For most of my student and professional life I considered myself a young turk–someone who thought of himself as trying to improve and modernize the structure and function of the university. As an undergraduate I had been a member of SDS, although at Washington and Lee University our politics more nearly resembled the left wing of the Young Democrats than those of Tom Hayden. As a young faculty member I was a member of the New University Conference, a group dubbed the SDS’s faculty auxiliary. It was the 60’s and the issues were civil rights and the Vietnam war. The 70’s added gender politics to the list.
As I reached middle age and tenure, I found myself both part of the establishment and a critic of it. Many in my generation of academics found themselves in this predicament. There were several standard responses. One was to pretend one was still young and cultivate a following of politically active students. The conservatism of the 80″s and 90’s made this difficult, but not impossible. A second option was increased careerism–publish and ignore. The third, which is the one I followed, was to involve oneself in university governance and work to make changes from the inside. This choice makes enemies in each of the other two camps.
During this time I was comfortable calling myself a radical, which I defined as one who went to the root of the issue. During my youth, I was proud of the title “radical;” more recently I have been aware of the irony inherent in such a title. However, one consistency I see in my life is a desire to actively influence both individuals and the larger social structure. That desire is one of the reasons I left the university for my current position at the Family Foundation School.
Those readers who have followed the school blogs know that we are in struggle with a group called The Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY). I described the group as radical or rather that their agenda represented “a radical take on children’s rights.” Many of my colleagues both co-workers and others in the wider profession have objected to the characterization as radical as being too insulting.
I suppose I should acknowledge that I live in an age where radical gets most often paired with jihadist and not be surprised at this reaction. But I see CAFETY’s agenda striking at the root of the relationship of the family to the state and in that sense it is radical. The irony has not escaped me. I am now the target of the kind of group I would have considered joining when I was twenty-five. My twenty-five year old self would say, “well, you are old and have an ecnomic stake in the outcome. Just what did you expect?” In my next post I will discuss their agenda and my response directly. I wrote this post first so my readers can see where I am coming from and how personally I take these issues.
Tagged as:
CAFETY,
Education,
Family Foundation School,
Politics
The cover of the February 16 issue of Newsweek proclaims, “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW.” I shuddered when I saw the cover. Newsweek, the least conservative of the three big news weeklies, seemed to be putting Obama in a box. This is Socialism; it’s bad; therefore, we don’t have to think about it.
The article itself is fairer. It correctly points out that the Bush administration’s Medicare drug plans expanded the state as did the TARP bailouts. It compares us to European economies and points out that we have grown more like them and that all parties want government involvement in the economy, even if they disagree as to what it is they want.
What strikes me is our inability to find a language in which to rationally discuss our current situation. The Newsweek article tries to be balanced but still uses “socialism,” “big government,” and compares us to the French. Language that I believe will prejudice the average American reader.
Where might we find a new language, a new frame, for an analysis of our problems? We might do somethings that are un-American, such as have a philosophic discussion about the role and purpose of government. Do all believe that the business of government is business. Pragmatist will cry, “you want philosophy when the economy is burning?” Without an answer to this question, we will be unable to proceed without finding ourselves in another predicament.
We might look north to Canada. Their banking system is relatively sound. The Newsweek points in that direction when it discusses the housing crisis. We never much like looking at others’ solutions, but the Canadians have a good sense of the purpose of government and we would profit from looking there.
V.I. Lenin says the first question to be asked of any new policy is “whom does it benefit?” That is not a communist question or a capitalist one. But one that if we asked and answered it truthfully might change how we do things. It would certainly change how we talk about them.
Tagged as:
Canada,
Medicare,
Newsweek,
Politics,
Socialism,
United States
My last post ended with my return from the Peace Corps. I came back to the chaos of the late 60’s. I went to San Francisco in an ill fated attempt to be a hippie. I met Huey Newton for about a minute in the I Thou Coffee House on Haight Street. Went to graduate school and lived through the assassinations of 1968. When 1970 dawned, I was teaching at The Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, an historically black college. I got the job at the last minute with only an MA; my Peace corps experience helped me get it.
I found myself teaching students only a few years younger than myself and because the population of the college was mostly Southern from a past as segregated as my own. I listened to many in class presentations about the platform of the Black Panther Party. I joined the New University Conference, the faculty auxiliary of SDS. I took students to anti-war protests, supported them in various political ways. They were the material on which I honed my craft. I know I’m a better teacher because of these students.
In many ways I’ve struggled more with this post than the other two. In part, because I have more incidents to choose from, but mostly because my life moved further away from my parents and I don’t want to lose the personal focus of these blogs. So in many ways the important action of the 70’s was not the protests, the shootings, or the demonstrations. Rather it was a martini fueled argument on my parents’ patio in which I defended my racial opinions and my choice of jobs to my grandfather and my father.
My grandfather was an elegant man. A man who could wear white flannels and never get a spot on them. He was a classical scholar, a teacher, a staunch Episcopalian and a very moral man, except for his racism. My Grandfather was the old South. His great uncles had fought in the Civil War–he told me their stories as if they were his own. My own sense of morals, my choice of career, my sense of decorum, such as it is, all derive from him. And he was a racist–”colored,” and “darkie” were as much a part of his vocabulary as Horace and Euripides, his dissertation subject.
So on this early fall afternoon, we drank martinis and went at it–my father, the lawyer, my grandfather and I. I cannot remember all that was said. A picture of us under the tree that shaded the patio exists in memory. Emotional recall brings up memories of anger, and force, and struggling to remain logical and to defeat two highly skilled opponents. But the only words that remain are my grandfather’s as we answered my mother’s call to dinner. “You’re right, but I’m too old to change.”
How do we honor, love, and preserve the good in our history without denying the stain of racism? That question seems to me to be a major problem of American History or rather how we bring collective memory to bear on our current problems. I’ll address that in my next post and then maybe put aside politics for awhile.
Tagged as:
Black Panther,
Euripides,
Haight Street,
Hampton University,
Peace,
Peace Corps,
Politics,
protest,
Southern
The earliest records I can remember (yes, children I’m old enough to still own vinyl), were a very British recording of “The Wind in the Willows” and my mother’s Burl Ives collection, Wayfaring Stranger. I played it over and over. Then my mother got me hooked on Gilbert and Sullivan. Obnoxious child that I was—precursor, alas, to my adult personality—I regaled my first grade class with “When I was lad” from the HMS Pinafore.
Despite the operettas and the dutiful trips to the youth symphony performances, it was the Burl Ives followed quickly by Richard Dyer Bennett and then the Weavers that stuck with me. My mother loved folk music and played and sang to us often. She was appalled that her eldest son inherited his father’s dysphonia, not that that ever stopped me from singing. (I’m so bad I was asked to leave a church youth choir).
Family trips before the days of minivans and portable DVD players were spent in singing and arguing. The 50 miles to my grandparents would get us through most of our repertoire of hymns and folk songs. My mother supported my sister and younger brother would struggle to hold the tune while the dysphonic, but volume enhanced voices of my father and myself went merrily on blithely unaware of the pain they were inflicting.
One way this post could go would to be to write about our loss of collective family memory, but as I look at my daughter’s family—minivan, DVD player, and all—I know this to be a false direction . She and her husband are creating family memories for my grandchildren and themselves. It is simply too curmudgeonly of me to complain they aren’t the memories created for me.
Rather, I would like to reflect on the unintended consequences of our choices. My mother just wanted us to share her musical tastes and not fight in the car. But my very Republican parents ended up with three children who tend vote Democratic and folk music is partly to blame. If my mother had known the result she might not have exposed me to working songs, songs with laborers as heroes, spirituals, or the laments of poor farmers. I think these shaped my sympathies at a young age and when the folk explosion of the 60’s came, my siblings and I were ready.
Like everyone in my high school I listened to the Kingston Trio. I thought they were too commercial, too phony. I remember the shock of hearing the early Dylan, seeing Odetta in concert and developing my intense lifelong crush on Joan Baez. As these voices began to speak to the politics of the 60’s, my earlier exposure made it easy for me to pick up those causes. “The people” were important to me because I had learned sympathy for their sorrows as expressed in song.
Of course, my politics come from many sources and I am no less a product of my times than is anyone else, but it has always fascinated me that humans are taught things with a clear intention in mind and seem to learn other things. The training my early feelings received through music shaped the way I responded to the issues of my time. At a personal level these seem more important and intense that than the imperatives of class or race.
Thomas Carlyle says, “Work bodies forth the shape of things unseen.” Who knew that learning the “Foggy, Foggy Dew,” or “Drill Ye Terriers Drill,” would lead to sit-ins and protests. Whatever our intentions, those we teach will bring their experience and their feeling to that knowledge and we cannot (should not) control that outcome.
Tagged as:
Bob Dylan,
Burl Ives,
folk music,
Joan Baez,
Odetta,
Politics,
Wayfaring Stranger
The fool’s words are the cruelest statement in Shakespeare’s cruelest play. As someone who has just reached the age the government defines as “senior citizen” and who is entering the blogosphere for the first time, I suspect that I too am ignoring the fool’s advice. Like most Americans, I prefer possibility to fulfillment, so I’ll continue to ignore this advice.
What will be the themes of this blog? Memory and the search for wisdom in various ways will inform most of the posts here. My first classroom was in the Kgari Schele School in Molepolole , Botswana. Currently I am the Academic Vice President of the Family Foundation School in Hancock NY. In between I’ve taught at four universities. So teaching and learning will be one of my threads.
I’m a father and a grandfather, so family memory, wisdom and learning might appear in this blog.
I’m a scholar of the theatre and compulsive reader, so musing on literature, theater, and our lives will be another thread. I’d like to personalize these musings in ways that are simply unacceptable in academic criticism. If reading isn’t fun and/or enlightening why do it?
The playwrights I like the most Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, and Edward Bond (who too few Americans know) all are engaged in politics—so while this will not be a political blog in the usual since of the word the intersections of art, morals, politics and popular culture will be another of my threads.
Mostly though I’d like to muse on what wisdom is, how memory defines us and therefore wisdom itself—I want to bend the personal to the philosophical or at least to the critical. So if you’re interested, stay tuned. Before I started this blog,I promised my self I’d post two or three times a week, so more will be here soon.
Tagged as:
Botswana,
Edward Bond,
Molepolole,
Politics,
Popular culture,
Shakespeare,
Theatre
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