QVELLING

Bekisizwe "Stanley" Ndimande was born in a township in the northern Transvaal in South Africa.   He survived the brutal segregated South African education system and did well enough on his school leaving exams or "matrics" to qualify for admission to an historically black university.  But of course he did not have the money to pay the tuition fees that would gain him admission and access to the country's loan system.  My scholarship organization, University Scholarships for South African Students, provided him with that money and he enrolled at the University of Durban Westville.  He did well, supported each year by one of my grants. After graduation he came on a US government grant to the University of Massachusetts School of Education.  From there he went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to do a doctorate in education.  Yesterday, I received an email from him, telling me that he has just been promoted with a large salary increase to the rank of full professor at the University of Texas San Antonio.

Some of you may be familiar with The Brothers Karamazov.  If so, you will no doubt remember the fable that Grushenka tells Alyosha about the old lady and the onion.  I often think that Bekisizwe is my onion. When I die and go to hell, I hope I will be able to restrain myself from kicking as I am pulled out of hell by the angel holding the onion.

BOOK BURNING

So now the fascists have turned their attention to the books in school libraries.  They want to ban the books they do not like, thinking in that way to keep them from impressionable children. Lordy, they are so clueless. Do they really think schoolchildren go to the library when they want to read a book? I would love to know how many times in the past 12 months those dangerous books have been checked out of a school library. Then I would like to put a message about the books up on TikTok or WhatsApp or Facebook or any of the other social media platforms that I have never even heard of and see how many times the message is read or forwarded or liked or commented on in the first 24 hours.

 

I am as horrified as anyone by book burning but I am afraid that ship has sailed.

INTERVENTIONS

The term “intervention” has come to be used to describe a collective act of familial tough love. A member of the family is behaving in a self-destructive manner, and the sons and daughters, or fathers and mothers, or aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents get together to sit down with the loved one and talk a little tough common sense to him or her.  Interventions are painful and do not always work, but they are usually well-meaning expressions of genuine concern for a troubled family member. When I was a boy, my father became an alcoholic. He was a quiet drunk and simply became sleepy rather than rambunctious when he had had too much to drink. The subject of his drinking was never mentioned because in a Jewish family heavy drinking was a schande, a shame, something not to be spoken of. I do not know whether he would have benefited from an intervention, but none was ever organized.

 

Two days ago I was the object of an intervention. I had asked my niece to arrange a zoom call with my big sister who is 91 years old and lives in a Southern California retirement community. I have not actually seen Barbara in person in several years and I miss her. At 2 PM my time (11 AM on the West Coast) we had a little get together via zoom. In addition to myself and Barbara there were Linnea, who arranged the zoom call, and her brother Josh who was, I think, somewhere in upstate New York.

 

I had sent a circular email around to the family members telling them of my bad fall and assuring them that both my right hand and my side were now feeling much better, although my cell phone was not and would have to be replaced. When the call started, Barbara and Linnea started urging me to use a cane or walker in order to avoid another fall – falls at my age are a principal source of life-changing injury and are best avoided if at all possible. I replied casually that I had tried walking sticks and a cane when taking my morning walks and had found that they did not really help me at all, so I had stopped using them.

 

I was just chatting, making customary family talk, but Barbara and Linnea kept at it about the walker and all of a sudden it dawned on me what was happening. I asked, only half in jest, “Is this an intervention?” They allowed as how it was. (Josh commented that he was not in on it.) The tone was a light and casual, but it was clear that my sister and my niece meant it and had spoken to each other about it before initiating the call.

 

It was hard for me to hear, and I know exactly why. As I have grown older, it has become a point of pride for me to continue to be active and effective, to be my wife’s principal caregiver, to be the one who can always handle what is coming up, who can protect my wife (who is, after all, a year older than I am, as she has been since I met her 74 years ago.) I am aware, however embarrassing it may be, that I take great pride in having become known around Carolina Meadows as someone who takes a long walk every morning, winter or summer, getting to know the early morning walkers and dog owners whom I see and say hello to on my way. All around me are men and women using canes, using walkers, or in wheelchairs and I try with a certain quiet desperation to hold off the time when I will be reduced to that condition.

 

Well, I am a great believer in pride, in keeping up a good face, but a serious fall causing broken bones would really be a disaster in my life. Let us face it, I was lucky to suffer no more than a fractured cell phone as a consequence of this last incident. Susie has several walkers in our apartment and so, with considerable reluctance, I appropriated one. It is a four wheel roller and in the last day and a half, I have been using it around the apartment. Later this morning, when it warms up a bit, I will go for a walk using the roller. I cringe at what people will think when they see me go by. “Isn't that Bob? He must have declined a good deal to have to use a roller. Oh well, it comes to all of us.”

 

I continue to ride my exercycle five mornings a week, increasing by 30 seconds each week the portion of that spent at a higher level of difficulty. I am now up to 7 ½ minutes at the higher level and I will continue as long as I can increasing the difficulty. I do this not because I enjoy it, God knows, but because I have been told that aerobic exercise 150 minutes a week has proven to be successful in delaying the progress of Parkinson’s disease.

 

Since Barbara reads my blog each day, she will know that her intervention was successful. I have been trying all my life to live up to my sister’s brilliant successes and her approval, which I hope I shall have earned, will go some way to easing the pain of the intervention.

ADDENDUM

Guy Mizrahi asks, “Prof. Wolff, what were some of the other changes you observed in the elite American education system during your time within it? Whether that be changes to the attitudes of students, to the education offered, or to the general body politic of the institutions themselves?”

 

An interesting question, about which I could go on for quite some time. Some things have changed little or not at all, of course. Plato is still Plato, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare, calculus is still calculus (although these days more students learn it in high school then when I was young.) But the changes have been dramatic. Indeed, I have often observed that the half-century of my teaching career pretty much coincided with what future generations will look back on as the Golden Age of the Academy. When I was a young professor at Columbia, graduate students were being offered tenure-track jobs before they were ABD; editors at commercial publishing houses contacted us unbidden to ask whether we had any ideas for books that they might publish; tenure was secure; there were few adjunct professors; and at the good institutions the teaching load was a light two courses a semester. We all thought it was because we were so bright, not realizing that we were benefiting from a relatively brief moment during which there was a seller’s academic labor market.

 

In two very important ways the life of undergraduates at the elite institutions was markedly different. First of all, when I started as an undergraduate at Harvard, tuition was so low (in constant dollars roughly 1/10 of what it is now) that no one graduated with student loans to pay off and it was literally possible, if you did not waste the summer months, to work your way through college. I have long believed, without any hard evidence, that the soaring cost of higher education, which began during the Vietnam War, served the latent function of dissuading students from pursuing socially and politically progressive but un-remunerative careers after graduation.

 

Secondly, because it was not difficult to secure admission to the “good” schools, students were under much less pressure to get in, and hence under much less pressure to conceal their sense of their own inadequacies in the presence of what everybody assumed was a collection of elite fellow students. Consequently, the whole business of getting a college education was not so surrounded with doubts and anxieties. In 2018 and 2019 when I was flying up from Chapel Hill once a week to teach at Columbia, somebody on the Morningside Heights campus remarked in passing that half the students at Columbia were getting some sort of psychotherapy!

 

At the administrative level there has been a major change in the sorts of people recruited as university presidents, chancellors, or senior administrators. Sixty years ago the men (and in the rarest cases women) offered University presidencies were genuine academics, some of whom had actually achieved significant distinction in their fields of specialization. It was only later that corporate types started taking over universities and trying to run them as they would their corporations – with pretty much the disastrous consequences one would imagine.

 

One of the changes in higher education of which I became aware only after I transferred to an Afro-American Studies Department was in a way an unhappy consequence of a virtuous change in the white institutions. For many years there had been splendid historically black universities and colleges whose faculties were staffed by first-rate academics who had no chance of securing jobs at elite white institutions because they were Black.  After the 1960s when northern universities started recruiting some of the best Black scholars there was a brain drain that weakened the historically black institutions. 

 

I liked Harvard when I was there as an undergraduate (even though, to be sure, I wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson calling on the president to resign). I do not think I would like it very much now.

GETTING INTO HARVARD

Terrible things keep on happening in a world on which I can have no noticeable impact.  I sit here worrying about my car windshield (which should be replaced today or tomorrow!) Meanwhile more than 2000 people a day in the United States die from the virus – a 9/11 every day – war is on the edge of breaking out in Eastern Europe and democracy dies a thousand deaths here at home. Now I read that the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to affirmative action admissions programs at Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill.  The thought occurs to me that although I can have no effect on the outcome this is actually a subject about which I have been thinking and writing for virtually my entire life, so today I will make a few remarks about it.

 

Let me begin with a few historical facts. Before World War II, colleges and universities did not have admissions policies or admissions programs. They had admissions requirements. If you met the requirements you were pretty much guaranteed admission. Things began to change after the war, even though only 5% of the adult population earned college degrees. I have several times observed here that when I applied to Harvard in 1949 for admission the next fall, only about 2200 young men applied and three quarters of them were admitted although I think the class eventually was a bit smaller than 1200 in all.  Ten years later, in 1960, things had begun to change. I heard the Dean of the Harvard faculty, McGeorge Bundy, observe that there were 5000 applicants, of whom, as he said, “a thousand are clear admits, a thousand are clear rejects, and all our effort goes in deciding to which of the other 3000 to offer admission.”

 

In those days half or more of the entering class were preppies and it went without saying that if your father had gone to Harvard a place would be found for you. Furthermore, even the elite schools were regional rather than national, let alone international.

 

Very quickly pressures for admission increased steeply as parents sought to get their sons and daughters into elite schools, graduation from which virtually assured them choice positions in the upper-middle-class. In addition to the traditional legacy admittants and the sons and daughters of rich potential donors and of course athletes in the premier college sports, admissions committees started worrying about finding a good oboe player for the orchestra or achieving geographical balance and even, out of an excess of social concern, admitting a number of people who had colored skins and odd names (although, like as not, these new sorts of folks did not come from working-class homes – I mean, there is a limit!)

 

As the proportion of college graduates in the population increased and the already steep pyramid of jobs and wages grew even steeper, parents seeking to launch their children into the upper middle classes became more and more anxious about getting their sons and daughters into the “right” schools. At first the parental concern was simply that their children have access to “college preparatory courses” which frequently carried grades that were higher than the traditional 4.0, resulting in applicants with GPAs above 4. A glut of such overachievers led admissions committees to look for evidence of “extracurricular activities” to which parents responded by pushing their anxious children into internships, musical activities, and officially “good” works designed to help the “poor,” with the result that admissions committees became even more selective as they sifted through stacks of applications from students every one of whom could have made perfectly good use of the education that the college was offering.

 

I wrote about this for the first time 60 years ago in an article for Dissent magazine, another version of which appeared the next year in the Atlantic. The essay was called “College As Rat Race” which pretty well captures my view of the goings-on in the elite corner of the higher educational world.

 

My proposal for how to end this nonsense was heartfelt, sincere, and so off the charts bananas that no one ever picked up on it or echoed it, even on the left of the political spectrum where I lived. I suggested that colleges should establish some reasonable minimum standard calculated to identify students who could benefit educationally from what they were offering, and then simply make a random selection from among the large pile of applications that remained from the sifting and offer admission to whomever made this cut.

 

I had all sorts of good arguments as to why this would be a rational way of handling tertiary education. It was, after all, the way elementary and secondary education was for the most part handled in America. But there was of course a killer objection, namely, Why on earth would parents pay the enormous tuitions being charged by the elite schools if admission to the school was not prima facie evidence of suitably elite ability?  The whole point of going to Harvard – or Princeton or Yale or Cornell or Swarthmore or Reed or Amherst – being to get launched into the scarce elite high-paying jobs with good fringe benefits and no threat of sweat, random admissions would defeat what Robert Merton would have called the latent function of higher education.

 

The reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court will, I predict, for all the wrong reasons strike down the use of race as a consideration in the admissions policies of American universities and colleges. But say what you will about Harvard, it has some brainy people there (not all of whom, like Senators Cruz and Hawley, have gone over to the dark side), so it will be interesting to see how they manage to get around the Supreme Court ruling.

WHERE IS RELIGION WHEN YOU NEED IT

One of the little noticed drawbacks of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition is that it did away with those lesser gods who look after such matters as crops and tides. I have been feeling the loss of these lesser gods lately because of a series of problems I have been having which in a better time would have fallen under the eye of the god of glass. First, when I took the bad fall about which I have written, my IPhone 5S suffered a cracked glass screen. The phone still works – these are remarkable objects, after all – but tiny pieces of glass are falling off and since it is now very old I have decided to upgrade to a new phone. Ordinarily, this would be no problem but I am so leery of entering any commercial establishment because of the virus that I am unwilling to go to the local Verizon store. Apparently I can buy a new phone, have it shipped to me, and then sign in on it and get all my old data which is (who knew?) stored in the cloud.  This would be as nothing if I were 60 years younger, but alas I am not.

 

Meanwhile, the slight ding in the windshield of my ancient car has now mushroomed into a crack so large that I dare not drive the car. Naturally, this happened on the weekend (I will get to the question of weekend gods later) so until tomorrow I cannot even find out whether the local Toyota dealership can replace the windshield and will do so.

 

Now in the good old days before the Old Testament, I would simply have offered up a newly slaughtered pig or some such to the god of glass who would, I assume, have answered my prayers. But nowadays either I must go it alone or I must direct my plea to the Infinite Immortal Eternal Lord of the Universe, and it just does not seem right to bother Him (or Her or It) with so trivial a matter. Oh, the Catholic Church has Saints for this and Saints for that, but Saints are just ordinary people who got lucky and bypassed purgatory. They are not really Gods and what I need right now is a god of glass.

 

Ah, give me that real old time religion!

POLITICAL REPORT

I am sitting at my desk in my office and to my right, on the floor, is our little cat Chloe. She is curled up asleep as is the way with cats and her chin is on a copy of the Communist Manifesto.  And they say cats can't read!