- 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: [email protected] (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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