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Of course, summer isn’t over for another month and a half, and in northern California, the weather often feels summerish until November, but I can hardly believe that the fall semester starts in another week.Must work faster on my thesis.
Having mentioned the impending doom of Antioch College twice already, it seems worth pointing out this article by George Will on the college’s fate. Thanks to the Cranky Professor for the pointer.
To be honest, in spite of my romantic recollections of driving past the Antioch campus on a warm summer day, the college was always a laughing stock in my ‘hood.
Here are a few things that have caught my attention and entertained me on the web recently.
There you have it. Scatological history, immigration, war, politics, and academic gossip all in one fell swoop.
I grew up less than an hour’s drive from Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College. My friends and I frequented the Glen Helen nature preserve near the town. I was in high school at the time, and I recall driving past the campus and wondering what life would be like in college. Once, a friend and I helped with the layout of one issue of a student publication, back when “cut and paste” retained its literal meaning. (The phrase “Red China” leaps to mind when I recall that stint, too, although I can’t remember exactly why.)
A year from now Antioch College will close, Ralph Luker notes at Cliopatria. Other than sentimental memories, I don’t have any ties to the college, and never considered attending it. But, as I said above, Antioch help shape some of my romantic ideas about what college might be like (and the reality was far from the romanticism).
Until reading Ralph Luker’s note, I wasn’t aware that Antioch’s graduates included such luminaries as Clifford Geertz, Stephen Jay Gould, Corretta Scott King, and Rod Serling.
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, says public schools, colleges, and universities are failing to teach students about American history, and by so doing they are failing to create a population that can sustain our political system.
Democracy is in jeopardy, not because of the usual suspects — corporate influence, activist judges, theocrats, etc. — but in the only form and the only place where it can long survive: civic and historical knowledge in the minds of the young.
The other side of the same coin is that in some cities, half of all high school students drop out before graduating.
Thanks to Prof. Richard Nokes for bringing to my attention the web site of Herr Professor Doktor Boethius P. von Kornkrake. As anyone can see from his bio, Herr Prof. Dr. Korncrake is well-grounded in modern research methods and theories. I am especially intrigued by his emphasis on semiotics. Those attending this year’s Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, might have heard Kornkrake expound on semiotics in some detail:
[T]he actual reading of my masterwork, “Cultural Semiotics, Semi(n)ology and Semiotics: scientia omnis aut est de signis aut de rebus significatis: Text, Textuality and Semiosis”, was anticlamatic.
I droned on in as perfect a monotone as I could manage, safe in the knowledge that such a reading would give my work the proper gravitas. When it was time for questions at the end, I filibustered, turning my first answer into the only answer time allowed.
I once worked with someone we facetiously called “Herr Professor Doktor,” but she couldn’t hold a candle to Kornkrake’s wit and style. Not many can.
Two days ago, while working late on my proposal for a master’s thesis, my Mac Powerbook took a dive. I was editing a footnote in Word, trying to change an Endnote citation, and the thing froze up on me. The fan started humming louder and louder, and I couldn’t switch from one application to another. The system just sat there, whirring away, unresponsive. I waited for something to crash, which usually returns control to the Finder, but after several minutes I gave up and hit the power button. When it went dark, the disk made a sound that didn’t seem right, even for a crash.
When I tried to boot up again: bad news. Gray start-up screen, spinning “wait” icon, and then the computer shut itself down. I tried booting again. Same thing.
Uh-oh. My thesis proposal is on that machine, and the last backup was over an hour ago. Now what? Fortunately, DiskWarrior saved the day, although it took what seemed like an hour to get the computer running again. When I finally logged in, my Word document was still there and I hadn’t lost any work.
That was a close call.
Then I read about the “herioc computer” that died in order to save the world from a boring master’s thesis, and I began to wonder if my computer was trying to tell me something.
I would like to have heard Tom Wolfe deliver the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Here are some of the highlights as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Mr. Wolfe’s lecture, “The Human Beast,” took its title from a novel by Émile Zola, the 19th-century French novelist who described himself as a “naturalist” and whom Mr. Wolfe called “my idol.” But he also gave the author of La bête humaine and his scientific inspiration a mock scolding: “I love you, Émile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn’t you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, ‘man reasoning,’ but Homo loquax, ‘man talking’!” . . .
He also referred to Max Weber, and then Clifford Geertz:
The work of scientists, in particular neurobiologists, Mr. Wolfe concluded, offers proof that culture, or “those things in human life that could not exist without speech,” trumps evolution. “It becomes difficult for neo-Darwinists to continue to say that structures consisting only of words are not real and durable,” the writer argued. He offered a quote from the Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not even be the clever savages of Lord of the Flies.”
I’ll keep an eye on the interweb for the entire lecture.
John Fund, writing for the Wall Street Journal, has been following the story of former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, now a student at Yale. In his most recent article on the topic, Fund notes that “there appear to be a whole lot of dark corners in university admission offices that deserve illumination.” His report is worth reading, not only for the commentary on the “Taliban Man at Yale” incident, but also for some of its insight on American politics.
Not usually the type of reader who follows a story from a reporter on the political right? Consider what this young man said:
James Kirchick, a Yale senior, wrote last month in the Yale Daily News that he was disturbed by the refusal of liberals to be outraged over the religious fascism the Taliban represent. . . . He noted that “a friend of mine recently remarked that part of his and his peers’ nonchalance (and in some cases, support for) Hashemi has to do with the fact that the right has seized upon the issue. Our politics have become so polarized that many are willing to take positions based on the inverse of their opponents’. This abandonment of classical liberal values at the expense of political gamesmanship has consequences that reach far beyond Yale; it hurts our national discourse.”
Isn’t it difficult to disagree with Kirchick?
Everyone by now knows, or should know, to take anything on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. It’s not without some genuine value though. I like to use it as a quick way to find a few dates, or at least to get a sense of the historical context on a subject, to refresh my memory, or to help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge about a historical event. This works for some topics better than others. It seems to work well for topics in modern western military history, such as the two World Wars. It can also work for information about famous places. I just referred to the page on Seville to refresh my memory on the date of the city’s switch from Muslim to Christian control, although I wouldn’t cite this date in a paper without consulting a more reliable source.
But these pages are in a horrible state: Moors, Hispania Baetica, Córdoba, and Mezquita. Woe to any student who relies on them for a school report. These pages could lead them into C territory, or worse, if I were grading them. Beside all that, if I ever teach a class on medieval Spain, I can already anticipate the problems I’ll have trying to deal with the term “Moors.” It belongs in the same bin as “feudal.” Students should be familiar with these terms, but they also need to know how troublesome the words have become.