A Now and Then Newsletter
JANUARY 2024
The discouraging developments of recent months have raised in my mind one big question about American higher education: Is there light at the end of this dark tunnel?
Not long ago admissions procedures at some selective institutions turned out to have been corrupted. The Supreme Court ruled against the use of race in admissions decisions. Florida and several other states began telling colleges and universities what they could and could not teach. The president of Stanford resigned when doubts were raised about the integrity of his research. The atrocities of October 7th and its sequel set off campus protests and back and forth recriminations, followed by Congressional hearings on antisemitism, then, ... Well, you know the rest, and surely there’s more to come.
It’s hard to see any light at the end of this tunnel, but I believe these problems can turn into opportunities provided colleges and universities seize the moment and demonstrate more unequivocally what they value most.
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Do You Agree?
A friend who knows about such things writes, “The universities need to go back to what they did best: solid scholarship, strong teaching, and protection of academic freedom. That is all.“
Do you agree? Or what’s your alternative formulation? I’d like to hear from you.
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Search Committees, the Secret:
Who’s to blame when an academic appointment doesn’t work out? The person appointed? A right-wing conspiracy? The overwhelming demands of the job? Here’s the secret: Search committees at topflight institutions usually get exactly what they are really looking for. If the scholarly credentials of those appointed turn out to be flawed, maybe those who made the appointment didn’t really care about that. If the appointee waffles or sounds spineless before a Congressional committee, could it be that those who govern the institution wanted someone pliable, a figurehead who would comply with their wishes?
If so, a truly effective search will begin not with compiling a list of attractive candidates but by thinking hard, and if need be, arguing passionately about what the institution really stands for and needs.
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Ponderable:
“What is best in the new responds to an ancient need.”
Paul Valery.
Questions: What are these “ancient needs”? Are they ones all humans experience but can’t articulate well since they are deeply buried within us? Are they waiting for someone to bring them to light and give them voice? Is that what the new does at its best, and what ancient texts did in their day and may still do in ours?
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Neologism of the Month:
Indigeneity (noun)
Before 2000 or so, as best I can tell, almost no one used this word. In the last few years, however, it’s taken off, especially among academics and progressive activists. It’s a very convenient term, grouping together Palestinians. victims of colonialism in Africa and elsewhere, and native peoples in many settings. suggesting that their experiences and responses to them are essentially similar. While native peoples themselves do not seem to make much use of the term, it may be headed for a prominent place in the curriculum at some institutions, to judge from one recent college president’s list of topics for the university’s curriculum.
Latin based (within-born) Indigeneity is displacing Greek derived autochthony (identity from the soil). a word that has been around in English since the 1600s and can cover a wide range of relationships between earlier settlers and later arrivals, including the assimilation of the latter into the former.
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“Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard”:
Forner Harvard President Derek Bok has published an important article with that title Here’s a key passage: “In 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring with a majority of the Supreme Court, set forth what he described as the four essential freedoms of a university: to decide who will teach, what they should teach, how they will teach, and who should be admitted to study. He recognized that these freedoms could not be absolute but added that the government should not intervene except under circumstances that were “exigent and obviously compelling.” During the decades that followed, however, the courts have become less and less inclined to accept his formulation. In 1978 the Supreme Court began a process of regulating and eventually forbidding the use of racial preferences in deciding “who shall be admitted to study.” As Steve Sanders recently detailed in the pages of The Chronicle, the court’s eventual decision in 2023 to end the use of racial preferences was only the latest in a series of cases in which judges displayed a diminishing trust in the academic judgments of universities . ... The steady erosion of Justice Frankfurter’s essential freedoms has now continued over several decades and shows no signs of abating.“
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2019:
For American higher education the tipping point, or “inflexion point,” as we say nowadays, came in 2019.
. That’s the year when polling showed that Americans had flipped from a generally positive view of higher education, to a negative one. That opened the door to individuals with their personal agendas and to politicians who began to recognize that attacks on higher education would advance their careers and the causes they support. The effects of the change in public attitudes were evident at first in public universities; that is likely to continue even if at this moment topflight private universities are the more conspicuous targets.
The polling data don’t stop with 2019 results. Last summer Gallup summarized its polling on public confidence in higher education in this way:
- “36% have ‘a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education
- Confidence down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015
- All major subgroups less confident, with Republicans dropping the most.”
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Subjective explanations may, however, be closer to the mark. We are in a mood of national grumpiness, where nothing seems to assuage feelings of annoyance. As a result, we are often better at spotting flaws than in recognizing contributions to personal lives and societal wellbeing.
Still more troubling is the fact that higher education is not the only sector of our society to experience a loss of public confidence. Other institutions, the media, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Presidency, et al., are in the same boat.
In another Gallup report one can trace an approximately 50% decline in confidence in the institutions Gallup regularly monitors. Maybe polls are just a way for people to express their frustrations and disillusionment, but if we take the polling results at face value, it’s hard to see how a society can remain stable amid such declining confidence in its major institutions.
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What’s Next? Bok’s Answer:
“In 2017, Congress imposed a 1.4-percent tax on the earnings of endowments above $5 billion. Following the massacre of Israelis by Hamas on October 7, 2023, several members of Congress threatened to stop all federal funding of universities that did not act appropriately to prevent acts of antisemitism on their campus. In 2022, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced a bill that would deny eligibility for government-backed loans to any university charging tuitions greater than $20,000 per year unless they reduced the size of their administrative staff by 50 percent within a few years. More recently, Donald Trump announced that if elected president in 2024, he would create a free online university to be paid for by “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.”
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Does Bok Get It Right?
This is a frightening prospect for Bok’s institution and many others whose continued flourishing depends on their continuing autonomy. The threat, however, is much more immediate for public institutions where the threat of the Know Nothings is close at hand.
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A Museum Commemorating an Atrocity:
Greece is planning a new museum to house skeletons found a few years ago in a mass grave near Phaleron on the coast of Attica. Some had iron shackles on their legs; others had had their hands tied behind their backs. The story can be found in The Greek Reporter.
Pottery evidence suggests a date near the time of an attempted coup d’etat by Cylon and his in-laws from nearby Megara. Thucydides (1,126) tells of an atrocity when the Athenian authorities butchered the suppliants in Athens itself. If the skeletons could talk, they might recount more widespread retaliation against the conspirators.
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Another Look at Skin Color in Greek Antiquity:
Christopher Parmenter has some thoughtful observations in this post.
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Quotable:
“"Man is an adventurer of the infinite, which gives him unknown resources. His activity is to make sense, and in all drawings, in all poems, and in all musical compositions, it is reinforced by the faculty to make an obscure sensation clear and coherent."
Alfred Kubin (Thanks to Claude Cernuschi for providing this quotation.)
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Ponderable: On Polytheism and Monotheism:
“Polytheism sets a high bar for monotheism to clear. The polytheist has not only a dozen or so divinities squabbling on Mt. Olympus; the divine is represent in one form or another in e in every human experience - the growing of grain, the drinking of wine, the birth of a child, initiation into a mystery - everything from birth to death and thereafter. When the divinities from Mt. Olympus are distracted, one of their children, Eros for example, can step in, or one of the forces we misleadingly call “personifications.”
“Monotheism can’t compete in this game. Instead, for those whose imagination is up to the task it allows a flickering glimpse of remote but unbounded light.
“What is a poor monotheist to do? Surely not to push that glimmer off to some far-off heaven but to let it find and illumine the darkest corners of the soul.’
Maurice Brenmdenheim Confessions
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A Transgendered Emperor?
Click here for the debate about Elagabalus.
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Jargon of the Month:
bioesssentialism
Short definition: DNA is destiny.
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Breakthrough or Regression?
DNA extracted from ancient skeletons may in time tell a lot about ancient peoples, their migrations and now, it seems, their diseases and medical history. There’s still, however, a ways to go, as Christopher Parmenter argues:
“After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering on migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, DNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work—a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism.”
Christopher S. Parmenter. ”The Twilight of the Gods? Genomic History and the Return of Race in the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean” forthcoming in History and Theory.
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Etymology of the Month:
plagiarist (n.)
“ ... from Latin plagiarius "kidnapper, seducer, plunderer, one who kidnaps the child or slave of another," used by Martial in the sense of "literary thief," from plagiare "to kidnap," plagium "kidnapping," from plaga "snare, hunting net" – Etymonline.
The first person named as a plagiarist seems to have been Fidentius, chastised by Martial 1.29 et alibi for using his works without credit.
By 1601 the term was creeping into English when Ben Jonson spoke of a plagiary, meaning a copycat. (To save me from a charge of plagiarism, please click here.)
The term now covers a wide range of offences from carelessness in citation, to the deliberate stealing of someone’s ideas or research results. Maybe we’d be better off with two terms, reserving plagiarism for the kidnapping of ideas and results, and coining Fidentism after the Roman who failed to give Martial the credit he deserved.
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Journeys:
Daniel Mendelsohn, now the editor at large of the New York Review, will lead a series of seminars in 2024, which the Review describes as a continuation of “his acclaimed literature seminars on the theme of “Journeys.” This fall, over 1,000 participants joined his first two seminars—on Homer’s Odyssey and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Beginning in February, Mr. Mendelsohn will continue the series with three month-long seminars, devoted to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Second Place.“ You can sign up on the NYR website.
Dan Mendelsohn reports on a journey of his own in his account of teaching a class in which his father enrolled. His Odyssey is on my reading list.
And now there is Peter Brown’s much acclaimed (a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, etc..) Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.
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Poem of the Month:
When we think of journeys, we usually think of goals, arrivals, destination. Cavafy provides an antidote:
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind--
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
tr. Edmund Keeley
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Aphorism:
“War begins where reason ends.”
Frederick Douglass
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Stylish Stylites:
Old drawings of Athens sometimes show a strange structure perched high on the ruins of the temple of Olympian Zeus. What was it and what was it doing there?
It was, perhaps, a place for a stylite, that is an ascetic of Late Antiquity or the Byzantine period who withdrew from the world by climbing a column and living there. The story:
https://greekreporter.com/2023/12/10/building-top-temple-olympian-zeus/
Why such bizarre behavior? It meshes with many attitudes in Late Antiquity, but more broadly with a an earlier and deeply engrained habit of thinking about value on a vertical axis – the higher the better. We still talk about high minded people and lofty aspirations; the stylites acted it out.
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Sarcasm, Thucydides, Keep the SAT, but... –
You may enjoy several posts on my blog but the one most relevant to this Newsletter is “This May Make You Feel Uncomfortable.” Check it out.
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End Note: One Ways Forward:
Moments of gloom and doom, such as those discussed earlier in this Newsletter, may provide an incentive to rethink some core questions: What do we expect from a college education and what are the best ways toward those goals?
If we believe a good education should help us speak thoughtfully and persuasively across social, political and intellectual divides, then an ancient practice may help us:
“Rhetorical training meant more than teaching students to declaim prettily; it meant arming them to engage as citizens in an irrational and contentious world ... It’s time to resume teaching the skills that form the basis of interaction and a civilized life.” John Bowe “An Ancient Solution to Our Current Crisis of Disconnection” in the New York Tines.
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Thanks:
Many readers have sent me links, leads and ideas, so many, in fact, that I can’t name all my benefactors. Two, however, deserve special recognition, Judith Hallett, and Kevin O’Connor.
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Requests:
Please forward this Newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it, and please send me links and ideas that you think should be included in the next issue.
Bob Connor
[email protected]