​ 
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.
--
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
--
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.
--
 
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.
--
 
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.
 
--
“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.
--
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 /
--
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.” 
--
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
 
--
--
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?
--
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.
--
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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 i

 

 

 

 

           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.
--
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.


​          --
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.
 
 
 
-
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
​

​Your name is your destiny, at least so they thought in some cultures, ancient Greece among them. For them a name wasn’t just euphonics; it didn’t just have to “sound nice,” or honor Grampa or some other friend or relative.  Names could point to a role model or invoke a social value.  Then as now names could covey parental expectations and thereby exert a powerful influence on the shaping of personality.  Sometimes, however, there were unexpected consequences.
Naming can be a slippery business, because names can wiggle out of restraints that apply to other speech acts.  Consider the name Hippolytus, for example, or its female equivalent, Hippolyta.  These are fine sounding names, whose first component hints that the family must have enough money to keep horses and thereby be part of the horsy set, or other high-status circles.   You can see that mind set at work in Aristophanes’ Clouds when Strepsiades and his wife argue about naming their son.  and compromise on Pheidippides, joining together a word for tightfistedness with one  for horse.  Or consider a woman whose name evokes a horse with a tawny coat, Xanthippe.  Her family’s values are clear; she didn’t have to scold her ne’r-do-well husband about wealth and status; her name sent that message to Socrates loud and clear.
Names with -hipp-  in them, however, can go one step beyond the prestigious  ownership of horses .  They can evoke the cavalry, the hippeis.  Archippus and Hipparchus both conveyed the goal of commanding cavalry – a patriotic ambition set for the child so named.

But what about the second half of the names Hippolytus and Hippolyta?  Now the parents envision not just horse ownership, or cavalry command for their baby boy or girl,, but a specific moment in a battle, when the command is given releasing a cavalry ore that has been restrained from attacking an enemy until the moment is just right.  That moment is also in view in  a more general way in names such as

Lysimachus.    A daughter can be named that way, too: Lysimache turns up both in myth and in real life.

Then there’s poor Lysippus.  His name is probably a sign that the parents wanted their child to grow up to be a commander who tells his cavalry when to charge.  But what happened? Did the young Lysippus rebel against his parents’ aspiration for him so he could become one of the most famous sculptors of Greece?  I hope his parents were not too disappointed.
Sometimes ambiguity is waiting in the wings of  Greek nomenclature.   The name  of the character who gives her name to Aristophanes’ sex-strike comedy, Lysistrata, sounds militaristic. But she is not someone who gives an army the order to charge, but someone who realizes the futility of war, and concocts a plan that will release, in another sense, the armies of Greece .  The sex-strike she plans will demobilize them, once the belligerents come to their senses.
A similar ambiguity in a name shapes Euripides’ play Hippolytus, produced some years before the Lysistrata and a tragedy not a comedy. .In it the “release” part f the name turns from active to passive. (Names don’t have to signal  their grammatical mood.)  Hippolytus is undone when his horses panic and overturn his chariot. It’s a devastating ending for the expectations of his parents, king Theseus of Athens and, (probably) the Amazon queen Hippolyta.

 His name was their destiny. 

​THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
June 2023
The Vermeer Phenomenon:
          All 450,000 tickets for the exhibition of Vermeer’s paintings sold out before anyone could book a ticket for Amsterdam.  Now a new Vermeer may have turned up in Philadelphia, as John Immerwahr explains on a not-to-be-missed video on YouTube. Genuine or not. the painting is part of the recent wave of interest in Vermeer and his work.
          Such interest may seem surprising at a time as overscheduled, overcommitted, overly frantic as ours.  Why are people paying attention to these placid images from a Dutch master of the 17th century when we have so many more pressing things to do?  He should be totally out of fashion—a dead, white, European, binary male, dependent on or even a product of Dutch colonialism. Yet even those most burdened by such baggage find their way to the sheer, simple beauty of his paintings, as Teju Cole shows in a remarkable essay in the New York TIMES. 
Perhaps that placidity is the force that draws us back to him -- the quiet, domestic interiors, the recurring yellow dress, the gentle light through the predictable window -- tranquility interrupted only by an occasional message from the outside.  All this may serve as an antidote to the frenzied pace of our time.
 
Courage amid a Tectonic Shift:
          I find the Vermeer phenomenon deeply encouraging in a literal, etymological sense.  It instills courage at a time when beauty, visual and literary, and those who value it often get pushed aside in the rush toward the contemporary, the politically correct and the profitable.  That should embolden all of us who are facing the “tectonic shift” affecting the Humanities, as described in the last Then and Now Newsletter. (Still available at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog).  New evidence continues to show a shift away from the study of the humanities toward STEM fields with their promise of prompt high “returns on investment.”  The trend is clear and continuing.  Recent reports document it at Yale (Thanks to Jean Houston for pointing me to the Yale Alumni Magazine ), and at the University of Maryland as Nick Anderson has reported in The Washington Post. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/19/college-majors-computer-science-humanities/) Thanks to Tom Barron for calling my attention to  this article.
          The shift is real, not a set of misleading statistics nor a PR problem, as some have suggested.  It will almost surely profoundly change American colleges and universities and the sudents who enroll in them in coming years.
Still, many people, including students majoring in STEM disciplines, are, I believe, hungry for the nourishment that Vermeer and many other great artists and thinkers of the past unapologetically provide.  The greater the STEM stampede, the greater the opportunity for an unflinching affirmation of the humanities.
--
“Why Are We Losing the Humanities When We Most Need Them?”
          Maureen Dowd explores that question in  “Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ with Real Frankenstein at Large”   And congratulations to her on her recently earning her M.A. in English from Columbia University.
--
Outliers:
In every system there are “outliers,” that is, individuals, programs or departments that outperform the norm.  That’s certainly true in the Humanities. 
The trick is to make the outliers the norm.
That means looking hard to see if what works in one setting can be put to work in other settings.  Here are two cases worth a closer look.  The chair of the English Department at Pace University in New York City reports that her department “has experienced a 40% growth in majors over the past few years.  Click here to see how they present themselves. On the west coast at UC Berkeley, as  Axios reports,  “the number of first-year ...  students declaring majors in the arts and humanities ... was up 121% over last year. “   In Forbes Michael Nietzel digs deeper into the situation at Berkeley, and quotes Dean Sara Guyer’s observation that many of us have “
“ ... found ourselves in a series of unprecedented situations without a compass or guide, ... It is not at all surprising that students are turning to the arts and humanities as a way to make sense of our current moment. The imaginative, ethical, creative and analytical contributions and historical observations of humanities research and artistic production provide a valuable way to understand the complexities brought on by contemporary challenges.” 
--
“The Age Demanded”:
          The greatest long-term threat to a humanistic education comes, I suspect, not from the outside, but from within - – humanists’ fear that they must respond to the demand for
the catchy, the fashionable, the trendy -- things more likely to reinforce the prejudices of a befuddled age than to challenge its orthodoxies. There’s always the excuse “The age demanded.”   Before going down that road, however, a few scatological verses from Ernest Hemingway are in order:
The Age Demanded:
The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.
 
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.
 
The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
 
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.
--
Word of the Month:
          Sisu: Finnish for endurance through difficulties – perhaps like our word grit, but Finns think of it as part of their national character.  Is that part of the reason why Finland keeps being ranked as the world’s happiest nation?
--
What Can Greek Lessons Do for (or to) You?
Try “Greek Lessons: A Novelby Han Kang ,
”I don’t think the book is about the characters, ...  and it’s certainly not plot-driven either. What is steering the craft? One answer is that it’s language itself, and the dissolution of language “
Review in The Guardian. (Thanks to Pam Machold for calling this novel to my attention.)
--
Riddles and Poetry:
“I was the image of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane “…”
Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire
When riddles morph into poetry, as they often do, what is our response?  Is it to convert the poem into explanatory prose, or is it to pause and let perplexity turn into delight? 
--
Outlandish Speech Acts, Continued:
          Then and Now has looked at riddles, palindromes, and in the last issue, a koan in which a Zen master responds to an inquiry about Zen by pouring tea until his visitor’s cup overflows.  Note how this koan works.  It’s a narrative but the answer within it is non-verbal.  The overflowing cup raises thoughts of fullness and emptiness, and eventually the recognition that the latter must precede the former.
          Sometimes speech acts work that way, and not just in Zen monasteries.
--
Quotable:
“Words are the only  victors.” Salman Rushdie.
.--
Three Cheers      Discouraged by gloomy statistics about American education?  Here are three developments worth watching, and maybe your encouragement.
First: Latin at home. Home schooling doubled during the first year of the pandemic, then declined a bit, but now almost 6% of K -12 kids are homeschooled.  Clearly, a significant number of parents find it works; many of them want their kids to learn Latin.  Homeschooling is tricky and controversial, but before dismissing it read Kevin Mahnken’s essay, “Amid the Pandemic a Boom in Classical Education.”  (Thanks to Hunter Rawlings for calling it to my attention.)
          Second, some charter schools are providing things that other public schools don’t, and seeing good results.  Example: the Washington Latin Public Charter School in D.C.   (Thanks again to Hunter Rawlings, who has served on its Board, and is convinced that it is a great school, with a very diverse student body, high graduation rate, and many of whose students  go on to top colleges.)
         
          Third, The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Studies.  Its leader, Jason Pedicone, writes., “At Paideia, we are ...  focusing mostly on developing self-paced online teaching tools that can keep Latin and Greek in schools, even if they don't offer formal programs. Read more about our new HS Latin Curriculum here, and our Elementary School curriculum here..’’
          Notate.Bene.: Most of these projects have been developed off the paths beaten by conventionally-minded funders.  That may have given them freedom to innovate, but fund-raising is hard.  If you can help Paideia, here’s the address:
The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study, Inc
P.O. Box 670
New York, NY 10012
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Viral   
          “There’s nothing wrong with dying. All the best people in history have done it.” That’s Paul Woodruff’ in his essay “My Death Is Close at Hand, but I Do not Think of Myself as Dying.“: His essay in the  Washington Post went viral.  You can read it here, or access it via YouTube.
--
A Taboo Broken:
          When Paul Woodruff speaks so unabashedly of  “death” and “dying” he frees us from the taboo that demands we avoid such words and speak instead of “passing,” as if dying were some cosmic course exam.  If one cannot speak of death and dying, one must also pretend not to grieve and thereby deny oneself the consolation from friends and the closure mourning can bring.  Thank you, Paul, for this and for so much else!.
 But how is one to grieve or to console?  That was also an issue in antiquity and led to some serious thinking .   For ancient advice see Michael Fontaine’s “How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation.”
--
 
Some Good News (for a change) about Freedom of Speech on Campus 
The Washington Post reports some encouraging developments on maintaining free speech on campuses.  Campus leaders are recognizing how important it is that all points of view be heard, even if it makes some people “uncomfortable.”  Here’s the link, Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention..
--
Quiz: What Do Tintin, James Bond, Inspector Poirot and Dr. Seuss Have in Common?
          They are being rewritten so no one feels “uncomfortable” reading them – and to sell more copies., as is explained by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris in “As Classic Novels Get Rewritten for Today’s Readers, a Debate about Where to Draw the Line.”
A modest solution:   Add an apparatus criticus to the bottom of the page, that is a brief note showing what has been changed.  Any good classical text provides this information when manuscript editions disagree or scholars propose a new reading.  Shouldn’t publishers provide something similar whenever the original wording of a work is changed?
--
Vocation of the Month: “Sensitivity Reader”
A novelist friend of mine, well established and respected, recently told a group at a reading that to get a book published today, the book must win the approval of a Sensitivity Reader” before the publisher will launch it.
          The vocation began a decade or so ago as a service to white writers who wished to include black or other disadvantaged people in their works but weren’t quite sure about word choice. Now initial good intentions may be morphing into yet another form of censorship.
--
Ponderable:
“An omniscient divinity would surely know that creatures in a paradise would focus on the one thing that was prohibited, and soon violate that prohibition, eating the fruit that conferred the knowledge of good and evil upon them.  Then they would surely set out to create their own paradise based on precisely that forbidden knowledge.”
Maurice Brendenheim, Confessions I I p. 127
----
Can the New Artificial Intelligence Solve Riddles?
          Answer: “Better than I can.” Test yourself against Chat GBT here.
--
Etymology of the Month:
 Sully (verb). See soil.
          soil (verb)
“early 13c., "to defile or pollute with sin," from Old French soillier "to splatter with mud, to foul or make dirty," originally "to wallow" (12c., Modern French souillier), from souil "tub, wild boar's wallow, pigsty," which is from Latin solium "tub for bathing; seat" (from PIE root *sed- (1) "to sit") or else from Latin suculus "little pig," from sus "pig."”
from Etymonline.
--
 
Richard Moran on Living in The Past:
“We can’t live in the past, and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to.  But we can draw on the past, our own experience and those qui ante nos fuerant.  That’s like going to the well on a hot day and drawing cool water to drink.”. 
Moran’s whole article can be found at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/95177090/The_Philosophical_Retreat_to_the_Here_and_Now_Notes_on_Living_in_Time?email_work_card=view-paper
--
 
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Bob Connor

"Tectonic" i's no hyperbole, as you can see from a chart in James Engell's essay "Humanists All" in the January /  February issue of the Harvard Magazine​  The chart, and much more is discussed in my new Then and Now Newsletter.  Here's the Newsletter text (minus the chart, for technical reasons):
 
MARCH 2023 NEWSLETTER
THE THEN AND NOW NEWSLETER
MARCH 2023 (almost )
A Tectonic Shift:
      Nathan Heller’s essay “The End of the English Major”  in The New Yorker .made me wonder if the Humanities in general were reaching the end of their rope.  That question was answer may be contained in a chart in James Engell’s
essay “Humanists All!” in the January / February 2023 issue of the Hravrd Magazine.
 
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/01/features-forum-humanists
 
T-he chart shows the STEM disciplines all gaining majors and the nHumanities all losing them. -
Scroll down to see the chart
--

Quotable and Ponderable:
““The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter ,,, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.” “
 
 Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the Harvard English department.
Comment:    The allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne is revealing.   At Bowdoin College, we  are told, he “read widely and received solid instruction in English composition and the classics, particularly in Latin.” The same could probably be said of his classmates including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future U.S. President, Franklin Pierce.  They all knew how to find the  subject and the  verb;  And the time gap of a century or two was for them nothing when  compared to the two millennia or more.that they took in stride   
(Quite a class ’25! I wonder if 2025 will match it.)
We have eliminated that old-time education without finding a substitute for it   No wonder students feel lost.

,--
.
The Brave New World of English:
      Another shift is taking place within some disciplines, - not only from past to present, but also , from text to margin. An egregious example is called out in my  blog post of March 28th.
--
The Death of the Humanities?
Tectonic shifts do not of ten reverse themselves,  But remember Mark Twain’s comment when a newspaper published an obituary of him-
the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.“. 
Heller’s article in The New Yorker  contains several examples on institutions where the English major is surviving, maybe even flourishing.   (UC-Berkeley;s English department  seems to be one.)  Success stories may be easier to find in other fields. including Classics. .Jane Chaplin provides some guidance from her perch at Middlebury College:
      “”At Middlebury, the ‘crisis’ in Humanities is really a crisis of English majors, and to a lesser extent of American Studies, History, and modern language majors.  Enrollments and majors in Classics have not declined over the past 20 years; in fact enrollments are slightly up (in keeping with a growth in the overall number of students).  Enrollments in Religion, Philosophy, and Art History have also remained consistent.  The co-directors of the Humanities here have made a big push in the direction of digital humanities and humanities in action; it would be nice also to see us embrace what we can really offer – service courses in reading and writing.
--
Can Success Stories Be Generalized?
     
The American Council of Learned Societies, under the leadership of Joy Connelly, is trying out a promising approach, “developing a survey of success stories – examples of sustainable approaches to undergraduate teaching and research that enable humanistic study to flourish. These stories make the strongest arguments for the value of humanistic knowledge “  That’s the only initiative that I knowe of in this area.
--
Quotable (and Pondrqable,  oo):
“The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong,’” 
            G.K. Chesterton (Thanks to Ros Douthatr).
 
--
Are Majors the Right Metric?
      It depends on your goals.  If the goal is to produce skilled workers, including Ph.D.’s,, then the number of B.A. majors field by field is a helpful metric. . But if the goal is to help students clarify their values, think and write more clearly, argue cogently, and bring a fresh perspective to bear on perennial problems, then the number of majors is only a small part of the story.  
      We need better metrics, specifically ones that recognize where students are developing capactoes that will enrich their lives and their contrubutions to society.
--
The War of the Words:
      What’s happening to our language? An overview in The Economist sketches some of what’s going on. (Thanks to Jane Chaplin for providing the link.)
      The Associated Press through its stylebook joined the War of the Words recently, as Nicholas Kristof has reported. The AP to;d its writers ““We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizlng ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college educated.””
The French?  In response the French Embassy in Washington proposed renaming itself “The Embassy of Frenchness.”
The absurdity rolls on . Good! Such language tinkering usually gets so absurd that it falls on its face.  The sooner the better since the abuse of language can lead to the abuse of friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. Aux armes, cityoens!
--
Nietzsche on art (and Riddles)
: "If we think of the original germs of the artistic sense and ask ourselves
what different kinds of pleasure are evoked by the firstlings of art,
for example among savage peoples, we discover first of all the
pleasure of understanding what another person means; here art is a
kind of solving of a riddle that procures for the solver enjoyment of
his own quick perspicuity."
No 119 in the second volume of Human, All-Too Human.  Thanks toClaude Cernuschi who pointed me to this passage reminding me that Nietzsche is not saying that art is itself a riddle but that “our interpretation of art is like solving a riddle, which generates self-congratulatory pleasure.”.
-
 
Word of the Month:  
ghost (vb.):: …
The dictionary says under use 2 of the verb ghost: ”the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.”
 This usage has been around for a long time, but has steadily increased since the 1950s. Ghosting is nasty enough in a face-to-face society, but is more common, and more virulent, in  an age dominated by social media, when one no longer has to look someone in the eye.    The practice very likely exacerbates the current mental health pandemic among adolescents and young adults.
How to deal with it? . A few suggestions can be found in  in  “When People Ghost - and How to Get Over it.”  Other ideas are welcome
--
Congratulations to Carolyn Walker Bynum  on being awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Catholic Historical Association.  I hope this results in much happy  feastihgfr the author of Holy Feasts and Holy Fasts  
--
News from New College
      The February 29th meeting of the newly appointed  Board of Trustees at New College in the Florida state university system showed their priorities.  They abolish the programs of the college’s  Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office..  See the coverage  on CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/us/new-college-florida-board-meeting-reaj/index.html   Prefer the news in print? Here it is.
      The next engagement in the ongoing  Florida higher education battles is House Bill 999 in the Florida legislature.  It’s important because by curtailing the autonomy of state funded  universities it may provide a model for other state legislatures to adopt.
Here’s the text of the bill., and here’s  a statement by the American Historical Association   endorsed by many academic oroganizations. (Thanks to Judith Hallett for calling my attention to it.
 
--
A Strange Lenten Abstinence:
No cookie at lunch? No pre-prandial potation?  Not challenging enough.  I decided to give up politics for Lent. No Tr*np, no St*my, no p*lls, no speculation about 2*24.. And, beginning right now, no Fl*r*d*..
      I’ll report on some surprising results in the next Then and Now Newsletter.
 
Generative Artificial Intelligence
”We have passed the point where people argue whether Generative AI (ChatGPT, BARD) are more than a curiosity, and start focusing instead on what they do best, and where they are likely to mislead.  A discussion in Axios is a good starting point. Don’t be surprised if some of the discussion sounds like Plato’s distinction  between the plausible (doxa) and the real.  So far it seems that Generative AI is not very good at distinguishing plausible fictions from true facts.  If so, it will exacerbate an already wide-spread problem in our political culture. .
--
Palindrome from Paradise:
      “Madam, I’m Adam.”
--
College: What It Was, Is and Should Be:
      A second edition of Andrew Delbanco’s book of that that title mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all.  
--
Gold Medal: New Philology Award:
      It’s the job of Philology, as I see it, to blow the whistle on abuses of our language, but also to commend those who use it in fresh vigorous ways to illumine problems obscured by jargon. Example: ,my eyes glaze over when I hear once again about the “serious consequences that will result if global temperatures rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels “.  German Lopez has called attention to  Katherine Hayhoe’s fresh way of presenting the same fact:, a comparison of climate change to a fever: Think about how much worse you feel when you run a fever of 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. That fever is the equivalent of what the whole planet will soon be experiencing.
      Nice. If I had a gold medal I’d give it to Prof. Hayhow.
--
--Ponderable:
“The dead are better than the living in nourishing the soul. After all, they’ve been through it all, so what they leave behind, whether fleeting memories or enduring masterpieces, has already passed one test.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
 
--
Beyond the Riddle:
      Is the Zen Koan just a step beyond the riddle?  Try this one”
There was a Japanese Zen master named Nan-in who lived during the Meiji era (1868-1912). During his days as a teacher, he was visited by a university professor curious about Zen.
Being polite, Nan-in served the professor a cup of tea.
As he poured, the professor’s cup became full, but Nan-in kept on pouring. As the professor watched the cup overflow, he could no longer contain himself and said, “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
       The Master’s response will be in next month’s Newsletter. .
----
Quotable:
“Men are divided into two great classes: those who predominantly live in hopes and those who predominantly live in recollection. Both have a wrong relation to time.  The healthy individual lives at once both in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life acquire true and substantial continuity.”
 
Richard Moran “Notes of Living in Time.”  following Judge William, ‘On the Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,’” who was following Soren Kierkegaard,
 
-
A Problem with Race:
“ After all this work, clarity on the basic question of what a race was still lay a long way off, even farther away than it had been before the work had begun.  There was, for starters, no consensus on the number of races, with authorities arguing for numbers ranging from one (the human) to sixty-three.  At one time or another, Franks, Gauls, Caucasians, Americans, Lapps, Celts, Negroes, Border-Scots, Nordics, Irish, Jews, Scythians, Tartars, Mongols, Hottentots, Malays, Slavs, Yankees, and Europeans had been described as separate races.  
 “Nobody knew for certain how many races there were because there was no agreement on what race was, or even where it was.  What was the site of race?  Was it in the skin, hair, bones, blood, culture, language, geography, brains, skulls (shape or volume), teeth, souls, smell, or semen?  All these possibilities had been proposed by someone or other, but by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly understood that the sheer number of them made it impossible to take any of them seriously. “
Geoffrey Harpham in a lecture given at Tulane University.
 
--
 Help Wanted:
       Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, etymologies, neologisms, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
--
Inflict it on the Innocent and the Vulnerable:
 Please forward this Then & Now Newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it. If they’d like to subscribe, let me know at wrconnor1@gmail.com. (You can unsubscribe there, too.)
Thanks!
Bob Connor
 

Here are the entry level courses in English at one well respected American  private university.  What do you think is going on?
​ ENG 1000  SUPPLEMENTAL WRITING WORKSHOP
 ENG 1100  WRITING: ARGUMENT AND INQUIRY
 ENG 1220  FAIRY TALES IN LITERATURE AND FILM
 ENG 1221  CRIME FICTION
 ENG 1223  DYSTOPIAN FICTIONS
 ENG 1224  THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
 
 ENG 1225  ECODISASTER
 ENG 1226  WAR & WRITING
 ENG 1227  SCIENCE FICTION
 ENG 1228 MENTAL ILLNESS IN LITERATURE
 ENG 1229  WRITING LIFE
 ENG 1231  LITERATURE OF TERROR & SUPERNATURAL
 ENG 1232  LITERATURE ON SCREEN
 ENG 123 3 LITERATURE FROM THE MARGINS
 ENG 1234  POP FICTION
 ENG 1235  CULT CLASSICS, LITERARY TRASH
 ENG 1236  BANNED BOOKS