University of Austin

 

 

            Recently a group of academics and journalists announced the foundation of a new American university, the University of Austin (not to be confused with the large old university already in that city, the University of Texas).  The muted buzz that greeted this birth has now largely stilled, but I believe the initiative may prove to be of lasting importance.  It has further publicized the charges of groupthink and herd mentality widely leveled against university faculties, especially humanities departments.  These charges, which find expression in bizarre incidents reported in the popular press and close-to-the-bone spoofs in stand-up comedy and the satirical television serial The Chair, have already infiltrated the national political debate.  The president of the fledgling institution declares it to be guided by three principles: unfettered search for the truth, freedom of inquiry and conscience, and civil discourse.  What’s not to like?  Well, according to a political cryptographer on MSNBC, what these principles really mean is that “In exchange for paying to indulge in racism and transphobia the students get…nothing.”  The peculiar nastiness with which the erudite used to abuse each other was called “theological hatred,” odium theologicum.  With the decline of religion we are left with odium academicum.  Among more moderate cavils I have seen is an essay by the president of Wesleyan University (an institution in which faculty opinion on woke issues ranges all the way from A to A prime) gently lamenting the wrong-headedness of the whole Austin idea.  He is not sure we need “another conservative university.”  Nor am I, if what that description means is an indoctrination machine.

 

            Academic wokeness is sufficiently irritating and, indeed, sufficiently intellectually pernicious to stimulate the foundation of an Anti-Woke academy, but Anti-Wokeness cannot be the sole or even main substance of an academic enterprise.  I am a titular member of a controversial group called the Heterodox Academy founded by the social psychologist Jonathan Heidt at NYU.  Its members believe that higher education should be characterized by “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.”  That one can be controversial by loving Mom and apple pie should tell you something about the current state of many academic faculties.  Such an organization as the HA does valuable work in defending liberal principles of academic freedom and comity.  But there is a difference between the guiding principles of an educational institution and its curriculum.  If the University of Austin can develop an excellent curriculum to which it applies its admirable principles, it could be a great success.  But that will be an extraordinarily heavy lift.  The names I have seen listed as its potential beginning faculty form a kind of Who’s Who of victims and critics of wokeness.  I admire some of them enormously, but of course the way to build a great faculty is to hire people who know a lot about particular disciplinary subjects and are very good at teaching them.  I will return to this theme in a moment.

 

            First, I perhaps need to make the point that many of the world’s great centers of learning, like the social organizations founding them, were born in polemic and reaction.  This is particularly true of American colleges.  Many venerable institutions came into being because their founders were unhappy with the state of the venerable institutions to which they were at the time attached.  The English monarchy is a most venerable institution.  When they became aggrieved at the monarchy, the Founding Fathers dumped it and launched a cheeky start-up of their own.  The origins of the western university—a construction of startling originality—were gaudily entrepreneurial and adversarial.  Peter Abelard became famous by breaking with his old teacher, William of Champeaux, and setting off on his own.  Several medieval universities were founded by disgruntled professors unhappy with trends in their own institutions.  In early America the great engine of educational innovation was the Christian religion in its often warring sectarian forms.  This or that religious group was desirous of having its “own” institutions or unhappy with trends in one that already existed.  The great glory of American higher education, which is still in many ways the envy of the world, lies in its copious variety, aka “diversity”.  You have your Harvard and you have your local community college.  My view is the more the merrier.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.  I don’t think the mission of higher education is to spare undergraduates the “harm” of disputed ideas.  When it comes to the power of Truth, I’m with Milton: “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”  In principle there is absolutely no reason that in this land of start-ups you could not launch a successful, potentially great, start-up university.  But it will not be easy.

 

            There is an often-told anecdote about the American tourist in Oxford dazzled by the utter perfection of the nearly sacred lawns within the individual colleges.  She asks a gardener, busy in pushing a compressive roller over the grass, how he has achieved the magic effect.  “Oh, it’s pretty simple,” he replies.  “Keep people from walking on it, and just keep clipping it and rolling it, clip and roll, clip and roll—for eight hundred years.”  Venerability cannot be ordered from Amazon.  Ivy is a comparatively slow-growing plant.  Most of our great institutions have impressive origin myths stressing their difficult and humble beginnings.  I have not seen President James Garfield frequently quoted in recent decades, but every dog has his day.  To Garfield is attributed another famous anecdote concerning higher education.  The ideal college, he said, was “Mark Hopkins and a student in a log cabin.”  (The theologian Mark Hopkins was a legendary teacher and president of Williams College in the middle of the nineteenth century.  The remark was soon improved to “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student at the other.”)  Perhaps the University of Austin will be able to create a significant and credible institutional “presence” within a relatively short time.  After all Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, did spring fully grown from the brow of Zeus.  But that is a daunting challenge not to be achieved by high principles or noble goals alone.  It will require a boatload of money.

 

            Though their website is a bit cagey on the matter, Austin’s founders are talking about a bricks-and-mortar operation.  That, in my opinion, is the only model capable of competing with the long-established institutions that are the American norm.  On-line courses, “distant learning”—all well and good around the edges, but not a university.  As it now can cost a million dollars to build a big house in this country, you can perhaps imagine what it would cost to reproduce the real estate of even a small liberal arts college, let alone a Cornell or a Chapel Hill.  Or perhaps like me you cannot: anyway, some number ending with many zeros.  Medieval universities could be peripatetic.  The University of Austin doesn’t have to be in Austin.   I suppose that one realistic possible head start would be to snap up one of several failing old institutions in a fire sale.  (The term of art would be “partnering”.)  Given two facts about the current cultural moment—the large number of the super-rich and the vehemence of our political divisions—I suspect there is a significant pool of potential mega-donors.  Whether there is a sufficient pool of mega-donors committed to a fiercely independent enterprise—one of the founders’ stated promises—is another matter.

 

            The problems that any nascent start-up faces are formidable.  But its promise is still nonetheless great, and it enjoys some fine advantages and possibilities.  One major problem in American higher education is its exorbitant cost, especially at the elite or “legacy” institutions.  It is hard for me to believe that it is worth $80,000 per annum to bask in the intellectual radiance of Wesleyan or anyplace else.  Not that I imagine that many families actually pay those fees.  Like my own institution, Princeton, most of our very expensive institutions are actually charitable engines of financial redistribution which, through lavish programs of scholarship aid, have for decades been fostering the national meritocracy in which I still believe.  It is easier to do this if you have an endowment of a few  billions.  But whether paid by individuals or by charitable endowments, the high costs are real.  And though education is supposed to be highly profitable to those lucky enough to enjoy it, no epithet is more damning in the discussion of colleges and universities than “for profit”.  One major factor in the rise of college expenses in recent decades is the manifest bloating of highly paid university administrations.  A start-up could and should strangle this monster in the cradle.  The Austin people seem to recognize this problem and be ready to address it.  A second great advantage would be in faculty recruitment.  College teaching is conspicuously a buyer’s market at the introductory level.  And within current faculties, yearning to breathe free, there still are a great many talented professors who are passionate about Euler numbers, the Chanson de Roland, string theory, tectonic plates, Meso-American pottery, Kant’s second treatise, African economies, the Great Migration, the languages of the Malay peninsula.  These are among a thousand other topics crying out to be studied and taught in a generous, liberal, and tolerant intellectual milieu.  A very great deal about the ways our colleges are run seems tired and creaky, including the academic calendar, the nature and purpose of the doctoral dissertation in the humanities, and the conventions surrounding faculty tenure.  The new broom sweeps clean.  The founding of a new university might offer an opportunity for a deep dive into these troubled waters.  But first things first.  Having adopted its coat of arms, the UofA must now move on to the second requirement of an American university—a line of sweatshirts.

 

 

Crowds and Castastrophe

 

 

           One of the old saws needing serious qualification is the one about safety in numbers.  The dangers presented by the madness of crowds as an important historical theme was first drawn to my attention by a book I read many years ago: George Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution.  The dangers are especially great when large numbers in the crowd are literally or, perhaps more commonly, metaphorically intoxicated.  By metaphoric intoxication I mean possession by an intensely powerful shared immediate objective, passion, prejudice, or religious fervor.  Race riots, pogroms, lynchings—all of which are well documented in modern history—are examples of the dangers of mob violence.

            If crowds can be the incubators of criminal violence, they often have been the convenient targets at which criminal violence has been directed.  The “crowded market-place” has been one of the favorite venues for Middle Eastern suicide bombers, but any large gathering, such as those congregated for religious services and weddings, has proved vulnerable.  Four or five years ago a demented man in Las Vegas murdered some sixty people attending a music festival.  About eight hundred others were wounded by his gunfire or injured in the ensuing panic.  Without attracting the attention of any of the hotel staff he had successfully brought up to his complimentary rooms in an upper floor of the flashy Mandalay Bay hotel a veritable armory of high-powered rifles, some of them modified in such a fashion as to turn them in effect into continuous-fire machine guns.  As a concert neared its conclusion he fired down into the large crowd in attendance in the plaza below. He set a new record, which will doubtless prove temporary, for mindless slaughter before killing himself.  Nobody knows why he did it, but there is no why that could really explain it.  He had big gambling debts, but he carefully paid them off before getting on with his mass murder.  If people are packed closely enough together, a shooter need not be much of a marksman to do a lot of damage.  In Colorado a graduate school dropout shot up a cinema audience gathered to view the film “The Dark Knight Rises.”  In Florida an Islamic terrorist dealt out devastation in a packed nightclub.

            In all these instances, and indeed in dozens of others like them, journalists are wont to underscore the dichotomy between the carefree, often celebratory mood of the congregated victims and the inscrutable dark motives of the perpetrators who strike without warning or comprehensible motive.  Yet as we have been reminded by a terrible event of the last few days, crowds have demonstrated time and again that they are very great dangers to themselves.

            Religious pilgrimages, sporting events, rock concerts—anyplace where large, het-up crowds are trying to get into or out of constricted areas—are potential sites of slaughter.  The latest disaster, last Friday, was at a Houston music festival at which the rapper Travis Scott was performing before an audience of fifty thousand people.  That is roughly the population of a small city like Joplin MO or Troy NY.  At such events the authorities normally have on hand a medical tent to deal with drug overdoses. For Mr. Scott’s performance, this facility was overwhelmed before the actual concert began.  Mr. Scott is apparently one of those “the-show-must-go-on” types, so it went on as, unbeknownst to him, people were being suffocated and trampled to death.  Altogether, eight died.  Many more were injured, including a ten-year-old child.  One of the dead was fourteen.  Am I simply too unhip to know why a ten-year-old would possibly be at such an event?

            There have been a few times in my life when I felt endangered by being in the midst of a crowd.  Mainly this has simply been a feeling of enforced immobility and uncertainty amidst sensations of obscure shoving and jostling.  Once in London I felt overwhelmed and threatened among a sudden rush of drunken Scottish soccer fans who swamped an Underground train on which I was riding, packing the car far beyond its intended capacity.

        The only time I have been really scared was on my one visit to Israel many years ago now.  My son-in-law, who grew up in Jerusalem, had arranged a marvelous tour for me, and directed most of it personally.  But he thought, correctly, that I would like to visit some of the traditional pilgrimage sites in and around Bethlehem.  There I was on my own.  Bethlehem, a West Bank village under the administration of the Palestinian Authority, is probably not more than ten kilometers from the Old City in Jerusalem; but in my experience it has much in common with Virgil’s Avernus, or perhaps the Roach Motel.  It is much easier to get into than out of.

            I don’t know what to call the formidable fortress through which all travelers between the two territories must pass.  Terms like check-point or customs station are clearly inadequate.  It seemed to me very large, and reminded me most of a heavy concrete subterranean parking garage.  It was roofed with a grill of heavy metal bars.  You could hear and also see military boots walking noisily about on top of it.  There were some roped stanchions to direct lines of visitors toward the kiosks where officials, again I think military people, asked you what you were about and examined your passport.  Except there were not any lines of visitors, only me and three or four others, one of them a Christian nun.  After a brief but thorough inquiry into my papers and purposes I was directed to a door quite some distance away.  This opened onto the Palestinian West Bank in the form of a grubby and littered parking lot where there were waiting, as I had been told to expect them to be, a number of drivers in their taxis hoping for visitors to employ them as guides to the principal tourist sites of Jesus’s birthplace.  My “guide” was a pleasant man who took me to all the right places and let me poke about on my own.  I enjoyed the experience, parts of which were quite moving.

            This essay is about crowds, however, and specifically the large crowd already gathered at the parking-garage frontier barrier on the return trip.  I had been one among five on the exit from Jerusalem.  I was now one among five hundred—one conspicuously tall Caucasian bobbing above a choppy sea of Semites.  There was a lot of shoving and jostling.  It was as though everyone in the crowd was trying to stake out an ideal place from which to race to an exit, the exact position of which no one knew.  This seemed wholly irrational.  Though more people kept arriving, there was plenty of open space behind; yet people jammed in like voluntary sardines.  There were loud arguments in Arabic, louder peremptory commands from the military police.  There was no independent volitional motion.  The whole crowd swayed and staggered to capricious but irresistible forces.  Some people were being pushed against the iron bars of the cage.  My rational mind knew that there were twenty yards of open space not far distant behind me; still I was terrified.  What must it feel like to be trampled by a hundred soccer fans or rap enthusiasts who have nowhere to go except across your body?

November Begins

 

 

            The last few days have been eventful, and in my part of the world somber in a way that echoed the events.   A week out from the changing of the clocks, both the mornings and the evenings are unpleasantly dark, with chill winds and a fair amount of drizzle.  I have finally had to face up to how much I am dreading the approach of real winter.  The three immediately preceding days have seen Hallowe’en, the opening of the global climate conference in Glasgow, and then yesterday a couple of harbinger gubernatorial elections.  Each of these I found disconcerting in various ways.

 

            The evolution of Hallowe’en in this country is particularly interesting.  All the world’s great religions are ritually respectful of the dead; and some students of comparative religion find in the commemoration of the dead and various concepts of spiritual afterlife or material reincarnation the principal and original impulses behind all religions.  In the old religious calendar of Christian Europe there were two adjacent holy days (falling on November first and second) devoted to the commemoration of the dead.  All Saints’ Day was a general celebration of all those who had formally or informally been declared to have been conspicuously holy.  All Souls’ Day remembered the far larger number of the ordinary “faithful” (i.e., believing) dead.  The distinction is between commissioned general officers and the rank-and-file enlisted, so to speak.  Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve) denotes explicitly the night before All Saints’ Day, i.e., October 31.  In centuries past the two festival days made a kind of pre-winter double-header, often featuring various local and to our minds secular jollifications and pranks.

 

            The Puritans who came to New England, highly principled killjoys, were hostile toward many of the old religious holidays.  Offering prayers for the dead, as though the agency of living petitioners could influence the divine judgment passed upon the souls of the defunct, was a “popish” notion deeply abhorred by the Reformers and connected with the doctrine of a temporal Purgatory they rejected.  While nothing of the religious meaning of Hallowe’en survived in American Protestantism, some of its rich European folkloristic associations did—especially those having to do with actual mortuary customs.  Hence all the tomb-crypt-skeleton-skull side of things.  These associations proved sufficient for the creation of our strange secular rituals in honor of—what?  In many old European countries there had been mellow family “reunions” across the Great Divide held in the churchyards, the most common burial sites.  What might be macabre was not always spooky or sinister.  Some of the strange bond of jollity linking the quick and the dead on All Souls’ Day survives in the Mexican “Day of the Dead,” in which there is a fusion of late medieval European and Amerindian traditions.  Unfortunately I can tell you nothing interesting about our Hallowe’en beyond the historical backgrounds.   We live in a neighborhood with too few young children.  It is not officially a “senior community,” but seems to aspire to that status.  We did as usual put out a minimalist jack o’ lantern, but there were no little ghosties or ghoulies who visited our street.  The chances of rowdy teenagers soaping our car windows are zilch, and that’s a little sad, strangely.

 

            This brings us to day two: Glasgow.  There is not much reason to believe that the results of the global climate conference just beginning will differ significantly from those of twenty-some earlier meetings.  The journalistic preparation for the meeting has been apocalyptic.  By first reports its opening discussions have been recriminatory (“Rifts and Finger-Pointing,” says the Times.)   The global warming formulary, like the religious formularies it increasingly resembles, is faith-based, faith being “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  The problems as they are described to us are of an enormity and an urgency demanding from the nations of the world a level of earnest engagement and cooperation unprecedented in all previous history.  The master-builders of the medieval cathedrals might work for a lifetime with no expectation even of approaching the completion of their vision, but the long haul is not a framework democratic politicians find  congenial.  They need evidence of things seen, such as “tax cuts,” “programs,” and “jobs”.  The tyranny of short-term thinking is everywhere to be seen in our politics.  How could that not be the reality in a system in which elected officials must spend so much of their time worrying about being re-elected.  Our Congress has been struggling with proposed legislation of allegedly existential import and certainly unprecedented expense.  Once you move beyond a few broad categories (family leave, free education, “human infrastructure,” “green projects,” etc.) who actually knows what is in or out of the proposed bills?  How in fact do you “debate” the contents of proposed legislation requiring some thousands of pages for its description?  Yet most of the public talk was about how things might be arranged to give President Biden an apparent “win” or two to take to Glasgow as talismans of his capacity to show “leadership” in the Climate Struggle to save our world.

 

            Thus we arrive at Day Three, yesterday, with its two “bellwether” gubernatorial elections, one of them in my own state of New Jersey.  I have delayed mounting this post by several hours in the vain hope of securing the advantage of knowing the definitive results.  We began the day early in a nearly empty polling site, but as of now, things are still too much up in the air.  Whatever the final result in New Jersey, it will be very close.  In this state, that fact alone would be an eloquent gauge of the level of enthusiasm propelling the Democratic incumbent, Phil  Murphy.  The Republican victory in Virginia needs some big adjective like stunning.  At least it stunned me.  I’ve been reading the New York Times and the New Yorker.  Obviously, I had my preferences, which I was able to express as a voter.  But I already knew that I was unhappy with the election before the voting had begun.  The cause of my unease was less with the possible outcomes of the elections than with the mode in which they were conducted.  So far as I can judge the competitors in Virginia were two honorable, intelligent, and capable men of proven capacity.  Mr. McAuliffe, the Democrat, is a kind of new model Clintonian politician who had already competently served a term as governor. Mr. Youngkin, the victorious Republican was a big success in “private equity”—a background becoming not uncommon among first-time political aspirants.  So Youngkin is filthy rich, as opposed to McAuliffe, who is merely rich.  God knows that the world, and our own dear nation within it, face problems worthy of serious and nuanced discussion by thoughtful people.  But the debate, such as it was, was mainly about Donald Trump.  McAuliffe did his best to prove that Youngkin was Trump redivivus.  Youngkin did all he could to distance himself from Trump without offending those who would be happy if he were Trump.  One can say of these performances that they exhibited considerable political dexterity, but hardly any political vision commensurate with the challenges we face.  But I must end this literary display of my seasonal affective disorder,  Each year I react to the prospect of winter with increasing glumness; but I do hope the next three days of November will offer more encouragement than the first three.

 

The Harvard Game

                                                    Duhhhh...
 

            The final weeks of Indian Summer have seemed particularly mellow this year, and I have enjoyed one particular aspect of them in a special way.  I make no claim to being a serious “sports fan”, but I continue to enjoy and admire certain aspects of Ivy League intercollegiate competitions.  Football is very big business in this country, and far too big a business in American universities and colleges.  There is something truly grand about American collegiate football.  My teaching career began at the University of Wisconsin, and I acknowledge what one must call the cultural awesomeness of a Big Ten Saturday afternoon.  Huge crowds, parking mayhem, industrial-sized marching bands in flashy uniforms, grotesque operatic renditions of the “Star-Spangled Banner”.  That is the model that defines professional football, as well, and seems to be the ambition of half the country’s high schools.  Once the dynamism of the American commercial spirit invades an institution, there is no turning back.  I never actually attended a Wisconsin game; but  you hardly needed to be at the stadium to know what was happening.  The whole city of Madison shook to the roaring of the crowd.  But here in the old Ivy League there are still some vestiges—and they are only that, vestiges—of the genuinely amateur and gentlemanly ambiance in which the collegiate sport was born.  As is well known the first ever recorded football game in this country was played on November 6, 1869, between teams from Rutgers and Princeton.  Handlebar moustaches are no longer the vibe, but it’s not quite the Dallas cheerleaders either. 

 

            It was probably about forty years ago that I served briefly on the university’s Committee on Athletics.  This was hardly a heavy assignment, and it had a great perk in the option to purchase season seats on the fifty-yard line.  So I secured two, and have renewed them every year since.  We are not talking a Notre Dame VIP box here.  A ticket costs about as much as a stadium hot dog, and may well taste better, though I have not run a test.  I used to make it to a game or two each year.  Since retiring I’ve done a little better, though the whole program was shut down for Covid.  In our socially constrained world, I make a bit of a thing of it.  The walk to the arena from my house is a tiny bit over a mile, approaching my huffing and puffing limit these days, especially when packing a nice lunch and a book or two in a cloth bag, as I like to do.  We used to have a small gang of retired faculty sitting together, but that play has been broken up by one thing or another, the main thing being the Grim Reaper.  I am now just another fish in the sea of students and alumni.

 

            If in retrospect the Harvard-Princeton game was declared to be the “game of the week” by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, as it in fact was, the explanation is to be sought in the curiosity of the play rather than in its uniformly high quality.  Princeton began bravely but ingloriously with a self-inflicted wound—a lengthy forward pass thrown with absolute precision to a Harvard defender.  But honors were pretty much even on this kind of thing, making for an exciting and suspenseful struggle in which, for a time, neither team seemed to be able to score a touchdown.  Would it be a duel of field-goal kickers?   After all there is presumably some reason the game is called football.

 

            The Princeton stadium has something of the sol y sombra features of a Spanish bullring.  The home team (west) seats grow ever cooler and shadier as the afternoon progresses, the visitors’ (east) side ever more bright and sunny.  So I did what I sometimes do on chilly game days—I moved over to the corner of the visitors’ side during the Covid-abbreviated halftime high jinx.  This would allow a quick exit when the game ended and warm sunshine until then.  There were maybe twenty of us scattered among a half acre of empty seats. I could not have known that my excellent view of the north end zone—not usually considered a desirable vantage point—would on this occasion be decreed by fate to allow me a superb view of all the important action.

 

            I forgive myself for not knowing exactly what happened from this point in the game, because as it turns out the officials in charge of it didn’t know either.  But early in the fourth quarter there was a sign from Heaven registered on the electronic scoreboard.  With thirteen minutes and thirteen seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Harvard scored its single touchdown, evening the game score at thirteen to thirteen.  Now, that is a lot of thirteens, and it should have been enough to make everybody happy if wary.  When the score was still thirteen to thirteen at the end of four quarters, it should have been a tie. 

 

            My view of American popular sports harks back to a Golden Age around 1950.  But there are all these new rules, designed to pander to fans requiring non-stop drama and impatient with all ambiguity.   First, they sissified  baseball by coming up with the nutty notion of a “designated batter”.  The sudden death overtime innovations in football are even worse.  The tied teams compete, rapid fire, in simulating a post-touchdown conversion until one of them wins.  Now all gladiatorial combat is required to end in death, and as quickly as possible, since the fans still may have a long drive ahead of them.  My view is that sometimes there really is such a thing as a tied game between equally matched adversaries, a result bringing honor to two teams and disgrace to neither.  This truth, which is recognized in chess, the supreme game of all games, ought to continue to be recognized in football.  In short, I do not like these innovations, and yes, I know the “lightbulb joke” on this topic—a joke obviously easily adapted to any institution of the teller’s choosing.  How many Princetonians does it take to change a lightbulb?  The answer is of course three.  It takes one guy to change the lightbulb and two others to lament about how much better the old lightbulb had been.  But if you absolutely insist on new bulbs, make sure they are bright ones.

 

            Five, yes five overtime periods now played out at the goal line just beneath me.  Presumably some folks in the stadium knew what was happening, but I was not among them.  The decibel level of the shouting drowned out the PA system.  It was all quite satisfactory from the partisan Princeton point of view.  So far as I could tell. Harvard kept making winning plays only to have the referees decide, upon mature consideration, that they had in fact not won.  Harvard made a good kick.  Princeton made a good kick.  Then Harvard won again, except that somebody failed to notice that the Princeton coach had called for a time-out.  When the call was revised, the Harvard coach threw a hissy-fit—a bit of drama in itself worth the price of admission.  He threw his cap to the ground.  He stamped his little feet.  Princeton completed an end zone pass.  A Princeton defender knocked away a Harvard pass that would have evened the score.  I had no idea that the game was over, but a couple hundred Princeton fans concluded that it was and rushed onto the field in a victory frenzy.  Final score: Princeton, 18; Harvard, 16.  I began my bemused walk home.  I presume that large, fuming buses full of large, fuming football players, headed north on the New Jersey Turnpike in the direction of New England.  A day or so later Ivy League officials, with Princeton now at the league’s top,  actually re-read their new rules and discovered that under prevailing circumstances the crucial time-out had been inadmissible.  Oops, their  bad.  One for the books, but by that time the book had already been printed.  The stuff of legends.

 

 

Tough Nut to Crack

 

 

the shagbark

            The hardwood forest of Appalachia extends westward across the Mississippi in the deep woods of the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas where I lived long ago in what seems to me now almost another life in another world.  It was a world of trees.  The deep woods displayed a large variety of species.  Most prominent were various inferior oaks, and especially gnarly and knotty pin oaks, good for little more than firewood; but there were in those days still to be found here or there a few magnificent remnants of the old growth.  There was still a good deal of ash, and other trees of beautiful shape.  When it came to real hard wood, however, I always thought of the hickories.  This was before the era of the chain saw, and doing battle with a hickory from one end of a cross-cut was an Olympic event.  My uncle’s barn was mainly used as a hayloft, but one aisle of it was given over to the kind of heavy metal bric-a-brac that goes unsold at farm auctions, and to several piles of “special” lumber being saved indefinitely for “special” projects that somehow never came to fruition.  The collection included a stack of tall, thick hickory posts that had been curing since before the year of my birth and had the weight of stone and the feel of steel.

            It is the hardness of hickory wood that makes it so good for baseball bats and tool handles.  In olden days it was used ox yokes and barrel staves.  Andrew Jackson came by the moniker “Old Hickory” for personality traits not all of us would admire.  Its use in infantile chastisement is remembered in several relics of our popular culture, such as—

            School days, school days

            Dear old golden rule days.

            Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic,

            Taught to the tune of the hickory stick…

                                                                                    though in my parts usually called a hickory switch.

            There are many varieties of hickory (family carya), all of which so far as I know produce edible nuts.  The whole family of carya are first cousins to the Juglandaceae (walnuts).  The hickory nut with which you are probably most familiar is the pecan.  It is native to the American South, where it has been developed as a cultivated crop.  However the seed produced by the shagbark hickory (the carya ovata) has a deliciousness all of its own.*  That is the good news.  The bad news is that it is a herculean task to get the meat out of the shells.  The Ozark natives of my youth—folks who would eat with relish nearly anything edible that could be shot, trapped, hooked, plucked, picked, gathered, or simply found dragged in by the cat—mainly regarded the hickory nut as more work than it was worth.  But of course they were not retired professors with time on their hands.

 outer shells

            There are many varieties of hickories, and some variants among the shagbarks themselves, that are pretty common in the backwoods in many parts of America, including suburban Mercer County, NJ.  About four years ago I wrote an essay about harvesting local black walnuts.  But somehow the hickory nut did not re-impress itself on my consciousness until fall arrived this year when, on one of my walks around lake and canal towpath I was quite literally struck by one of them in its descent.  Sir Isaac Newton is supposed to have been seized with a Great Idea on a similar occasion.  I was seized by a small one.  Why should I not start gathering a few hickory nuts on my frequent constitutionals? 

            The real woods around here must be opulent in nut trees.  Unfortunately, I am rather unsteady on my feet these days.  I don’t mind going into real woods if someone else is with me.  My son Richard and I have pursued chanterelles together over some very iffy terrain.  But a serious fall far from the beaten path might prove injurious to my remaining health, so that on long solo walks I need to follow a more or less established footpath with a more or less even and visible track.  Even with this drastic restriction though, I am finding a bountiful nut harvest, some of it even along paved roads.  So I trudge along, cane in one hand and nut bag in the other.  It appears that the effect this sight has on anyone who chances to see me is roughly that inspired by the samphire gatherer in King Lear.  (“Dreadful trade,” says Edgar.)

            The nuts of the varying species vary in size and construction, and I will take any that look promising or even possible; but the best and most numerous are the shagbarks.  The shagbark, like its black walnut cousin, has a double shell.  You can see the construction in some photographs taken this week.  The outer shell, which offers a kind of preliminary protection, is roughly spherical and about an inch and a half to two inches in diameter. Its thickness, though variable, is roughly that of a walnut and has a similar sturdiness, something like thick cork. The color on the tree is a garish green, but this fairly soon turns brown or blackish as it lies on the ground.  The ball is seamed in quadrants that, like postage stamps in a perforated sheet, are fairly begging to be dismantled.  Many nuts, especially those falling on hard earth from a considerable height, crack apart when they hit the ground.  One commonly finds the pristine nuts scattered loose beneath their tree.  Even those with outer shells that do not self-destruct present no serious resistance to rodent teeth.  But then the real fun begins.  The small, lightish-brown inner shell, which guards the meat, is the original tough nut to crack.  What else could you expect from the toughest wood in the forest?

 inner shells

            The inner shell has roughly the contours of a walnut, only about half the size or smaller, meaning that the meat of the interior is even more tightly constrained and difficult to break free of its amazingly strong latticed carapace.  The shell is nearly invincible.  It will explode beneath a hammer blow, but only one so forceful as to smash the edible part of the nut to smithereens in the process.  Stout pliers, of which the only nutcracker I have is a feeble derivative, do nothing.  Fortunately, I do have one tool that does work: an old cast iron book press intended for use in bookbinding.  “Who breaks a butterfly upon the wheel?” asks Pope; and the answer is that I do.

            Free food!  I admit that were you to cost out my labor at minimum wage, hickory meat would probably cost out at roughly seventy-five dollars an ounce.  I can’t be sure because I haven’t gotten my first ounce yet.  I keep eating it as I go.  But as I have tried to remind my spouse, who thinks I am nuts to engage in the enterprise, what is important here is to remember that it is the journey, not the destination.  I wonder if there is any good samphire gathering to be had in these parts.  In fact, I wonder what samphire is.

*I am no botanist.  For technical terms I rely on a book indispensable to anyone interested in Ozark flora: Julian A. Steyermark’s Flora of Missouri (Iowa State University Press, 1963.)

Whose Pronouns?

 

                                   Lady Grammatica from the Hortus Deliciarum

 

            Professor John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, is one of the more recent and more engaging arrivals to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.  While his interests are not confined to linguistic topics, his treatment of them has a refreshing precision within the context of the increasingly imprecise prose of the paper’s news stories.  McWhorter’s essay is called “In Praise of New Pronouns”.  Its principal subject is the growing use of the plural pronouns they, them, and their with singular subjects.  This development is somewhat similar to the long-established colloquial use of the second person as an indeterminate.  “To make an omelet, you take your eggs and…”  The they/them phenomenon is of course related to heightened social sensitivities concerning transgendered persons, a subject that has in a relatively short time become prominent and controversial.  McWhorter makes the point that it is the natural tendency of language to change, and he finds this change helpful.  I would point out that much of linguistic change is as mysterious as it is constant.  Lexical change is the easier part to grasp.  New words are constantly being added by invention or taken on permanent loan from other languages.  Our language in particular owes a great deal to its magpie tendencies.  American English has been as generous and welcoming as our immigration policies.  Word meanings mutate, expand, fall away.  Some words disappear altogether.  Changes in grammatical usage, generally gradual, are also constant.  Most mysterious of all is phonological change—that is, changes in the pronunciation of the spoken language.  Although we lack such evidence as modern sound recording can now ensure, we are pretty confident that we have reconstructed the English sounds of five hundred and a thousand years ago.  The differences are, to put it mildly, dramatic.  If we know some of the what of phonological change, the why remains largely speculative guess work.  But trying to understand linguistic change is different from trying to coerce it.

 

            Monday’s paper had several letters responding to McWhorter’s column, which garnered general praise if not uniform agreement.  I hope it is possible to continue to talk about this topic in a rational and courteous way, as he does.  People generally seek to accommodate the reasonable desires of their neighbors and fellow citizens, and I would hope to do so on an individual basis whenever possible.  But the radical impositions suddenly imposed by fiat upon long established languages—such as those imposed on French by the Jacobins or on Russian by the Bolsheviks—are not encouraging models.  It is worth thinking about.  Note in the first place that it is by no means all pronouns that are proving problematic.  Debaters often say that while their opponents are allowed to have their own opinions, they cannot claim their own facts.  The “pronoun controversy” is not unrelated to the opinion/fact calculus.  That is, are pronouns more along the lines of facts, or of opinions?  When people announce “their” pronouns, it is a very limited pronominal repertory, only the personal pronouns, and not even all of them.  The first-person pronouns enjoy a relative clarity and a relative freedom from controversy.  Even people who are often of two minds about things are likely to use the first person singular when speaking of themselves.  Exceptions are rare and reserved for a few very special cases.  The Queen of England gets a royal plural (“We are not amused”), and perhaps also people suffering from dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD)—but only if in possession of the appropriate form signed and notarized, from his/her/their shrink.  I have from experience discovered one other exception: health-care workers involved with geriatrics.  “Time for our bath”.

 

            What all the fuss is about is the third person singular forms of the gendered personal pronouns: he and she.  These were pretty mysterious words long before the invention of gender theory.  What its speakers have called “English” is a very old language that has undergone such radical mutations that its earliest surviving written texts are unintelligible to all native English-speakers but a few experts who have made a special study of them.  Old English (roughly the state of the language before the Norman Invasion at the end of the eleventh century) was highly inflected, maintained grammatical gender in its nouns, and had a quite complex verbal system.  The nominative third-person singular pronominal forms were he (masculine), heo (feminine), and hit (neuter).  Where, then, did she come from?  That is actually a bit of a mystery.  If you are into Good Reads, I recommend the article “she” in the Oxford English Dictionary.  I lean to the belief that it was through influence from the definite article (se, masculine; seo, feminine).  In the personal pronouns the s appears only in the feminine nominative.  She has her own pronoun, as he has his.  But perhaps I am influenced by my Portuguese Duolingo course.  In Portuguese the gendered definite articles are in certain circumstances used to mean her, him, or them as well.

 

            Actually, most of us habitually do choose some of our own pronouns, and without much comment from others.  As an English professor the ones I have found most  embattled are the relative pronouns: who, whom, whose, which, and that.  There may still be some general agreement concerning the use of who and whom at the theoretical level if not in general speech practice. but that and which seem to be losing the grammatical roles once assigned to them.  Many influences led me to my life’s work, but two of them were public school teachers, one in Taft CA and the other in Mount Pleasant TX, who loved the English language and the grammatical conventions of those who spoke and wrote it well.  As late as the 1950s one of those conventions was to be pretty religious about using that when introducing restrictive clauses and which when introducing non-restrictive clauses.  But the rule, which is generally useful, is not one that commands blind obedience.  You get the idea.  These days most of us do pick and choose more or less as we please.

 

            But some who revel in breaking free of the restraints of grammatical correctness want us to succumb to the shackles of political correctness.  Language must serve many functions, but one of the most vital is to talk about the empirical world as we actually experience it.  There are limits to the extent that the social experience of the centuries can be coerced or abolished.  Hence I speak of and enjoy a beautiful sunrise or sunset.  Even I have enough elementary astronomy to know that the description of observed reality is not the same as a scientific one.  But linguistic innovation leading to manifest absurdity is of limited utility.

           

            Imagine that you are the sole witness to a crime.  You saw a violent incident on the street.  Two people seemed to be arguing.  One of them pulled out a gun and shot the other one to death.  You are absolutely confident in what you saw, and that you would be able to help the police identify the killer.  In the police investigation, the following dialogue ensues.

            Police Investigator: Can you describe the perpetrator?

            Witness: Yes, about six four, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, three-piece suit, receding hairline and thin, graying hair, probably about fifty years old.  Caucasian.

            Police Investigator: Man or woman?

            Witness: Certainly.

            Police Investigator: No, I mean was it a man or a woman?

            Witness: Dunno.  It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to ask for their pronouns.

It is an old legal adage, or at least used to be, that hard cases make bad law.  That is perhaps why linguistic change has, on the whole, been slow and consensual, rarely abandoning common sense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Lot of Parking

  

 

            Now that I get out and about a bit more, I begin to appreciate the extent to which my old employer, Princeton University, has continued to be on the move despite the constraints of the pandemic.  We aren’t waiting on any infrastructure bill.  Bulldozers everywhere pave the way for new voyages of restless minds or, in some instances, simply pave the way.  One of the most profound educational insights ever uttered—usually if uncertainly attributed to Robert Hutchens, Clark Kerr or some other legendary prexy of the last century—involves the disparate priorities of major stakeholder groups within a university.  “All the undergraduates are interested in is sex.  All the alumni are interested in is football.  The faculty are chiefly interested in parking.”  You see, there is a reason those people make the big bucks: educational vision.

            I joined the faculty here in 1965, and in the years since, and particularly during the years since my retirement in 2006, there are many noticeable signs of expansion: more buildings, more gazillion-dollar machines required by Big Science, more faculty, more programs and research centers, and many more administrators.  There is a carefully measured and integrated expansion of the student body underway.  I think I have figured out the algorithm behind it.  For each additional five students you need one new dean.  For each fifty new students you need one new Vice President for Whatever.  And of course all these people, and the necessary additional new ancillary staff bobbing in their wake, do need somewhere to park.  This is a good news/bad news sort of situation, and of course the two are inextricably entwined.  I’ll begin with the good news, because it is just across the street from my house.

            A couple of years ago I wrote  about what I call Butler Park, several acres immediately across the street and until a few years ago the site of an ancient housing project for graduate students dating from the 1940s.  Though all the houses were removed, the grid of streets was left untouched, and can still be found on Google Maps, which have not yet caught up with the university architects.  The housing was originally intended for married veterans, and most of the streets were named for top WW2 brass.  (Look, e.g., for King Street, Princeton NJ—Ernest King, of course, Chief of Naval Operations—but Devereux, Halsey, or Eisenhower will also get you there).  Butler Park is now a great place for a gentle walk, the general vibe being something like walking though a long decayed and romantically overgrown archaeological site or a Claude Lorraine painting.

            Meanwhile, the campus parking crisis had become acute.  The most dramatic of various steps taken to address it was to construct another multi-storey parking garage.  The rub here was that the site chosen for this new building was already a heavily used parking lot.  This meant that until new construction was completed there would be a significant net loss of parking spaces available.  Sometimes you must be cruel to be kind, but  something would have to be done on a temporary basis.  And not too far away the old Butler tract still had its grid of war-hero blacktopped streets, admittedly decaying and sprouting weed patches, along which cars had once been parked and along which even more could be parked with a little ingenuity.  A couple of weeks of quickie road repair, including the conspicuous delineation of hundreds of parking spots in bright white fresh paint, and the job was done!  We couldn’t even mumble, “Not in my back yard,” as it is in our front yards.

           
            Though I used to walk to work each day, it’s a good half hour walk.  There is no denying that this is remote parking.  No status symbol is more potent in the American university than one’s parking spot, and to be relegated to such an obscure assignment is instantly to be rendered low man on the totem pole.  It is an inconvenience with a tinge of insult, and the Vice President for Something or Other has done her best to palliate its impact on staff morale.  Very frequent mini-shuttles speed you to campus from this temporary lot.  In the morning hours you never have to wait more than seven minutes.  Even so, seven whole minutes?  Another vice-presidential brain-wave addresses this problem.  Next to the principal shuttle stop the University has parked for the duration a large, visually conspicuous Food Services truck under the supervision, during morning hours, of an amiable and experienced Food Services professional.  You can sweeten your potential seven-minute wait with a cup of coffee and a pastry (doughnut, cherry Danish, cheese turnover, or bran muffin on some kind of rota).  And it’s free!  Future potential is bright, but I have so far actually used the shuttle only twice.  On most days, however, I have been happy to consume a coffee and Danish, as my habitual long morning walk ends quite near the food truck.  So far as I can tell, no small print prohibits my initiative.  I estimate the goods and services offered by the Tiger Truck at maybe five bucks, max.  And that’s on the inflated scale devised by Starbucks and Gulf pirates.  My most recent trip on the free shuttle was to get a free flu shot offered by my former employers followed by a free chocolate donut.  The ease with which these mini-entitlements could buy my approval perhaps augurs the fate of a pending political package of three trillion in freebies.

 

            That’s the good news such as it is.  What, then, is the bad?  I fear it is the new parking facility itself.  It will not be the ugliest building of the year.  Sometimes you have to settle for an honorable mention.  But it is huge, brutal, and looming.  Many more people than will ever park in it will have to look at it.  It will be the landmark of the southeast corner of the campus.  This is as it must be.  There is no room here for my romantic aesthetics.  The University is responding to an urgent need.  Form follows function, and the function here is to service our national thralldom to the internal combustion engine.  But the parking garage is in a very prominent place.  I cannot complain with the philosopher Joni Mitchell that they paved paradise to put up it up.  That was done years ago by the folks who built the macadam-surfaced lot from which the new multi-tiered expansion is rising.  It is very much to the institution’s credit that its new construction includes no plans for a supplementary pink hotel, though  it is perhaps too bad that we have lost the old Fitzrandolph Observatory.   But that little edifice was already an eyesore, a decrepit relic of the Little Science of the 1930s.  Per aspera ad astra, indeed.  I think that’s supposed to mean Through hardships to the stars!  Sometimes hardtop has to do.