Guest Essay
​The Right in America is busy banning books in formerly progressive
states like Iowa. Meanwhile the Left is banning speakers from
universities that formerly prized academic freedom. The New York
Times righteously decries what the Right is doing, the Wall Street
Journal delights in making fun of what the Left is doing. We live in a
censorious age in which extremists from both sides seem to think their
main job in these culture wars is to protect the kiddies from
information they routinely get in far more graphic form from the
Internet and social media every hour of every day. How juvenile the
behavior of adults who regulate books and speech in such futile
fashion, and how hollow the automatic responses of our major
newspapers and cable channels, which cannot resist their own
ideological impulses to attack the sins the other side commits.
A modest proposal: take the men out of the legislatures and
newsrooms and put women in charge—of everything. Sure, there are a
few extremist women who contribute to our divided society, but let’s
face it, guys, it is men who pass the vast majority of silly and destructive
rules and perpetrate the worst ideological crimes. Men are peculiarly
unsuited to the job of responsible governing. As someone once said,
what men love most is the remote control of their television sets. It
perfectly combines their two central traits: they are remote from
human emotion and understanding, and they want nothing more than
to control them. Hapless! Hopeless! They sit at a distance and push
the clicker to change the channel, cut off the sound, get their way from
afar.
Seriously, can’t we begin to move the extremes out of leadership and
put moderate people, mostly women who care, in responsible
positions? We would be so much better off. And so would our kids,
who need to be exposed to good literature that raises their sights and
 
introduces them to challenging topics and scenes, even risqué ones
that make some parents uncomfortable. One of the most intelligent
statements on book banning comes from Bridgette Exman, an assistant
superintendent of curriculum and instruction for public schools in
Mason City, Iowa, which now makes it a crime for librarians to keep
books on the shelves with racy passages. “This summer I became the
book-burning monster of Iowa” is the title of her essay (NYT Sept. 1,
2023), a smart and tough dismemberment of the arguments made by
the Iowa legislature in its law forbidding libraries to carry certain books.
Read it and don’t weep, get angry.
By the same token, if your child’s college or university is into banning
speakers, remind the administration that academic freedom is a
bedrock reason why American higher education is so good, the envy of
the world and the place where the rest of the world wants to come for
research and instruction. If a speaker makes college students cringe, let
them fire back, not cringe, argue, not shrink. How else do they learn to
defend their positions and broaden their views?
OK, enough pontificating. If you are in the modest middle, please
speak up and take action. We need you--now. As my father used to
say, “moderation in everything, even in moderation.”

          Guest Essay by Richard Ekman
      It’s easy nowadays to despair about the future of American higher education, but here are some ideas from someone  who knows higher education better than anyone else I know,
​                                     --
 

I read your latest Then and Now Newsletter with interest and want to add to what you said about West Virginia University’s decision to eliminate foreign languages. You note the possible “domino effect” of this change. From my perspective there are two, separable domino effects. The first is among colleges and universities that for more than a decade have, for financial reasons, been eliminating courses and programs that do not draw many students. The humanities have been big losers in this process, but so have other fields such as physics. It is unfortunate that students at these mainly smaller, not affluent institutions will no longer be able to obtain a well-rounded general education because core subjects have been eliminated from the curriculum. This domino effect shows no sign of abating, sad to say.
 
The second domino effect is the one you note in your discussion of West Virginia University. WVU, the leading research university in the state, has a mission to advance knowledge at the frontiers of research and to preserve knowledge for the benefit of future generations. While no university can be expected to cover all subjects, WVU’s elimination of several core fields suggests that it no longer aspires to be a true research university. Admittedly, there are among the “flagship” universities in the US, some that are clearly stronger than others. But if leading universities in additional states abandon core subjects, the domino effect you worry about will surely follow.
 
There are possible solutions. For example, several major universities with distinctive strengths in Southeast Asian studies, when they found it extremely difficult to enroll enough students to offer the full array of language courses in Vietnamese and the other languages on each campus every year, banded together to offer intensive summer courses on a rotating basis. Another example is Harvard’s Ukrainian studies program, for generations arguably the best in the US and perhaps the world. It has never attracted large numbers of students. Yet despite threats to eliminate it because of low enrollment, it has been sustained and now serves as a key resource for American understanding of current affairs. If these less-commonly-taught languages and literatures can be sustained, surely a research university can maintain expertise in the major languages and literatures of the world.
 
If state governments increasingly decide that they no longer need to have a true research university within the state’s borders, then the second domino effect you fear will follow. The consequences of this domino effect would go well beyond the loss of state pride.”
 
Richard Ekman
President Emeritus
Council of Independent Colleges

 
THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
Labor Day 2023
 
 Dominoes from West Virginia:
          West Virginia University, the flag ship of its state system of higher education, seems about to make radical changes.  In August its President, E. Gordon Gee announced a plan to close 32 graduate and undergraduate programs. eliminate 9% of the university's majors,  and terminate perhaps as many as 16% of its full-time faculty.
While other areas would also be affected, Undergraduate education in the arts and sciences is especially likely to be hurt.  Chemistry, Mathematics, Philosophy and other disciplines will be damaged; the Program in World Languages, Literature and Linguistics is slated for total elimination.  There will be no teaching of foreign languages, no study of world literature. no exploration of how languages shape thinking. .
Reasons for the proposed cuts?   President E. Gordon Gee says that his recommendations follow a national trend of declining enrollment in the humanities and other fields in the arts and sciences, and the declining number of 18 year olds in the future.  It’s also the case, as Wikipedia notes, that he needs “to address a budget crunch caused largely by the ill-fated expansion program that he previously pushed.”
Gee,79, knows the scene in higher education.  He’s held more university presidencies than any other American, nimbly hopping, some would say, from one post to the next before the full effects of his leadership could be assessed.
WVU’s Board of Governors will decide on the plan at its meeting on September 15th.   Their decision, no doubt, will be reported in the student newspaper, the Daily Athenaeum, and, I expect, in the national press.  If you are as troubled as I am, you can contact the Board through valerie.lopez@mail.wvu.edu
 
The big question, however, is not whether the Board will go along with President Gee’s proposal, but whether other colleges and universities will take similar action.  WVU is, no doubt, an extreme case, but demographic, budgetary and political pressures may lead other universities to adopt similar measures.  Once one domino falls, others are likely to follow.  An opinion essay by Leif Weatherby explores the situation and its implications; it’s worth pondering.
==
What a “Classical Liberal Arts Education” Means at New College of Florida:
          Following the Governor’s appointment of new trustees things have changed, big time, at Florida’s one time public liberal arts college.  The driving force this time is not budget but ideology, and the results, as Inside Higher Ed reports, is chaos.  But change is coming, lots of new athletes and a new twist in the rhetoric about a “classical liberal arts education” when, as Michelle Goldberg notes, New College has made a big push to fill its entering class with baseball players and other athletes and then to cater to them.  New College’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, Goldberg writes.-.”sent a memo to faculty members, proposing new majors in finance, communications and sports psychology, ‘which will appeal to many of our newly admitted athletes.’ “
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Why It Matters:
Why should we care what goes on at a low ranked university in West Virginia and a tiny college in Florida?  Because infection spreads.  Demographic, budgetary and leadership issues are not found only on these two campuses.  They are widespread and come at a time when there is hay to be made for Know Nothing politicians who know how to exploit doubts about higher education.
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The Partisan Divide:
          The American public has serious doubts about what’s going on at colleges and universities, and those doubts have increasingly taken partisan form.  This was already clear in a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center, “The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education,“  and is likely to have intensified over the last five years.  In a nutshell the Pew reports found  “There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction – even suspicion – among the public about the role colleges play in society, the way admissions decisions are made and the extent to which  free speech is constrained on college campuses.  And these views are increasingly linked to partisanship.“  .  Here’s the URL for the Pew report: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education-2/
Make your own predictions about how this will play out in the 2024 elections, but keep your eye on state legislatures where many decisions affecting higher education are made.
==
Brendenheim’s Law:
“When a culture renews itself it will turn to its classics – in our case to Greek and Roman texts--not for models or injunctions but for their sheer energy and exuberance.  After a while, though, fatigue will set in and barbarians will be hired as gate keepers.  They will quickly expel those classics, knowing that once those are gone, the rest will follow: other languages, the study of language itself, art, music, mathematics, the sciences, and soon, philosophy, that is  all the sources and expressions of cultural vitality.  One by one they will all be expelled.”
 
Maurice Brendeneim Confessions I p. 323
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Going to Greece? Check Out the Dipylon Project:
Thanks to Andy Szegedy-Maszak for linking me to
Nick Romero’s article “The Hidden Archaeologists of Athens,” .in the on-line New Yorker for August 22. .  Here’s a quote I especially liked, “Beneath the seductive surface of the present, there is always something older—the cool of a vanished stream, the clay of a potter’s workshop, the stones of a country villa, the grave of a young man buried with a flute and a lyre.  Even archeology itself has a past, which can flicker back to life.”
Here’s the homepage of the Dipylon Society: https://dipylon.org/en/
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Word of the Month:
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Liminality
I thought the word was jargon until I read Jerome Roos’s essay in  the New York Times.  You can find the whole text  it here.  But here’s an excerpt:
“To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its ... radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead ...  Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality.  It ...  captures an essential aspect of the human condition.  Derived from the Latin word for threshold, liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage.  In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between, neither here nor there.  .. ... We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, .... between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. “
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Etymology of the Month:
          Soul
It’s a bold word in its fusion of two ideas, the capacity to feel emotions, and whatever animates a living person.  The word goes back to Old English sawol  and is echoed in German Seele.  Beyond that it is hard to go with any confidence but, “It has been suspected to have meant originally "coming from or belonging to the sea," the supposed stopping place of the soul before birth or after death ” (Etymonline s.v.). 
          I like that conjecture since it lets me see my favorite seafarers -- Odysseus, Aeneas, Robinson Crusoe, Prospero in the Tempest, Darwin on the Beagle, and all those sailing with Captain Ahab on the Pequod -- in a new light, as soul-farers, people who experienced the unpredictability of the deep.   Is that why Hemingway says that his hero in The Old Man and the Sea had eyes the color of the sea?
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Dig Deeper in the Blog:
I’ve probed into some of these topics, and others, in my blog at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
Playing Offense for a Change
Entertainment
Gardener’s World.
You can also scroll back on the blog to earlier issues of this Then and Now  Newsletter.
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A Sumerian Riddle?
           “There is a house in which one enters blind but leaves  seeing.  What is it?”
Answer: go here for this and other good old riddles
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“Stolen” and “Looted”
Officers from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office arrived at 6:00 a.m. at the Sutton Place apartment of Shelby White, a major collector of ancient art and one of the most generous philanthropists supporting scholarly studies and public understanding of the ancient Greek world.  They wanted her to return parts of her collection of ancient art to the countries from which the objects had come, the New York Times reports.
More recently the same office, the Manhattan D.A,  has seized eleven ancient artifacts from the Princeton University Art Museum’s collection, alleging they were illegally excavated or acquired.  For the Princeton story click here. 
These stories are a small part of a much larger story: The number of possibly illegal antiquities acquired by American collectors is huge: the federal Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that “Since 2007, HSI has repatriated more than 20,000 objects to over 40 countries and institutions.“   The Manhattan D.A.’s office has also  pushed hard on the issue.  Perhaps its most famous case in this area resulted in the hedge-fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt, returning $70 million worth of antiquities and agreeing not to collect any antiquities in the future.
But what exactly is a “stolen” or “looted” antiquity?.  These terms can include any art object exported after the 1970 U.N. convention on the illegal import and export of cultural property.  This was a watershed moment, reflecting a broad but still  incomplete shift in attitude toward the removal of such material from its country of origin.  What was acceptable before 1970 became “stealing” or “looting” antiquities.  The issue now, I suppose, is whether recent purchasers have done due diligence when they acquire works that once perfectly legal but now run afoul of the law and produce sensational headlines..
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Begin Latin in the Middle School?
          Some schools see the rationale for getting students to study Latin in the fifth and sixth grades. Does your school system see it that way?
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Is Art All Politics Now?
          In many settings contemporary art has turned into a weapon for social or political causes.  Fine, but that can eclipse a quite different understanding of art, one well articulated by Claude Cernuschi,: who wrote in response to David Brooks’ essay on “ The Power of Art in a Political Age”:
“I have always thought of art as a gift. Whenever one is alive one can help people: physically, emotionally, and financially, etc. But unless we are immensely wealthy, and can establish a foundation that outlives us, that help is restricted to our literal lifetimes. But I can hear a
Beethoven symphony, read a book by Dostoyevsky, or look at a Rembrandt, and be completely uplifted, although these artists are dead hundreds of years.  They have left us a gift, something that extends beyond the confines of their physical lifetimes.  How many things can make such an impact?”
Claude is right, I think.  Art is a gift and we should not hesitate to say thank you in any we can.
Spread the Word:   If you enjoy the Then and Now Newsletter, your friends and colleagues may, too.  Forward it to them, or just send an email to wrconnor1@gmail.com (You can unsubscribe that way, too.)
          Thanks!
Bob Connor

       “We must call the Classics before a jury of the shipwrecked,” wrote the Spanish philosopher   José Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955)  That seemed right in an tie when classical studies, (and the humanities more generally) were struggling with the question of “relevance.“  Ortega shifted the question to authenticity and a sophisticated understanding of ‘vocation.’ I liked that; it opened my eyes, and I said so in print in 2011 in Classical Worlsd104.4   
       But the effect of that was introspective – Were we doing our jobs well enough? Of course we could do better, so energies went into figuring out how.  Such questions put classicists and humanists on the defense, as we tried to explain that our fields really had something important to impart.
       Playing defense was followed by a time of self-flagellation as humanists came belatedly to recognize that the narratives they constructed about literature, philosophy, music, the visual arts and even the natural sciences were largely about white males of European descent.  Instead of rolling up sleeves to change such things in the future many were tempted to deplore the exclusions and let it go at that.  
 Such stances were, perhaps, what the age demanded, but they left the Classics, and liberal education more broadly, weakened and vulnerable to assaults by the Know Nothings – those who judge every academic discipline by the enrollments it tallies and by “return on investment,” that is their ability to deliver marketable skills, and high-paying jobs immediately after graduation. Rather than standing up against this attitude many administrators are now tempted to base educational decisions on fluctuating enrollment figures and fund-raising results.
The issue now becomes whether colleges and universities should become upscale trade schools.  That is playing out right now at some universities, most conspicuously at West Virginia University.  (Here’s a summary of the proposed cuts, which include reductions in courses, majors and staff in Chemistry, English, Mathematics, Philosophy, and the complete elimination of the program in World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.)  WVU stands out for its Draconic cuts but many other institutions, public and private may be tempted to follow its lead.
Likely result?  Educational foreshortening, resulting in loss of perspective and potentially debilitating narrowing of minds. .
Time to quit playing defense and call before a jury of the about-to-be shipwrecked not texts that have stood the test of time, but present-day administrators who want to balance their budgets by foreshortening the educational experience of their students.
--
“How plead you, President Gordon Gee?  You are charged with shortchanging your students of the liberal education they deserve and will need to navigate in these perilous waters, and of plotting shipwreck.  The penalty is loss of your job and of the $1.6 million in compensation you enjoy, plus a life sentnce opprobrium for the damage you are causing. . How plead you? “--
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Playing defense may not have been so bad as a strategy in the not-so-bad old days.  But now, at a time of imminent shipwrecks, environmental, political, and cultural, to sed students   out without compass, chart or what those before them have learned about sailing in treacherous waters demands a Guilty voye from the jury. 
--
The WVU BOG can be reached by contacting the Special Assistant to the Board of Governors, Valerie Lopez at valerie.lopez@mail.wvu.edu
 
--
Westport Island, Maine
August 30, 2023

In a recent opinion essay in the New York Times David Brooks suggested that Donald Trump is better understood as an entertainer than as a politician.  That explains a lot, I think, but also makes me wonder how many other aspects of our life  have come to be thought of as entertainment, and judged accordingly.  College lecturing, for example?  Classical music, especially the sonata and the symphony?  These were not, I believe, composed to amuse or pass the time, but as ways of exploring emotions that could not otherwise be given voice.
       And what about Greek tragedy?  If we bring to it expectations of entertainment, we are sorely disappointed.  Better to think of it as a way of exploring certain states of mind, extreme ones, intense ones, perhaps even terrifying ones, but only rarely amusing ones.
--
Westport Island, Maine
August 28, 2023

​ 
Gardeners don’t see like the rest of us. Most of us walkthrough a garden with our vision shaped by nouns and adjectives – the names of the flowers and words like pretty.”  But gardeners, I think, see space – borders and boundaries, horizontals and verticals, walls and vistas.
 
We admire and go on our way. The gardener is constantly spotting problems: a weed to be pulled, a flower that needs dead heading. an insect infestation, a bush ready to be pruned, anything, great or small, that intrudes on the orderliness of space.  For every problem, though, there is a glimpse of possible improvement, a native species to be introduced, a hybrid to fill an empty space, a new rhythm to be established. 


Can this way of seeing, I wonder, be transplanted, or, like a bouquet be brought into one’s study?  With it would there come the know-how when to prune and when to let imagination flourish?
 
August 2023
Westport Island, Maine

 

- THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
July 31, 2023
 
A Double Blow to the Status Quo:
Two recent Supreme Court decisions affecting higher education have produced a surprising result – fewer howls than expected about the Court itself or the consequences of its rulings, but, it seems, an emerging consensus that better admission policies can (and must) swiftly be implemented.  There’s good reason to expect  that Biden’s “Adversity Admits” strategy. or some similar race-blind pattern can achieve better results than the old system.  Nicholas Kristof has drawn attention to A Better Affirmative Action, a 2012 paper by the Century Foundation that showed that seven out of ten public universities could maintain, or even increase, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students by using a strategy based not on race but on socio-economic criteria.  More can be done along these libnes.
        At the same time the whole admission process at selective colleges and universities has come under intense scrutiny.  Suddenly, we see how the sausage is made – favoritism for athletes, alumni and faculty progeny, donors, and above all, those in the top 1% of national income distribution.  Here is the link to some good reporting  on “Behind the Scenes in College Admissions.”  It’s not a pretty picture, but we are now, I believe, at a moment when the admissions process can be improved for all applicants.  Good!  Time for a change and for all of us to do all we can to make that happen, whatever we think of the Court’s decisions and the old Affirmative Action, to work for a system that achieves real diversity in admissions in classroom discussions and in all interactions throughout American campuses.
The Court’s other decision, the rejection of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, has received comparatively little discussion even though it affected vastly more people. The decision should also call attention to an underlying crisis in the financing of American higher education.  One can get a sense of the scale of the problem from the price tag on Biden’s rejected loan forgiveness plan -- $400 billion over ten years according to one plausible estimate.  And that would have dealt with past debt, not continuing borrowing.
If we are serious about replacing Affirmative Action with “Adversity Admits,” how will it be paid for?  It will be expensive to do it right, that is, through scholarships, work-study grants and the like, rather than through more loans.  Taking out a federally backed student loan may work fine for families with a comfortable living and some economic sophistication, that is, for those who designed the student loan program in the first place, but for many borrowers, especially African Americans it is a fiasco.
“Let them Eat Debt:”
          So far, I’ve not heard a serious discussion of how to come up with these funds.  “Let them eat debt” seems to be the guiding principle.  That is an unconscionable way to deal with the problems that low-income families, especially African American ones, encounter in student loan programs.  We need  a better way of making college affordable for all students.
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Word of the Month: Opsimaths:
Tom Barron tells me that Oliver Wendell Holmes started learning Greek at age 90.  When asked why, he replied simply, “If not now, when?”
At a somewhat earlier age, 80, Cato he elder is said to have started the study of the same language. Each of these was an opsimath, a late learner. It’s a Greek word, appropriately, which English adopted in the 1650s; Now, late learning is gaining ground, says Wikipedia.  Join the fun.  Be an opsimath!
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A Sentence to Remember:
          About halfway through Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the tired, sleep-deprived old man has hooked the fish.  He is groggy, but under the night sky realizes: “I am as clear as the stars that are my brothers.”
 
          Thanks to Steve Connor for his clarity about this sentence.
Quotable:
“On the one side of us memory wrestles with regret, on the other anticipation wrestles with dread.” Richard Moran
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Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers:
          Bob Kaster’s How to Do the Right Thing now joins Michael Fontaine’s How to Grieve, and ten other “How To...” books in a Princeton Press series.  Each presents a translation of an ancient text with an explanation of why it is important today.  Readable, enjoyable, valuable.  Rob Tempio, my spies tell me, deserves much credit for this exemplary series.
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Does the Pentagon Admire Sparta Too Much?
Yes, argues Bret Devereaux in Foreign Policy.
Thanks to Josiah Hatch for calling this article to my attention.
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In the Footsteps of Socrates? Beware!
The powerful poisonous “hemlock,” used in the execution of Socrates has arrived in the United States and is spreading rapidly, widely and dangerously.  The hemlock trees in the forest primeval are not dangerous, but the plant, botanical name  (Conium maculatum), is ready to do to you what it did to Socrates. This six-to-ten-foot invasive biennial is now found in almost every one of the mainland states.  For more information click here.  Watch out for smooth stems with red or purple spots or streaks, otherwise you may pull up, as I did, an innocent  look-alike, Queen Anne’s Lace.  Thanks to Kate Faherty for the warning.
 
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“Great Books Can Heal Our Divided Campuses”
Andrew Delbanco argues for this position in the Wall Street Journal Review for June 10 -11 2023.  Don’t subscribe to the WSJ?  The article also appears as a guest essay on my blog at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog. 
Here’s a sample from this important and incisive article: “In short, a common curriculum helps them to feel that they belong to a community of inquiry, despite powerful forces that may drive them apart “
          Thanks to Jean Houston for sending me a clipping of the article.
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Also on the Bob Blog:
          A guest essay by Hunter Rawlings, “And the Last Shall Be First,” an excerpt (“Snake Skin”) from Maurice Brendenheim’s Confessions, and two pieces of mine, “Greek 1,” and “Is your Name Your Destiny?”  They are at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog /
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Living in Time?   
The calendar you use matters. What kind of time do you want to live in?  That’s the question in “Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar.” 
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Quotable:
“A human being at his best, is the finest of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, is the worst of them all;”
Aristotle Politics I
 
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Ponderable:
“If art were a verb, what tense would it be?” (Brendenheim Confessions I p, 12.)  I suppose when the chisel first touches the marble it’s in the future or the future perfect. When a viewer sees a portrait or a scene it may be the historic present.  But perhaps there are also timeless aorists?
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Etymology of the Month:
trivial (adj.)
“The earliest use of the word in English was early 15c., a separate borrowing in the academic sense "of the trivium" (the first three liberal arts -- grammar, rhetoric, and logic); from Medieval Latin use of trivialis in the sense "of the first three liberal arts," from trivium, neuter of the Latin adjective trivius " of three roads, of the crossroads."  From  Etymonline.
For an antidote to contemptuous attitudes toward the trivium see Dorothy Sayers’ 1947 lecture at Oxford, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”   The trivium it turns out is anything but trivial.
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The Achievement of Carl Phillips:
Judith Hallett called my attention to the story of poet Carl Phillips as reported in The New York Times:
“Carl Phillips entered Harvard in 1977 with what he called ‘respectable, but not the highest SAT scores,’ and the second-guessing of white students at his Cape Cod, Mass., public high school, who suggested that he was admitted because he was Black.  At his work-study job cleaning dormitory bathrooms, the divisions of class and race were palpable. ‘You’re marching across Harvard Yard with a bucket,’ he recalled, ‘and then there are people wearing tweed jackets and enjoying their leisure. .... On one hand, I was grateful to have been accepted,” he said. ...
But he took particular satisfaction in going on to teach high school Latin. ‘There are not many Black people who do that,” he noted. And then, when he taught at the university level, he saw that he could inspire confidence in Black and gay students, who often told him that ‘they had never had a professor who looked like me.’ This year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.”
PBS News had a good interview with him.  Here’s link. And here’s the link to his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes.-
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Reading List:
An overlooked Kingdom from Sanskrit times?   Salman Rushdie’s new novel Victory City.
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          Danielle Allen’s new book is Justice by Means of Democracy,  just  out from the University of Chicago Press.
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Mary Beard Learns from the Classics:
https://berlinfamilylectures.uchicago.edu/
Thanks to David Derbes for this link/
 
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Back issues of the Then and Now Newsletter are available as blog entries at www.wrobertconnor.com/blog.
 
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Help Wanted: Please help me expand and diversify the mailing list for this Then and Now Newsletter.   Just send the name and address of anyone you think might like to see the next issue. My address is:  wrconnor1@gmail.com  (You can unsubscribe that way, too.),
Thanks!
Bob Connor
STOP PRESS!  JUST IN:   “Journeys,” a series of literary seminars led by Dan Mendelsohn has just been announced by the New York Review. For more information click here.
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           Guest Essay by Andrew Delbanco

Originally appeared in the Wal Street Journal  June 9, 2023
Fifty years ago, Allan Bakke, a white military  veteran with a solid academic record, was
turned down for medical school at the University of California, Davis. Bakke filed suit,
claiming that when the university set aside 16 seats for racial minorities, it violated his
right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Eventually the case reached the U.S.
Supreme Court, which ruled the quota unconstitutional and ordered that he be admitted.
But Justice Lewis F. Powell, who wrote the decisive opinion, did not shut down
consideration of race altogether. He allowed it not as a form of reparations for centuries
of exclusion of Black Americans from educational opportunity, but on the grounds that
racial diversity improves the college experience for all students. “Creating a diverse
classroom environment,” he wrote, “is a compelling state interest,” and therefore colleges
may lawfully take race into account as one factor in choosing whom to admit.
--



      Fifty years ago, Allan Bakke, a white military veteran with a solid academic record, was
turned down for medical school at the University of California, Davis. Bakke filed suit,
claiming that when the university set aside 16 seats for racial minorities, it violated his
right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Eventually the case reached the U.S.
Supreme Court, which ruled the quota unconstitutional and ordered that he be admitted.
But Justice Lewis F. Powell, who wrote the decisive opinion, did not shut down
consideration of race altogether. He allowed it not as a form of reparations for centuries
of exclusion of Black Americans from educational opportunity, but on the grounds that
racial diversity improves the college experience for all students. “Creating a diverse
classroom environment,” he wrote, “is a compelling state interest,” and therefore colleges
may lawfully take race into account as one factor in choosing whom to admit.
 
This idea that students have something to learn from each other has been the lifeline for affirmative action ever since. It’s an old idea. In 1850, when Herman Melville wrote that “a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he meant that he had been educated by the “miscellaneous metropolitan society” he found at sea—Blacks, whites, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders; believers and unbelievers; high-spirited adventurers and men laid low by poverty and squalor. The Supreme Court will shortly hand down decisions in a pair of cases—Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. the University of North Carolina—in which the plaintiffs charge that under the guise of “diversity” those institutions have been practicing reverse discrimination. It seems likely that the justices will lift the stay of execution granted to affirmative action by Justice Powell 45 years ago.
Repeal of the Bakke precedent will be greeted with satisfaction on the right and outrage on the left. But regardless of what one thinks about how racial diversity has been pursued through college admissions, people of all political views should acknowledge that, once students enroll, most universities have done too little to make diversity an educational asset.
Back in 2004, in a book titled “Defending Diversity,” a group of scholars from the University of Michigan warned against “a policy of simply recruiting a diverse student body and then neglecting the intellectual environment in which students interact.” More recently, the president of Johns Hopkins University, Ronald Daniels, has had the candor to say that while universities are right to seek “diversity in admissions,” they have “neglected to foster pluralism once students arrive” and have “given students a pass to opt out of encounters with people dissimilar from themselves.” Diversity means the most in a “classroom environment” where students from different backgrounds and with different experiences come together to think about moral and historical questions. Such questions include how rights, goods and privileges have been distributed in the past and how they should be distributed in the future. Who draws the line between norms and taboos? What is justice or merit? How has race been used to sort human beings into favored and disfavored groups? These kinds of questions belong to the humanities (history, literature, philosophy, the arts) and to what are sometimes called the “soft” social sciences (political science, sociology). No reasonable person would dispute that responses will differ according to who is in the room and that race is an important differentiator—though certainly not the only one. But since the Bakke decision the room has been emptying out. The last few decades have seen a mass migration from the humanities into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines and other fields such as business and economics that promise a straight path to a career. Diversity matters in these fields too, because our society needs diverse leadership in the professions to which they lead. It’s a stretch, however, to say that diversity matters for students sitting in silent rows at a lecture on finance or computer science. As for the humanities, much of the intellectual energy has moved to identity-based fields focusing on gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. These disciplines pay overdue attention to dimensions of human experience that were once marginalized in academic life, but they also tend to bring students into affinity groups insulated from one another.
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What, then, can be done to ensure that diversity remains a real force, in the sense that Justice Powell believed it could be? In today’s university, with the number of humanities majors plummeting, the most likely place for students to encounter perspectives different from their own is the “general education” program. The concept of general education first arose about a hundred years ago, following the abandonment of the old compulsory curriculum, heavy on theology and the classics, that had stipulated pretty much the same course of study for all students. As the old lockstep.
approach gave way to proliferating electives and specialized majors, and student bodies changed with the influx of Jews and other immigrants, colleges began looking for ways, in the words of one Columbia dean, to maintain some “common, if not always uniform, intellectual experience for all students for at least a portion of their undergraduate years.” In the wake of World War I, Columbia introduced a required “core curriculum” that still survives today, anchored by courses in literature and political thought taught in groups small enough to allow discussion, with common reading lists across all sections. Immediately after World War II, Harvard designed a looser core, which has not survived, consisting of introductory lecture courses on such subjects as world religions, major ideas in politics and science, and drama from the ancient Greek playwrights to the mode.
Variations took hold at many institutions, notably the University of Chicago, but by the 1960s, general education was disintegrating almost everywhere into what the sociologist Daniel Bell called “a mishmash of courses that are only superficially connected”—a cafeteria menu from which students picked a few courses that checked off the humanities, social science and natural science boxes. Nowadays there’s also likely to be a box labeled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI)..
Bell condemned this piecemeal approach, typically known as “distribution requirements,” as an “admission of intellectual defeat,” by which he meant that colleges had given up trying to agree on any subjects, texts, methods or ideas with which all students should engage before dispersing into this or that specialty. By the mid-1970s, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching described general education as a “disaster area,” and so it has largely remained ever since. What’s needed now is a fresh commitment to general education that assigns or attracts students to classes explicitly focused on broad human themes, with common reading lists and with peers whose origins, interests and ambitions differ from their own. People who think of themselves as progressive tend to dismiss the idea of a common or “core” curriculum as retrograde or even reactionary—a throwback to the era when colleges were run by thundering clergymen who told students what to believe and how to behave. But in fact, such a curriculum—or at least one with some common elements—is the likeliest way to make diversity a real force for learning among students of different races, religions, origins, sexual identities and other forms of difference. Why does Socrates refuse the opportunity to break out of prison on the eve of his execution? Is it true, as Jane Austen says, that “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance?” What about James Baldwin’s claim that “the ostentatious parading” of emotion at the suffering of others is actually a “mark of cruelty?” Students with different sorts of life experience will respond to such questions differently, and by listening to one another they may grow out of the naive supposition that there are uncontested answers. In short, a common curriculum helps them to feel that they belong to a community of inquiry, despite powerful forces that may drive them apart. Colleges secretly know this. That’s why so many assign a common reading—typiically on an issue of current interest such as race relations or climate change—to incoming students over the summer before they arrive on campus and then organize a few followup lectures and discussions. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. To go farther—even to a single semester-long course of common readings—isn’t easy. Getting faculty to agree on a shared reading list is akin to the proverbial project of herding cats. Especially at prestigious universities, rewards and incentives push faculty members into specialized research and teaching, where their performance determines their chances for retention and promotion. Reading novels, plays or essays that one hasn’t read since one’s own college days, or perhaps ever, can feel like a waste of time. So can expending time with fledgling students anxious to figure out what college—indeed life itself—wants of them. For these reasons and more, a serious general education program is a heavy lift, and most institutions have given up.
          Amazingly enough, some are defying the odds. For more than 20 years, Ursinus College, a small school outside Philadelphia, has prescribed a two-semester sequence of seminars for all incoming students called the “Common Intellectual Experience,” organized around four basic questions: What should matter to me? How should we live together? How can we understand the world? What will I do? Readings range from Plato and the Confucian Analects to contemporary works by Lynn Nottage and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Five years ago, Purdue University, a giant STEM-centric institution where the percentage of students taking history or literature courses had been dropping toward single digits, launched the “Cornerstone” program, which includes a sequence of first-year seminars for which faculty select half the readings from a collaboratively developed and continually revised list of “transformative texts.” The idea is to give students a shared vocabulary for talking about perennial problems—the joys and risks of freedom, the competing claims of rights and responsibilities, the distinction between love and desire, the inevitability of loss and mourning—that feel fiercely present in their lives regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or any other limiting ascription. Thousands of Purdue students now sign up for Cornerstone courses every fall, and a new campus publication, The Cornerstone Review, includes stories, poems and essays of their own.
Similar experiments are under way at Stanford, Vanderbilt, Texas A&M and Penn State, to name just a few. It’s happening not only at universities with stringent admissions policies but at open-access community colleges. At Austin Community College in Texas, each class in the “Great Questions Seminars” is “a small community,” in the words of government professor Ted Hadzi-Antich, “in which everyone’s voice contributes to a collaborative pursuit of truth.” At Onondaga Community College in upstate New York, the “Enduring Questions” initiative, organized around texts ranging from Gilgamesh and the Upanishads to works by George Orwell, Nelson Mandela and Leslie Marmon Silko, now serves some 500 students each year. Not incidentally, at such schools, where financial challenges deflect many students from completing the degree, those who enroll in courses organized around common readings persist at significantly higher rates than the student body at large. Last January, I went to Stanford to observe in action that university’s new “Civic, Liberal and Global Education” sequence of courses, required of all first-year students. It begins with a course called “Why College?”—a question aligned, as the faculty director Dan Edelstein points out, with W.E.B. DuBois’s credo that “the true college will ever have one goal—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”
          The class I visited was part of another required course, “Citizenship in the 21st Century,” in which the text for the day was the Declaration of Independence. The students in the room appeared to be of Black, white, Hispanic and Asian parentage, but there was no predictable correlation between what they looked or sounded like and what they said. The question at stake was what it means for a society to commit to the principle that “all men are created equal.” Should it mean, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, to “lift the weights…from the shoulders of all men” so that all have an equal chance to prosper? What about Lyndon Johnson’s claim a century later, in a speech at Howard University, that one cannot “take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all others’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair?” Late in the hour, the word socialism entered the discussion, which turned to the question of whether equality should mean equality of opportunity or equality of result. Students spoke with passion and sometimes pungency, advocating different points of view, but never rudely or dismissively. It was a demonstration of diversity at work.
          Stanford’s most daring innovation is that all sections of the new courses share the same reading list, which includes works by authors ranging from Plato and Seneca to the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore and the Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. At Stanford University, ‘More than 1,000 first-year students are grappling with the same ideas, reading the same texts,’says professor Dan Edelstein. PHOTO: MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS Edelstein explains: “When more than 1,000 first-year students are grappling with the same ideas, reading the same texts, writing the same assignments and engaging in the same activities at once, the walls of the classroom start to dissolve. Debates about what it means to disagree in good faith carry on in the residences themselves; discussions of the good life continue over dinner.” At our centrifugal moment, we have an opportunity—and an obligation—to rethink general education. Whatever the court says later this month, universities should not just give lip service to the worth of diversity but should commit themselves to making it a real educational value. Fortunately, some bold institutions are showing the way by proving that it can be done.


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Andrew Delbanco is the author of “College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be.” He is Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and president of the Teagle Foundation, which, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, supports several of the programs mentioned in this article.

​A Ponderable Quote::
Readers of the Then and Now Newsletter know that I have found the work of Maurice Brendenheim to be worth pondering.  Here’s one example”
       “Having shed its skin the garter snake silently slithered away.   When it returned to the spot a few days later it paid no attention to that remnant of its former self.  But seeing that skin brought me back to a remote Eden I had once inhabited.  Was it indeed a remnant of a former life, perhaps the mark of a teacher of moral philosophy who told us how to live our lives, provided, of course, that we maintained decorum and respected the requisite dress code.  He won the Teacher of the Year Award; he showed us the difference between good and bad, and inspired us to make a choice.  How intensely we listened to his every word, each syllable, the succession of sibilants, Socrates, Spinoza, solipsism.  
       “Was this then then a skin he had abandoned?  Was it part of a past he no longer needed, and which we could neither recover nor do without?  Had he slithered out of it to become a free agent, challenging us to do the same whatever the consequences?“
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions I, p. 326

I knew almost nothing about a college education when as a freshman at Hamilton I stepped into the office of my adviser, George Nesbit, the formidable chairman of the English department.  No word was spoken as he reviewed my high school transcript.  At length he said, “Connor, I see you had some Latin in high school.”
“Yes, sir, “I blurted out. “I thought it might be enough to get me out of the language requirement,”
He gave me the death look.  I began to understand that at Hamilton one did not “get out  of” requirements.
He picked up his pen.  It had on it , I think, the words Mont Blanc, and wrote  on my course selection card, “Greek 1.”
“But. ....” I tried to protest.
“If you liked Latin, you’ll like Greek. Now, for the science requirement …”
That was all there was to it.  He was chairman of the English department. I was a a freshman who knew nothing.   So, I took Greek.  Now, so many decades later I still struggle with that language and the people who spoke it in ancient times.  it  the words  I cannot put it aside.
 
 
 
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The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
― Omar Khayyám
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