École des Chartes

In this slow news week—yes, I am being ironic--and with the Princeton Commencement now behind us, I find myself reflecting a bit on the state of American higher education.  I did find myself rather dispirited by some of the Gaza sit-ins for the ease with which they reduced agonizing complexity to a spurious moral clarity of virtue signaling.  Education can and perhaps must lead to passionately held opinions; but without reflection, discrimination, and the nuanced differentiation of alternatives, those opinions seldom lead to enlightenment.  There is a reason that famous quotations become famous, as is that of John Stuart Mill: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”  I have been thinking about the nature of higher education from a rather old-fashioned perspective—considering its potential for social utility as perhaps opposed to social advancement.  And I have been pondering with increasing admiration the Grandes Écoles of France, often regarded as insufferable bastions of elitism.  These “Great Schools” of advanced study have essentially created the bureaucratic and intellectual elite of a major nation.  I’ll get back to them, or at least one of them, in a moment.

It is a little more than a year ago that I was so immersed in studying the works of the late medieval French poet François Villon (1431-1463?) that I wrote a blog essay about him.  There are many things to be said about him.  He is a unique figure in the history of European poetry, and as a documented “bad boy”—indeed a capital criminal!—he has seemed especially attractive to those who enjoy a streak of the transgressive in their favorite artists.  What is perhaps most remarkable about him is that—given his social obscurity—we know so much about him.

It is not surprising that the documentation of a figure like Chaucer is voluminous enough to require a heavy book (Chaucer Life Records.)  That is mainly to be explained by the fact that he was a prominent man in what we call the real world; only some of his fame and reputation derived from his poetry.  Chaucer even had a legal document attesting that he had not raped Cecily Chaumpaigne, as confirmed by Cecily herself.   (Naturally such a curious document has encouraged scholars of a certain bent to conclude that Chaucer was a rapist—or at least a kidnapper, as the Latin raptus might mean either.)  On the other hand, William Langland, Chaucer’s great contemporary, the author of Piers Plowman, is obscure almost to the vanishing point.  We are not even entirely sure that the name is right.

     But how is it that we know so much about Villon, a citizen much less prominent than Chaucer?  And why does so much of that knowledge date precisely from the decade of the 1870s—just in time to make Villon a kind of “culture hero” for a number of the more edgy writers of the French Third Republic and in the high Victorian era in Britain?  Part of the answer is that nasty always seems more interesting than nice.  Villon was not exactly nasty, but he was certainly wicked.  He was a violent felon (homicide) and habitual criminal (thief).  And among the most thorough bureaucrats in late medieval France, and probably in most other places and periods, were the police authorities.  They kept voluminous records.  But it is one thing for the police to write things down.  It is quite another for scholars to be able to find them four hundred years later.  This where Napoleon and the Grandes Écoles enter the picture.

            For such a bad man, Napoleon had a remarkable number of good ideas.  He was in his own peculiar way an heir of the Enlightenment.  Perhaps because he was so convinced of his own historical importance, he saw the desirability of carefully conserving all the national records of France.  He was very keen on the preservation of archives, beginning with his own.  He was also aware of the tremendous damage inflicted on the “national patrimony” by the Revolution, the destruction or dispersal of so many monastic libraries and royal offices, and the looting and vandalism of the seats of aristocrats.  He thought that there ought to be a special branch of study that would train scholars in the discovery, decipherment, exploitation, and preservation of old documents.  This aspiration was achieved by Louis XVIII—quite without reference to Napoleon of course, a couple of months before Napoleon’s death in 1821—with the establishment of the École Nationale des Chartes (The National School of Charters).  The French word charte, deriving from Latin carta as in Magna Carta, came to be applied to all manner of old legal documents.  So the province of the chartist institution was, and is, the study, decipherment, and publication of historical records of all sorts, not just charters.  Naturally a school of documentary studies  required of its small and highly select group of students and professors serious linguistic skills (especially in Latin), wide historical knowledge, and paleographic expertise.  It makes these same demands  today.  The description of a “chartiste” may sound like Professor Dry-as-Dust on steroids, or at the very best Melville’s “sub-sub librarian,” and I have heard some hip contemporary scholars speak of it in those scornful tones, but its achievements have to dazzle any medievalist.

 

Auguste Longnon

 

            In any event, in the 1870s a chartist named Auguste Longnon published two breakthrough books about Villon.  One was mainly about the historical figures who feature in Villon’s most famous poem, his semi-mock, but only semi, last will and testament.  Here was a window on a seldom viewed life of the medieval Parisian demi-monde.  The other book was entitled “A Biographical Study of F. Villon Based on Unedited Documents in the National Archives.”  These were preparatory studies for a major edition of Villon’s poems that Longnon published in 1892.  Of course scholarship is mostly tentative and dated.  Only a few scholarly books have an indefinite shelf life.   Such books (Darwin’s Origin of Species, say) then often are culturally upgraded and  move on to become the objects of intense scholarship themselves.  Longnon’s biographical studies have long since been left behind.  I had to appeal to one of my own indispensable sub-sub librarians—a priceless if too often unsung asset category in any serious university--to search it out in a rarely visited depository annex.  But not one of the many biographies that have superseded Longnon’s could have been written without his work and that of others like him, scholars trained at the École des Chartes or in institutions molded by its spirit.  For me as a scholar it is rather exhilarating to know that, for some moments, even I myself have briefly carried the baton in some worthy effort or other, to attempt some small increment, the grand totality of which is what Francis Bacon called “the advancement of learning.”  It is only since our own daughter became the chief executive of one of one of America’s major institutions of cultural curation that I have begun to appreciate some of the wider implications, challenges, and ambiguities of our difficult but essential accommodations of the past to the present.  Institutions dedicated to this subtle but crucial task deserve the admiration and support of all thoughtful people.

 

The distinguished scholarly journal of the ÉC
           

Showing the Flag

 

 

    One of President Clinton’s most famous quotations can serve as the epigraph for this post: “That depends on what the meaning of is is.”  He was ridiculed for it at the time, but it was in fact a recognition of the desirability and often enough the necessity of precision in linguistic communication, too often incomplete, unclear, or ambiguous.  So let me move on to the two SAs (Saint Augustine and Samuel Alito) and the upside down flag.  Considering such topics inevitably raises the status of human language as a system of signs and the larger question of non-verbal sign systems generally.  It should be obvious that the study of language must involve the study of sign theory.  One of the Greek words for “sign,” sema, is the root of the technical English linguistic term, semantics.  A famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure used the term semiology to refer to both verbal and extra-verbal sign systems.  It is interchangeable with another fancy word, semiotics.   It means: the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

 

Around the year 400 Saint Augustine wrote one of the most brilliant books about language and signification the world has yet seen.  Its title (De doctrina christiana) is usually translated as On Christian Doctrine, but this is misleading.  Latin doctrina does not mean “doctrine” as that word is now mainly used.  It means “teaching” in the active sense of pedagogy: how we go about teaching and learning.  Augustine intended it as a preface to biblical study.  All teaching, he says, is about one of two matters: either res (things) or signa (signs).  “But things are indicated by signs.”*  Augustine was trying to defend the adequacy of human language to communicate truth.  Ancient Sophists, like their modern progeny, the so-called deconstructionists, liked to argue that precise communication was impossible because it depended upon the use of words, which are by nature fatally ambiguous.  “Words are explained only by other words”.  In terms of achieving clarity, that is like “bringing an unlighted candle into a dark room.”

 

Augustine makes a distinction between two kinds of signs.  Some signs are natural, meaning deriving from the world of nature.  Think for a moment about fire.  Smoke, heat and visible combustion are all signs of fire.  They are natural signs of the thing, fire.  They are easily interpretable by every human being on earth.  But what about the word “fire” itself?  It is a sign of a different kind.  It is a conventional sign—meaning one that has been established by the agreement of a certain group of people, namely English-speakers.  Speakers of other languages will use other signs: (ignis, pyr, feu, fuego, Feuer, etc.).  If someone offers you a gift, you are more likely to be pleased if you are in Birmingham than if you are in Berlin, as Gift is the German word for poison.

 

Of course, there are many non-verbal signs that play important roles in all our lives: traffic lights, for example, and many road signs, among a myriad of others.  The other SA of this essay, Samuel Alito, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, is currently involved in a controversy with broad semiological implications with a non-verbal sign: our nation’s flag.

 

The flag, it turns out can do much more than indicate national identity or patriotism.  And the marked “indeterminacy” of the idea of “patriotism” is suggested by the fact that the January 6^th invaders of the Capitol sincerely claimed it as their motive.  The only demonstrator actually shot dead by the police, Ashli Babbitt, bore no conventional weapon but was said to be using a poled American flag in an aggressive fashion.   Clear video evidence records others using flag poles as clubs.  Now it is not suggested that Justice Alito committed any violence; but his private residence does have a flagpole, and there are photographs clearly showing the American flag flying upside down (i.e. with the blue quadrant with the fifty stars at the lower right rather than the upper left.)  Now, it is not easy to produce a simple meaning for the American or any other national flag.  It is a national symbol, but different people will have a variety of different associations with it.  But by semi-convention an inverted flag is “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."  This is the language of the semi-official “American Flag Code.”  But we already now have two semis—meaning (for me) that there is no definitive meaning to the display of an inverted flag, an ambiguous act subject to much subjective interpretation.  Alito’s critics claim that since the inverted flag was carried by some of the Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021—a claim that seems plausible, though one I have not been able to confirm from easily available iconographic evidence—the flag so displayed is an approbation of unlawful insurrection.  So Justice Alito must be a—a what?  According to his own testimony this whole thing had nothing to do with him—it was his wife!—not that he acknowledges any impropriety or assigns any definite meaning in her flag display.  The meanings being imputed to him are murky, but in every case unflattering.  Even if he is not an insurrectionist, he must be expressing a belief that the nation is in mortal danger?  Of course, a number of the most vociferous complaints about Alito’s signals come from folks who subscribe to their alleged content—that our nation faces a serious, indeed an “existential” threat, should Mr. Trump be elected to a second term.  This concern parallels that of many others who find a similar threat in Trump’s possible re-election.

 

                             "Signs, Signals, and Code" Merit Badge Patch

 

But there is a branch of sign theory that does deal with non-verbal signs of this sort extensively.  Nonverbal communication is important enough to merit its own Boy Scouts’ merit badge.  “The Signs, Signals and Codes merit badge covers a number of the nonverbal ways we communicate: emergency signaling, Morse code, American Sign Language, braille, trail signs, sports officiating hand signals, traffic signs, secret codes and more.”  Quite a lot more, if you think about it: thumbs up, thumbs down, middle finger, cut throat, clenched fist, index finger sealing lips, etc., etc.  When you come right down to it, signs, signals, and codes seem the very essence of Augustinian linguistic theory.

 

A major component of the preparation for the merit badge is the study of flag-talk, or semaphore.  The word means “sign-bearing,” and signifies a system that tries to convey verbal messages by means of creating a conventional alphabet of corporeal gesture by waving colored flags. This system grows ever more obsolete in an age of electronic communication, but it still exists.  The purpose is to achieve significant verbal communication over fairly long distances where the sender is visible but not audible, especially between ships at sea.  The would-be communicator holds the brightly colored flags (usually red and yellow) and “spells” out the message by moving body and flags in conventionally agreed upon patterns.  An adaptation of the technique for nighttime use employs flashing lights patterned to the alphabetical Morse code: most famously, SOS!  You might say our nation began with such a signal: One if by land, two if by sea…

 

Semaphore alphabet

 

            The subject of interest to the old Stoic logicians, and to their critic Augustine, was the possibility of precision—and thus lack of ambiguity—in human verbal constructs.  But the “meaning” of flags, and of the motives for their display, is often anything but clear.  So I must conclude that flag-waving is a rather poor way of communicating complex or nuanced ideas.  It is also manifestly subject to gross misunderstanding and practically invites intentional distortion. 

 

 

In a very crucial moment of Virgil’s Æneid, the hero’s meeting with Cumaean Sibyl, the hero begs that she deliver her prophecy in oral rather than in written form.  We may find the implied idea that spoken language is invariably clearer than written language surprising; but we have no Demosthenes, no Cicero in our public conversations.  I wish I could believe that the two verbal “debates” agreed upon by Presidents Biden and Trump promised substance and clarification, but on the basis of past experience, I cannot.  It is that fear that my quotation marks hope to imply.  More like bringing an unlighted candle into a dark room.

 

...and I on the opposite shore will be...

 

 

 

 

*Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa discuntur.

 

 

Menendezes of New Jersey

 

 

What’s in a name?  Juliet wants to know.  You may have had reason to ask this question with regard to your own surname and come to the same conclusion as Juliet: that a family name is an arbitrary denominator.  The word name, indeed, is simply a grammatical term for one of the parts of speech—usually called a noun these days—denominating a person, place, or thing.  A few of our classier verbs reflect actual surnames.  A wonderful word too seldom used, burk (to murder by strangling, throttling or suffocating) goes back to the murderous activities of Burke and Hare in the early nineteenth centuries.  This gruesome pair supplied Scottish medical schools with corpses for anatomy classes.   Later in the Victorian period a certain Captain Boycott became the object of a well-organized shunning campaign that added a new word to the English vocabulary.  I presume it is on the model of burk(e) that the verb bork occasionally still appears in the press.  This refers to the techniques used by Ted Kennedy and others to defeat President Reagan’s nomination of the conservative jurist Robert  Bork to the Supreme Court in in 1987. 

 

On August  20, 1989 the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, teamed up in killing their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in their upscale family home in Beverly Hills.  The weapons used were matching Mossberg shotguns, twelve gauge.  Mr. Menendez was shot six times, his wife ten times.  If you know anything at all about firearms you will know that a twelve gauge shotgun is a formidable weapon with the power to kill a deer with a slug and the spread to obliterate a covey of quail with shot.  I speak of the effect from one shotgun shell.  The brothers used shot, some at point blank range.  The scene was, shall we say, messy.

 

This event proved to be a sensation throughout the whole country, but it was of special interest in our town because the Menendez family had for a time lived in the Princeton area.  The fraternal murderers had both attended the Princeton Day School, and Lyle had attended Princeton University.  Indeed, I had personal knowledge of one of the assailants.  When I returned for a second stint as the Master of Wilson College (the oldest of the residential colleges among which all Princeton undergraduates are distributed during their first two years)—this would have been in 1987 or ’88—I was greeted in the pool room by an obnoxious fellow who seemed to think he owned the place.  This was Lyle.  Lyle did not achieve a Princeton degree, having been suspended for plagiarism; but he continued to like the place.

 

My ideas about the LA police were molded in my youth by watching Jack Webb play Sergeant Friday on Dragnet.  For some reason it took the actual sleuths investigating the Menendez murders a surprisingly long time to do what Jack Webb always did in about half an hour.  Before being arrested the brothers had enough time to blow through roughly seven hundred thousand dollars of the family estate and made various improvident investments, including the purchase of a greasy spoon specializing in chicken wings—Chuck’s Spring Street Café—a block north of the Princeton University campus.  This place is still going, but only a tiny cognoscenti still refer to it as Parricide’s Palace.  Very good wings, though.

 

When I met Lyle Menendez in the bowels of Wilcox Hall I did not ask him if he was related to the senior senator from our state, Bob Menendez, because Bob Menendez was at that time famous only in Union City, where he was the mayor.  I had never heard of him.  In fact, I became aware of him only in 2006 when he was appointed to fill out  the term of Jon Corzine, who was moving up to be our governor.  At the next election Menendez was chosen for a full six-year term.  I only sat up and took notice in 2015 during his first corruption trial, which ended in a hung jury.  This was more or less business as usual.  One of the expectations of living in the Garden State is that one of our major state politicians—impartial as to party affiliation—should be under indictment or threat thereof at all times.  The alleged sleaze on that occasion was of the common or garden variety.  Not so the corruption alleged by prosecutors in the trial now underway.  The operative adjective describing the case might be “bizarre.”

 

The pay-to-play schemes with which Senator Menendez is charged, along with his wife Nadine who is to be tried separately later, are pedestrian enough; but the details are fascinating.  Menendez, who has not resigned from the Senate but has given up the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, is charged with major influence peddling on behalf of three businessmen with ties to the Egyptian government.  (There is a sizeable population of Egyptian immigrants and nationals in north Jersey.)  The alleged bribes include a snappy Mercedes convertible in the possession of Nadine.  More fascinating to the police investigators are stacks of gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cold cash, much of it found stuffed into envelopes and semi-secreted all over the Menendez residence.  The senator was born in New York, and grew up in New Jersey, but has explained his curious banking arrangements by alluding to the alleged experiences of his father in Cuba, where his banked money was confiscated by the government.  That is, a United State senator, the chairman of one of its most powerful committees, is fearful of the possible confiscation of his money by the government of which he is a member.  It is hard to tell whether this claimed fear is more alarming as fact or as fiction.

 

I have written before about my own brief employment in the Senate Document Room in 1958, in a patronage job arranged by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, then chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.  The office joke in that ancient era involved the comparative amatory stamina of Representatives and Senators.  The former tended to be younger, and the latter elder.  Hence the House has a Committee on Foreign Affairs.  The best that the Senate can do is a Committee on Foreign Relations.  Get it, get it?

 

            The senator’s lawyers insist that Bob and Nadine Menendez are far from Bonnie and Clyde.  It has just been reported that Nadine has received a diagnosis of breast cancer, a devastating development that surely demands universal sympathy.  Yet her husband’s lawyers seem to be planning an Adamic defense: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”  The claim that the Senator was entirely unaware of dubious or felonious arrangements being made by his better half may seem to an outsider less than chivalrous, among other less thans.  But it cannot be wholly surprising. A great philosopher-poet reminds us of a hard truth of conceivable relevance here: “When love congeals/ it soon reveals/ the faint aroma of performing seals/ the double crossing of a pair of heels.”

 

 

            The presumption of innocence is a valuable feature of our legal system.  As of this writing, Senator Menendez has been convicted of no crime, and Nadine Menendez’s trial is in the indefinite future.  We cannot apply to the Senator’s wife the unreasonably high standard once set for Caesar’s wife.  So, I return to the philological theme with which I began: proper names that have become naturalized in the English vocabulary.   However the court cases go, it is doubtful that “Menendez” is likely to become a transitive verb like the monosyllabic burk or the disyllabic boycott.  It has too many syllables.  The only trisyllable that immediately comes to mind is an inexact but vaguely similar one: to mirandize, meaning to remind a criminal suspect of his specific rights before proceeding to interrogate him.  Mr. Miranda was a low-life, all-purpose habitual criminal who died in a barroom brawl, but his name will be forever remembered in connection with our most cherished civil rights. 

 

Summer Camp Early Report

 

 

 

This will be an essay without a topic, more along the lines of the kind of extorted report that might be a parent’s best hope from a twelve-year-old at summer camp.  Since I never went to summer camp, I never had a chance to write one myself, and so leap at it now.  One of my granddaughters has familiarized me with the genre.  I am on my own in Princeton and feeling rather unconnected.   Joan, accompanied by elder son Richard, flew off to England on Thursday morning.  They went to visit granddaughter Lulu, a Barnard College junior who is spending a happy term abroad in Pembroke College, Cambridge.  Telephonic and email reports from various the principals suggest that visit is a great success, and everyone is having a great time.  Richard has even seen a life-list bird, an increasing rare event and one usually requiring geographical exoticism beyond East Anglia.  They will be home by the time I post this.  I do wish I could be there, but I I am fortunately not entirely on my own.  My wonderful health aide, Christie Kadelu, had been keeping me out of trouble.  But I still have the feeling of Life on Hold.  And after a couple of days reaching the high seventies, the weather turned rainy and cool again, and in general I feel the week has actually conspired against me. 

 

I had a rather bad twenty-four hours on account of what I call my “electric foot”.   This is a a neurological aberration the medical name of which may or may not be a neuroma.  It is not uncommon among the aging, but has been considerably exacerbated by some of my other difficulties.  There is the sensation, beginning abruptly,  of a sharp, short electric sting in the toes, foot, ankle, or lower leg.  It is intermittent, with the little shocks spaced with a more or  less regular rhythm at intervals of about a minute at its height and three minutes at its mildest.  At its rare worst it I painful enough to make the leg jump, and even when relatively mild it makes falling asleep difficult or impossible.  The mind cannot relax into somnolence as it anticipates the next jolt.  This episode, the first in many months, was also the most painful I can remember, inflicting its intermittent short sharp stings to my lower left ankle with a real malice for several hours.  It then decreases both in frequency and in the sharpness of the sting and generally disappears entirely within twenty-four hours.  It had been so long since I experienced this annoyance that I was rather offended by its return.  I lost all but a couple of hours of a night’s sleep.  However, it is now reduced to a sleepable level.  Unfortunately, you don’t get a memo from the universe alerting you to the corporal insults awaiting you in old age.  But even amidst all this self-indulgence, I must not drift into an organ recital, as an elderly wit of my acquaintance characterizes the typical conversation of seniors.

 

Two major events in the public sphere have dominated my attention, along no doubt with that of a great many of my fellow Americans.  As my last couple of essays must suggest, I have been very concerned about the student demonstrations on many of our campuses.  I will say what worries me in a moment, but I think a sigh of relief is perhaps in order.  That is, I think that the weekend just past was relatively reassuring on the protest front. Protestors were allowed to make their point, and most institutions were allowed to make at least a gesture toward theirs—the point of an academic commencement being ceremonial and quasi-sacramental.   So far as I know, and despite the apparently high hopes of several thousand journalists and the malicious actions of a very few bad actors, dozens of institutional celebrations took place in an atmosphere of reasonably good order.  I will breathe a little easier if the next weekend transpires as the last one did.  There is serious potential mischief awaiting us at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late summer, but sufficient unto the day…What worries me about the protests had no direct connection with Israel, with Gaza, or even the horrible slaughter that initiated the war and has characterized its prosecution.  I fear that this particular form of campus disorder is likely further to alienate an important segment of the American population who already have a dim view of academic self-righteousness and self-satisfaction and will be further put off by this episode.  There are already enough cynical politicians fanning these flames.  I want our colleges to be, and to be seen to be, the great national treasures that at their best they are.

 

            There is, however, a big however.  Though my opinion is that the protests have often been wrong-headed and transgressive, they evidence the moral seriousness and idealism of at least many of the youthful protesters.  The other major news story of the moment is the continuing trial of Donald Trump.  It is generally called the “hush money trial” though it is technically a “falsification of documents” trial, there being no precise actual legal category for what it is really about, which is sleaze, personal and political.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m as much of a voyeur as any tabloid reader, even if my tabloid is the Times.  The latest reports I have read concern the testimony of Mr. Trump’s one-time lawyer, Michael Cohen, who is of course a felon, a perjurer, a former convict, and now a kind of male version of Alecto or Tisiphone, remorseless in his vengeful mission.  Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted that in his choice of lieutenants he takes only the best, and Cohen does seem to have been very good at what he did, at least for a while. 

 

The headline on one Times story reads thus: “Trump Told Cohen Disclosure of His Fling Would Be a Total Disaster.”  This headline seems hyperbolic in at least two ways.  Few disasters are actually total.  Indeed, the testimony is that Mr. Trump and/or his advisers thought that most potential male voters would be okay with the story, but that it might not go over so well with women.  Do you think?  My real objection is to the word “fling”.  Surely a fling has a little more going for it than this?  Surely “a drop” would be better, or at best a “toss”.  Best of all would be best to drop the whole subject.  It’s funny that so many things that aren’t funny are so laughable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Unquiet on Campus

 

Readers will know that I have been caught up in the news about campus protests.  Circumstances have had me reading lots of stories in the New York Times, many of which are of dubious authority as they tend to stress short moments of drama and confrontation that belie the generally static and indeed tedious aspects of the “sit-in” or “occupation” mode.   Indeed, it is rather difficult to dramatize the “hours and hours of boredom” as opposed to the comparatively rare “few moments of absolute terror” that punctuate them.  That was the formulation journalists came up with to describe the battlefields of the first World War.  And of course it is fair to say that student protests have rendered some of our campuses battlefields of a sort.

 

Surely the large majority of student protesters are idealistic and passionately sincere.  They are utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, which also means of course of their own virtue.  They are prone to think that those who might disagree with them are bad people but that they are good people.   But those are explanatory descriptions of a mind set, not  Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards.  It has generally been a principle of American political protest when it manifests itself in the public realm that the protesters be frank and bold in their protestations—that they “claim ownership of them,” as the phrase goes.  There is a famous story involving Thoreau and Emerson, the only inconvenience of which is its fictionality, illustrating the idea.  In 1846 Thoreau was (very briefly) jailed for failing to pay his poll tax.  As he later wrote in "Civil Disobedience," he believed "it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support."  He did this to register his hostility to chattel slavery, tolerated by American law.  That is the historical part of the story.  The legend is that he was visited in jail by Emerson, who is supposed to have said, “Henry, I am very surprised to find you in this place of custody.,” to which the prisoner is supposed to have retorted, “Waldo, I am very disappointed that you are not in jail!”  The moral: when the civil disobedience demanded by justice and conscience clashes with the law, break the law.

 

The large majority of the protesters at Columbia and several other places have masked their faces.  This is not a fact without significance.  There are various benign masked figures in our folklore—Robin Hood and the Lone Ranger come to mind.  But in real life most masked brigands have not in fact robbed from the rich in order to give to the poor.  Their masking is an effort to avoid identification and legal retribution.  When cloaking violence and criminality, masking likewise heightens the terror effect.  If you knew for a fact that that menacing sub-kleagle of the KKK was actually a balding guy who sells Fuller brushes you might at least have the slight comfort of knowing something about the banality of evil.  Even if they do not fear the illegality of their actions—or even if they are performing no actual illegal actions—the protesters may fear the retribution of “doxing”.  This English neologism, a child of the Internet age, is supposedly short for “documenting” or “dropping documents”—such as name, address, etc.  “Doxing is a form of cyberbullying that uses sensitive or secret information, statements, or records for the harassment, exposure, financial harm, or other exploitation of targeted individuals.”  It is another term for public identification.  Demonstrators may well prefer that school authorities, or their parents and friends, or public safety officials, or their professors, political adversaries, or parole officers actually not know for sure who they are.  Disguised identity, however, strikes me as sinister, and at the very least Civil Disobedience Light.

 

What captures my attention today, however, is a certain body of evidence of how the general public is reacting to the demonstrations.  There is a feature of the on-line Times of special interest to a protest-watcher.  That is the “Comments” section.  For many stories it is possible for any reader to make a comment, and often some hundreds of readers do just that.  The genre of the “comment” is not friendly to subtlety.  “Both sidesism” is rare and sometimes execrated.  The “Arab-Israeli conflict” provides a kind of political Rorschach Test in the American press.   I think it is also safe to say that the Times readership tips decidedly left on the whole.  Under these circumstances I find what seems to be a decisive  majority critical of the protestors a fact of which Democratic Party officials may want to take note.  Another feature of the comments of interest to me is that what I shall call the pro-Palestinian commentators, who though in a marked minority are still numerous, not infrequently invoke their own experiences as anti-War protestors in the late ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies.  What interests me most, though, is their frequent use of the phrase “the right side of history.”  Does history have “sides,” and if so only two, heads or tails, right or wrong?  As an historian of medieval religious movements myself, I have spent a fair amount of time studying “heresy”—deviations from orthodox religious belief or practice.  I am afraid my study has left me with what must seem a cynical definition of heresy.  Heresy is the side that loses.  In 1972, Zhou Enlai, the premier of China under Mao Zedong, was supposedly asked the question: “What was the long-term impact of the French Revolution?” His answer: “Too early to say.”  The anecdote is frequently treated as whimsical or facetious, but in fact it seems to me good Confucian wisdom.  

 

Many professors, including myself, are happy to acknowledge the huge debt they owe to their generations of students over many years.  Students are in many ways our teachers as well.   But action born of youthful passion too often claims the authority of a spurious certainty.  It is fairly easy to see that the situation in Gaza is absolutely horrible, and that the massive slaughter of a civilian population is unconscionable.  It is much more difficult to see that the current campus protests will have any practical effect in ameliorating that situation.  On the contrary, my fear is that their tendency is likely to further degrade the reputation of some of our finest institutions of higher learning in the eyes of the larger population in whose service they have been founded and to whose benefit they are dedicated. 

 

The Eighty Per Cent Principle

Hamilton Hall, Columbia University

 

        In this essay I return to the arena of American higher education, which was the arena of my own long professional activity; but I do so with the realization that in the flux of our quickly evolving social and political history, I do so as an outsider with increasingly obsolete expertise. 

            As I write, the health of American higher education has become a subject of general discussion.  Several American college campuses are in a state of excitement, tension, or even upheaval attendant upon (mainly) student political demonstrations responding to the conduct of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza.  I suspect there is more to come.  I also fear some of it could prove seriously troublesome.  One of the most prominent sites of protest and discord is the campus of Columbia University in New York.  Columbia’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is under criticism from several directions and is, I rather imagine, wishing she were back at the London School of Economics from which she was plucked by a Columbia search committee following an intergalactic search.

 

            It is distressing to me that the situation at Columbia University has gone off the rails.  Though I have only the slightest connection to the institution, to be mentioned presently, I have a particular admiration for it.  Toward the end of my teaching career I spent some years as a commissioner of the Middle States accrediting body, and I was a member of a team sent to consider Columbia’s reaccreditation.  For such a high quality, financially stable, and internationally renowned institution, the question of reccreditation is of course a foregone conclusion.  But such a visitation can still be helpful to such a place, especially if the visitors focus on topics of current administrative interest and effort and current campus discussion.  Our focus was the university’s vision of undergraduate education.

 

Under the leadership of a visionary provost, Columbia was in the process of rethinking and reanimating its approach to undergraduate life.  I think it is fair to say that at the time the institution’s justly exalted reputation was based primarily on its important professional schools and its post-graduate programs in many departments.  Undergraduate education had not exactly been neglected, of course, but it was now enjoying a fresh investment of conscious attention.  There must be hundreds of thousands of young Americans who would love to attend college in New York City.  The Columbia administration knew that and developed imaginative ways of appealing to them.  One was a so-called “Passport to New York,” soon imitated by other NYC institutions, which allowed students to explore museums and other cultural venues of the city “free” as part of their “citizenship” in the University.  The liberal arts faculty, traditionally of outstanding quality, became an even more visible attraction.  As someone who taught at a high quality, undergraduate-focused institution myself, I was mightily impressed.  I am less favorably impressed by what is now transpiring at Columbia.  I can claim some slight personal interest.  Our daughter is a Barnard alumna and current trustee.  One of her daughters is a current Barnard junior—fortuitously now studying for a term at Cambridge University in England.

 

Intractable situations are intractable for various reasons, but one of them is almost always a complexity resistant to simple solutions shouted through bullhorns or printed on cardboard posters.  It is possible to have complex and nuanced ideas about the current war in Gaza, and I have a few myself, but they have no particular authority and surely lack bullhorn confidence.  In fact it is the lack of full confidence in them that is my real subject today.  The significant experience I want to relate is one that I touched on in this blog a few years ago.  It is the “Eighty Percent Principle”, and it is a memorial tribute to a great man I was privileged to know: Robert Goheen (1919-2008), a former president of Princeton.  

 

When I was much younger, and newly arrived as an assistant professor at Princeton, I served a term on a committee involved with the quality of undergraduate life.  This was a subject concerning which I actually knew very little but nonetheless had definite opinions.  I had spent a single year in residence in the graduate program.  As graduate students we were indeed aware of the sea of undergraduates surrounding us.  But this was before the time in which graduate students began teaching them in the preceptorials (discussion groups) spun off from large courses.  By the time of the anecdote I shall now relate I had had some experience teaching Princeton undergraduates, but certainly not enough to justify my confidence in making dogmatic statements concerning them to the institution’s president.  Nonetheless I did so.  President Goheen had invited me to lunch with him at the faculty restaurant—an event most rare for a junior professor.  He actually had an agenda.  He eventually would ask me to take over the direction of the Woodrow Wilson Society, which was the pioneer forerunner of our residential college system, a system that eventually grew to accommodate all students in their underclass years.

 

But before he approached that subject he wanted to give me some personal advice.  It takes a skillful administrator to make what easily could have the full force of a reprimand sound like a hot tip instead.  He said that he had learned that though the major goals of a major university could be defined with surprising clarity, the means of achieving them were often uncertain, opaque, or experimental.  You had to have well thought-out ideas, of course, and you had to be forceful and prepared in advancing and attempting to implement them.  Never be sure, he said, that you are more than eighty percent right about any particular idea. 

Now it is obvious that what been known as the “Arab-Israeli Conflict” during at least the last seventy-five years of my life has ideological roots.  All conflict has to be rooted to some extent in ideas.  The ideas lying behind the establishment of Israel—call them “Zionism” if you wish—are varied and complex.  The resistance to Zionism (in situ as well as simply as an intellectual concept) is nearly as old as Zionism itself and certainly equally bellicose.  And the debate, or conflict, or struggle—the very words used to denominate it usually imply a strong point of view—is a dubious battle.   Surveying the antagonists you will find precious few eighty percenters.  There is no trace of moral ambiguity in the minds of the leadership of Hamas or of the Israeli war cabinet.  Those guys are all absolutely certain, hundred percenters.  It seems to me they would have to be, to do what they are doing.

 

Indeed, probably most of us are hundred percenters about a great many things in life.  I have ideas and judgements concerning the war in Gaza that easily reach the eighty mark.  Perhaps you do, too.  But the soundness of an idea is but imperfectly judged by the certainty with which it is held and the passion with which it is proclaimed.  Utter certainty about matters concerning which there is manifestly intelligent and plausible difference of opinion does not earn validation or assent from a supposed virtue of hundred percentism.  In the midst of pondering these things, I came upon a Times opinion piece by one of its editorial board gurus, Serge Schmemann, once a graduate student at Columbia: “Student Protest is an Essential Part of Education.”  This struck me as a rather dumb essay by an undoubtedly smart man who had succumbed to nostalgia for his youthful glory days as a student in 1968!  But one of the truly essential parts of education is developing the ability to see distinctions in things only superficially similar.  Student protest is not an essential part of education.  It may be a heartfelt expression of ethical passion or a characteristic part of the performative rites of spring and a welcome substitute for final exams and papers.  But if I had just spent four years of academic hard work financed by my self-sacrificing parents and the generosity of dozens of others unknown to me, I might like to enjoy the solemnity and festivity of a hard-earned graduation ceremony without being shouted down as a thought criminal.

 

knocking at the gates of knowledge