed early, fell into a brief sleep from which I soon awoke violently ill expelling disgusting materials from major orifices of intake and expulsion and generally convincing myself and the whole household that my last hour had come.  Before midnight I had been transported in dramatic fashion to NYU Langone Hospital.  Santa himself had not yet arrived, though hundreds of nurses dressed in reindeer getups appeared to be eagerly awaiting him as they busily went about their varied tasks.  Whatever the category two notches beyond the surreal is, this was it.  The hero of the event was my son-in-law Zvi, whose only couch of repose was the hard floor.

What a hospital!  Everything works like clockwork, even if it is sometimes a cuckoo.  Midnight on Christmas Eve with the animation of Grand Central Station at 5 pm.  It took most of the night, but expert technicians dealing in sordid matter eventually found that it was the dread sapo-virus--a diagnosis that brings with it an embarrassing mandatory exhortation to improve one's personal hygiene and practice much hand-washing.  Meanwhile expert, cheerful and high performing nurses spending their Christmas Eve taking care of the likes of me.  Between these professionals and a loving family, the most memorable Christmas gift of my life.   I hope to be sprung as early as this evening.  Not much of a blog essay, but considering the circumsances, a small miracle. Gratias Deo and best wishes to all readers. 

Christmas: Father, Son, and Uncle

 

 

James Magnuson—novelist, playwright, for many years the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, and for even more years than that the bosom buddy of Joan and John Fleming—has just come out with a timely new novel you would do well to check out during the Christmas season: Young Claus.*  The biographical subject here is not the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, but old Saint Nick, the Fed Ex of children’s Christmas gifts, whose actual biography has been seriously confused over the centuries in the local traditions of the many lands of Christendom.  Sound historical information has been wanting.  Though there have been significant advances in Kringleology since Leclerc’s breakthrough and still controversial study of 1896 (Le Père de Père Noël), surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the obscure infancy and early development of the Gifter Who Keeps on Giving.  It is this much-needed lacuna that has been filled, albeit it in an occasionally speculative manner, by Magnuson’s Young Claus.  I was privileged to read this work in an early stage of its development.

 

The intensity of the season and the publication of my friend’s book set me on a trip down Memory Lane concerning a Klaus-figure in my own early life and, in particular, of a marvelous Christmas episode related to him.  It is the story of my Uncle John and the magic Christmas tree.  There is a fancy anthropological term, avunculate, that refers to the special relationship to be found in certain old societies between nephews and maternal uncles.  It is of importance in some works of our early literatures.  The relationship was one of mentoring, of protecting, and sometimes of discipline.  (The word “mentor,” incidentally is highly literary, being the personal name of a character in Homer’s Odyssey, the tutor of Telemachus.) I did have one maternal uncle, Uncle George, but I barely knew him.  It was from my father’s two brothers, John and Wayne, and especially John, whose namesake I was, that I benefited from abundant traditional avuncularism.  John was my beloved mentor when I was young.  And with him mentoring more than once meant joining in secret conspiracies.

 

There were seven Fleming siblings, three men and four  women who  at various times  lived in proximity in a sparsely populated community south of Mountain Home, Arkansas.  This area was six or seven miles south of the town and not too far from the north bank of the White River.  In what I shall call the main house lived my two uncles, both unmarried,  and, at various times, no fewer than four aunts, two of whom never married.  At the time of today’s story, the nuclear family of which I was a part lived in a smaller house about a mile away.   My Uncle John visited us very often.  He was  particularly devoted to my mother, with whom he played endless games of cribbage.  He also liked to give her surprise gifts, trophies from the fields and the woods through which he often wandered for miles: flowers, leaves, interesting fungi, beautiful or curious stones, beautifully weathered wood, things like that.  My mother, who for many years was nearly housebound,  had a small museum of such trophies.

 

One Christmas my dad and I had hurriedly cut a Christmas tree in a nearby glade and brought it to the house.  It was a cedar.  There is not a lot of evergreen in that part of the mainly hardwood Ozarks, except for two or three slightly different species of cedar.  The cedar is a beautiful tree with a beautiful smell, but is generally pretty clunky as a Christmas tree.  My mother, who could be difficult, complained about the somewhat awkward and  uneven specimen we had brought home.  “It’s too big,” she said, “takes up too much room.”  She went on to say that one day she would like to have “a perfectly shaped little tree, and put it in the bedroom.”  Well, we did put up the cedar tree, which in truth did occupy too much space in the so-called living  room.  But it happened that my Uncle John had been present to hear my mother’s complaint.  Later that day he took me aside.  I could tell he was about to engage me in conspiracy.  He said to me, “What’s wrong with having two trees?  I know where there is a perfect tree for Jan.  What do you think?”  But there was a problem—two problems, actually.  This perfect tree was about three miles away—from his house that is, at least four from mine.  He didn’t even know whose land it was on, but certainly not on any of ours.  At that time there was still a lot of the deep woods that seemed to belong to nobody in particular and had been seized a half a dozen times for non-payment of the (now) unbelievably low property taxes.  I doubt that the County Assessor actually knew who was supposed to own it.  But John was a stickler about his neighbors’ property lines, and I was both shocked and titillated that he seemed so nonchalantly to be suggesting the plunder of a tree of unknown ownership.

 

So the next day we set off from “his” house armed only with a slightly rusty medium-sized pruning saw about eighteen inches long, a tool I had never seen before and certainly never seen in use.   The day was quite cold, but crisp and bright.   The first part of the journey was into some densely wooded hills to the southwest.  Within a half a mile we were in the deep boonies.  There were a few deer paths, but absolutely no signs of human presence.  It was pretty much of a slog.  I don’t know how well Uncle John knew the topography of the back of his hand, but I’m pretty sure he knew that of his corner of Baxter County even better.  Within fifteen minutes I had only the slightest idea where I was, though I never lost my sense of the general direction to get to the river.  The rough Ozark topography is pretty much of sameness, but it can surprise you.  We came to a hollow where a sizeable stretch of beautiful white quartz-like stone lay semi-exposed in large quantities.  Beyond that was a kind of semi-hillock at the top of which, amid all the grays and blacks of a winter forest, was the light green crown of a single pine tree about three and a half feet tall.  We had not seen another pine on our miles-long walk.  God alone knows where it came from, but it was absolutely perfectly formed, with soft, gentle, pliant clusters of needles.  Yet the most striking feature of this arboreal aberration was that it seemed to be growing not in soil but atop a large flat gray rock!  Forty years later or so, when I was seriously studying Italian Renaissance paintings, I got used to trees growing out of rocks.  There is a memorable such tree in the “Saint Francis” of Giovanni Bellini, a painting to which I devoted a whole book.  Of course the roots of such trees actually are in small crevices in the rock in which a certain amount of soil has been caught.  The unyielding constriction stunts them as Nature’s own bonsai, I suppose.  But this one, my first, amazed me.  It seemed to me marvelous and mysterious.  And, yes, we committed the sacrilege; and yes, my mother loved it.  But do you have any idea how hard it is to carry even a small tree through a couple of miles of thick winter forest without damaging so much as a twig of it?

 

Let me wish to my regular readers and, indeed,  anyone who has come across this essay by typographical error or other misadventure, a very happy Christmas and a good beginning to the New Year.

 

 

 

 

 

*Young Claus (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2023);  pp. 335, ISBN 9780875658360

Prexies Under Fire

 

 

Necessity demands  yet another essay related to the war in Gaza.  I undertake it with reluctance.  But the war has indirectly become the occasion of an important event in the life of American elite universities, the arena of my life’s work.  I refer to the recent Congressional hearings, which were fairly widely viewed and very widely discussed throughout the country, and at which the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania answered questions about student life on their campuses.  These institutions are among the most eminent in this or any other land.  Harvard is the greatest university in the world.  But this hearing was in my opinion a national embarrassment and a humiliation for anyone who believes, as I do, that the American achievement in higher education has been one of our nation’s greatest, and one that, despite all, remains the envy of the world.  But it is possible, just barely, that the hearing lanced a cultural boil that has been tormenting the Academy with increasing ferocity.

 

As you probably already know, the presidents were grilled, in a less than friendly fashion, concerning the way their students felt treated in a context of political polarization currently exacerbated by the very strong feelings excited by the brutal war underway between the Israeli Defense Forces and the military wing of the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza.  Hamas fighters in a sneak attack on October 7 invaded Israel, killed with nearly incredible barbarity more than a thousand Israeli civilians, and kidnapped and removed back to Gaza well over two hundred hostages. Included in both the slaughtered and the kidnapped  were many women, children, and elderly persons.  In the devastating response since then Israeli forces have been hunting down and killing some thousands of Hamas fighters, mainly by aerial bombardment, and have destroyed or damaged much of Gaza’s crowded civilian environment.  In the process they have killed many thousands of Palestinian non-combatants, including a huge number of children.  As the war continues the humanitarian crisis among the displaced, the homeless, the wounded, the trapped, and the traumatized has grown ever worse.

 

The world’s horrified reaction to this situation, in many ways echoed on American college campuses, has been mainly anti-Israeli.  This is the background that partially explains how a Republican congresswoman and Harvard alumna could put to the three American college presidents the essence of the following question: Is the advocacy of the genocide of Jews tolerated by your institution’s disciplinary protocols and speech codes?  I am unable to explain why none of the three could answer this question in a sensible, straight-forward way that would make sense to the ordinary intelligent and educated person.  All three failed miserably.  The performance of the President of Penn, Liz Magill, was particularly egregious and seems to have been the final nail in her presidential coffin.  She has resigned.  The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has retained the (official) confidence of her board.  But that the question of her retention should even be controversial, as  it actually is, is  a blot on the Harvard escutcheon.  Elise Stefanik, the right-wing congressional interrogator, is far from the only unhappy camper among Harvard alumni.  The unique importance of MIT lies in its legendary primacy in those fields of science and technology upon which many of us believe—and I think correctly believe—the future felicity and perhaps even the continuity of our species will depend.

 

There is and always has been a large element of political correctness in the selection of college presidents.  But of course what have been regarded as  the “correct” elements has varied considerably over history.  It is needless to say that western higher education, which has clearly evidenced origins in the medieval monastic schools, was long an all-male affair.  For a long time in Protestant America there were essentially two fundamental requirements for the man who would be a college president: theological orthodoxy and manifest erudition.  What we usually think of as “administrative skill” and “people skills” were of course desirable and in a surprising number of instances at least partially present.  By the middle of the nineteenth century the scene had evolved considerably.  The decade at the end of the Civil War must be regarded as a Copernican moment in our higher education.  Many old institutions, like my own, Princeton, gradually evolved by fits and starts toward educational modernity.  But Cornell University (1865) and Johns Hopkins (1876) offered from the very start innovations of secular inspiration and scholarly ambition that would define the great American research university.

 

As our institutions have become more complex, the presidential job description has changed utterly, the expectations vastly expanded, and the bar set ever higher.  The educational enterprise so brilliantly defined as the “multiversity” by Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor of the University of California about 1960, demands of its chief executive a panoply of skills and a reservoir of energy that simply cannot be reasonably expected of any single human being.  I hope it is needless to say that none of these presidents in the congressional hot seat is an anti-Semite, and certainly none is stupid.  They came to their high leadership positions through intellectual brilliance, practical know-how, manifest capacity for clear and inspiring communication, and a work ethic unknown to ordinary mortals.  Why, then, did these three college presidents shock the Congress and much of the nation?  Several commentators have suggested that an untenable situation derived  not from a want of rules and regulations at their institutions, but from a surfeit of them emphasized or soft-pedalled with an air that smacked of hypocrisy.

 

Perhaps we could help simplify their task somewhat by suggesting that there is no compelling reason that a college president express a public opinion on the Gaza war, let alone an institutional opinion, and a few good reasons not to.  And while an institution’s students  are indeed partners in the learning enterprise, the direction of the enterprise is the responsibility of competent professionals.  Likewise, the behavior of some students is such that it is necessary to remember that, with or without keffiyehs, they are in many instances often still unformed young people, as easily misled as led.  In a relatively few instances the behavior is so appalling that it should invoke serious discipline, a concept anathema (except for select political violations) on most campuses.  It is possible, barely possible, that this debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to some good.

 

 

Gaza Blues

 

Like most people, I have read a lot about the often poisonous effects of “social media” on the popular mood and our shared discourse.  But such “social media”as I have experienced is mainly second hand.  We don’t have it or see it, except as reported in the news.  And if there is anything more febrile than a tweet, it is a newspaper account of a tweet.  I do get a great deal of email, though, much  of which is political or commercial junk.  My morning email included an arresting message from someone called Meghdad, a person (or bot) otherwise unknown to me.

 

Do you see and are you quiet?

Do you hear the cries of the oppressed people of Gaza and are you still silent?

Do you see the crushed bodies of thousands of children and women in Gaza and are you still silent?

Are you alive or just a moving corpse?

Do you have only one name for being human or do you also have human emotions?

If you have ears, if you have eyes, and if you have human emotions, why don't you shout and protest against the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government?

 

The message, which I have reproduced in its entirety,  was accompanied by several photographs, mainly of dead babies.  It is on me, not Meghdad, that I looked at the photos.  I didn’t have to do so; I chose to do so.  They would wring tears from a serpent.  But Meghdad’s tone still offended me.  The idea that I, or anyone I knew, was silently indifferent to what was happening in Gaza confounded me, though I certainly expected there to be a diversity of opinion about just what that was, or is.  I was startled that some college professors and many idealistic students could actually praise the barbarous criminality (including, incidentally, baby-murder and revolting sexual violence) of October 7.  I am very far from an uncritical attitude towards Israel.  Who can look at practically any photograph coming out of Gaza without distress?  Though considerably reduced by infirmity I do make a claim to humanity and human emotions, and I do indeed have eyes and ears.  In addition to these organs of sensory perception, I do have a mind, and unfortunately the mind I have  tends sometimes to worry over troubling complexities at the expense of comforting and often deadly certainties.  I shall not venture down the endless and tortured dead end path of WhatAboutism, even if honesty demands acknowledgement that what the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is mainly about has become What About?

 

            What about, for starters, “the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government”.  I do believe the war is “criminal”, not just in the general sense that most wars are, but in ways specific to this one.  But I see no other plausible interpretation of the phrase quoted than that in Meghdad’s opinion the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting a criminal war in support of the government of the United States of America!  What I actually see with my eyes is the American President, his Secretary of State, and large sections of the American policy  intelligentsia and opinion makers agonizing over a situation of mind-numbing complexity as they attempt, with a little success, to moderate Israeli military activity in a situation that has been fostered by bad actors since the days of the Pharaohs and continues to be exacerbated by bad actors today.  I actually have great sympathy with and admiration for President Biden’s impossible efforts.  There are some problems that are insoluble by loudly repeated dogmatism alone, such as all of them.

 

            Years ago, when I made a serious attempt to "keep up”, I read several books by Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. (d. 2007).  He is no longer frequently mentioned, but he was a prominent public intellectual of my youth and a notable luminary in the Kennedy galaxy.  He was an old-fashioned liberal intellectual, a serious historian who moved easily between academia, active public service, and the research library, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to write another book—so it seemed from his enormous output.  As a medievalist, I could never take the image of the Kennedy Administration as “Camelot” very seriously, but with Schlesinger—a balding egghead who looked like a 1950s rent-a-professor including the bow ties and tweed jackets—the idea was preposterous.  Sir Bedevere?  One Schlesinger book to which I had a complicated reaction appeared in 1991: The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.  Its central point was stimulating, but I resisted it.  It was that the “melting pot” theory of American immigration—e pluribus unum—forming a national unity out of a culturally diverse body of immigrants from all over the world—had come to an end.  It was being replaced by a better goal—cultural diversity.  In this vision our country could become a kind of demographic warehouse of a hundred mini-cultures.   Well I was a college professor, and how can a college professor not be in favor of  cultural diversity?  Let a hundred flowers bloom.

 

            But a version of the “multicultural” ideas he was talking about is  now entrenching itself in our universities and among other thought leaders, sometimes with perilous consequences.  It is setting Americans at each others’ throats.  It has already seriously weakened the freedom of speech that should be the bedrock of our cultural exchanges.  I fear it has already done permanent damage not just to the internal operations of our educational institutions but to their reputations in the eyes of the public they must serve and on which they must depend.  If hating Jews or despising Muslims is your thing, maybe it’s “cultural,” part of an essential “identity” of “identity politics”.  This New World is not so much the guarantor of new beginnings as the custodian of old grievances.  But the world has a plateful of problems related to demographic, agricultural, and climate matters of fairly recent appearance without so carefully preserving and reanimating ancient ones.  From the historical point of view there is something surprising, perhaps even amazing about the survival of the human race through its centuries of violent folly.  The pathway of its continuing survival has been the intense application of innovation, adaptation, and perhaps above all cooperation, which depends on ethical intelligence.  Will we still have that in sufficient quality and quantity?  I won’t be here to watch, but I can hope.