SOME ADVICE FOR YOUNG PROFESSORS JUST STARTING OUT

I taught my first class in 1955 as a graduate student Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Philosophy Department's Introduction to Philosophy, taught by the venerable Raphael Demos [then perhaps fifteen years younger than I am now!]  That year, and the next, I was responsible for three discussion sections each semester.  I taught my last class two years ago, as a professor emeritus, in the UNC Chapel Hill graduate Public Policy Program.  Starting with those discussion sections, each time I taught a class, I would open a manila folder for the class list, the syllabus, any handouts I might produce, and my hand-written record of each student's quizzes, essays, examinations, and class presentations, with little notes to myself about his or her performance and the grade I assigned.  Fifty-six years of course folders sit in my file drawers, arranged chronologically.  They are a complete record of a lifetime in the classroom.

From time to time, I hear from a former student.  A woman whom I taught thirty years ago wants a letter of recommendation.  [Yes, that really does happen, and more often than you might imagine.]  A man who took my course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1960, and who is now in his seventies, drops me a line to say that he enjoyed the course.  Just last month, a young man who signed up for a course with me in the 1990's but never was able actually to take the course asked me to fill out a retroactive withdrawal form so that he could finally complete his undergraduate degree.

In each such case, a quick trip to my file drawers allows me to recapture exactly what that former student chose as a topic for the final paper or how he or she did on the midterm exam.  Somewhat disingenuously, I am prone, when I hear from a student of thirty years ago, to say in my reply, "Of course, you chose to write a critique of the argument in Hume's Third Dialogue, and although I thought you were wrong, I also thought you did a fine job of it."  Ah, they think, how can he possibly remember me after all these years!

If you are a graduate student or a young Professor, right now start keeping records of all your courses.  I understand that you cannot really imagine still being at this fifty years from now, but trust me, the time will pass, much faster than you might like, and there is a world of pleasure in having ready to hand a record of every young man and woman who passes through your classes.  After all, if you had chosen to be a professional baseball player, every one of your times at bat would be recorded somewhere.  Surely your students are as important as balls and strikes!

SOME EARLY USSAS STUDENTS

Yesterday I reported that after twenty-four years I am bringing to a close my scholarship organization for poor Black South African students.  Today, I should like to tell you just a little about three of the earliest bursary recipients.  What follows is excerpted from the final letter of appeal that I shall send to my donors shortly after Labor Day.

Let me begin with the very first USSAS bursary holder:  a young man [as he was then] named Lamla Maholwana.  I met Lamla in the South African city of East London in 1990 during a trip I was taking around the country to set up USSAS.  I took him to lunch --- the first time he had ever been in a restaurant! -- and after some discussion, I agreed to fund his first year of study in Biochemistry at Fort Hare University, the all-Black university famous as the alma mater of Nelson Mandela and many other Black southern African political leaders.  I completely lost touch with Lamla until suddenly, on May 15th of this year, I received a heartwarming email message from him.   It seems that he has earned a doctorate in health promotion at the University of Maastricht and is back in South Africa, as he says in his letter to me, "running a small social enterprise focusing on health promotion." 

            The second USSAS bursary recipient is Thamsanqa Zungu.  In 1993 or '94, during my visit to the University of Durban-Westville, my old friend and colleague, the late Prem Singh, who had taken on the task of looking after the USSAS students on that campus, arranged for me to listen to a young man from a Black township outside Durban whose extraordinary bass-baritone voice had brought him to the attention of members of the Music faculty at UDW.  I sat down in the front row of a little recital hall as a tall, slender, handsome young Black man took the stage and launched into the great aria from the Messiah, "The trumpet shall sound."  I very nearly fell off my chair.  He had an enormous, rich, thrilling voice, quite unlike any I had ever heard.  On the spot, I agreed to fund him, despite the fact that he had not, as they say in South Africa, "earned a matric" and therefore was not eligible to enroll as an ordinary degree student.  Over the next few years I did everything I could to help Thami's career along until he won admission to Juilliard in New York.  Eventually, I lost touch with him, and only recently discovered that he is now the Vocal Arts Programme Coordinator at the Tshwane University of Technology in Gauteng Province near Pretoria.  In 2008, Thami conducted a performance of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, the first Black conductor of a full opera in South Africa.

            The third USSAS graduate is Bekisizwe Ndimande, who started life in a squatter camp in the Northern Transvaal, somehow earned admission to UDW as an education major, received a series of USSAS bursaries that saw him through his undergraduate days, and then, with the help of U.S.A.I.D., earned a full Ph. D. in education at the prestigious University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Bekisizwe is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  His research has focused on the attitudes of poor South African township residents toward education for their children.

            Each of these men came from the poorest segment of the South African Black population, and none of them could have dreamed of such careers without the support made possible hundreds of USSAS donors.  I am sure that not all of our USSAS students have been quite this successful, but hundreds of them, if not more, are now working productively and making valuable contributions to South Africa.  I believe we all have a great deal to be proud of.

 

A SAD SWEET END TO AN ERA

Twenty-four years ago, after a memorable meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I launched University Scholarships for South African Students [USSAS], a charitable organization that I have run single-handedly now for just shy of a quarter of a century.  I raise money in the United States and use it to underwrite bursaries [i.e., scholarships] for poor young Black South Africans seeking to attend historically Black universities in South Africa.

Last week, yet again, but now for the very last time, I began the painstaking, tedious task of preparing for mailing a funding appeal to my small circle of faithful donors.  The process has not changed in all these years.  First, I draft the letter of appeal -- the easiest part of the process for me, inasmuch as I like to write -- and have the UPS store across the street print up copies, some signed "Robert Wolff," others to be sent to folks I know personally signed "Bob."  I check my supplies and have a local printer make batches of number 10 envelopes, number 9 pre-addressed return envelopes, and stiff printed contribution cards.  With all the materials stacked in my office, I am ready to begin the process of generating the mailing.

I massage my Excel database, preparing it for the mailing.  First I merge print the envelopes and then I merge print the letters [addressing friends by their first names, others as Dr. or Professor or Mr. or Ms.].  Everything is carried to the dinner table, which is cleared for the folding and stuffing.  Each envelope receives a folded up letter, a return envelope, and a contribution card, and as I work I check to make sure the letters and envelopes match.  Next comes the sealing -- a wet kitchen sponge swiped across the flap with one hand and the flap pressed down with the other.   The final step is to peel stamps from the rolls purchased at the Post Office and affix them to the letters.  With the job done, the stacks of envelopes sit in supermarket paper bags, waiting for the date I have chosen to print on the letters.  [This year, it is September 9th.  It is never a good idea to send out a mailing before Labor Day.]

I have done this so often that the entire procedure is thoroughly familiar, though not without its challenges.  Since I cannot make WORD accept conditional commands [although I have long been convinced that I ought to be able to], I must divide my database into eight subfiles:  One name, one address, and a personal salute ["Dear Jane"], one name, one address, and no personal salute ["Dear Professor Smith"], one name two addresses ["apartment 13", for example], and a personal salute, one name, two addresses and no personal salute, two names [Professor Jane Doe, Mr. John Doe, for example] one address, and a personal salute, two names, one address, and no personal salute, two names, two addresses, and a personal salute, and finally two names, two addresses, and no personal salute [this last file has only three names in it, but it must be separately merge printed so that the heading of the letter ends just exactly two spaces before the body of the letter begins.]

When the replies come in, I record the donations, write thank you letters to the big donors [$100 or more -- this is a pretty small operation!], send mega-donors a separate record of the donation for tax purposes [this to those who send $250 or more], and deposit batches of checks in my USSAS bank account, as they come in.  When pretty much everyone who is going to give has been heard from [there is always someone who will send a check six months later], I walk across the street to the bank and transfer what I have raised to a bank account in Pretoria, South Africa which is overseen by my old friend Sheila Tyeku.

The final step is the transfer of the funds from the Pretoria account to the University of the Western Cape, where Dr. Tania Vergnani, who runs the HIV-AIDS Awareness and Prevention campaign there, chooses the students who will receive the bursaries from among those who are participating in the campaign.  In an ordinary year, I raise enough to fund fifty bursaries, each one large enough to enable the student to pay a sizable portion of the tuition charges and enrol at the University.

Why have I chosen to bring this long effort to a close?  Well, in a few months I will be eighty, and it just seems time.  In 1990, when I founded USSAS, I had no idea that I would still be doing this a quarter of a century later.  Over the years, I have helped more than one thousand six hundred young men and women to attend South African universities.  The fragmentary nature of record keeping at the historically Black institutions in South Africa makes it exceedingly hard to keep track of the bursary recipients once they leave university, but for this last letter of appeal, I have been able to write descriptions of what has become of three of the very earliest bursary recipients.

Tomorrow, I will reproduce here what I have written in my last appeal letter, so that you can have some idea of what has been accomplished over the years.

THE BIRD HAS FLOWN THE COOP

Avid bird-watchers will be pleased to learn that the little sparrow has taken wing.  In time, we shall clean out the birdhouse, turn down the corners of the toilet paper the way the maids do in fancy hotels, replace the towels, replenish the mini-bar, and await next year's residents.

NAVEL-GAZING

I had a curious reaction after writing my little blog post about our condo porch bird house, reflection on which has taught me something about myself.  Inasmuch as blogging is to narcissism, we might say, as pornography is to eroticism -- a bastardized form of an already suspect obsession -- I suppose it is perfectly appropriate that I should write about my reaction here.

After posting my report about my anxious interest, and Susie's, in the fate of the baby bird in our birdhouse, I promptly lost all interest in the bird.  Now, very little, save the life of a sparrow, hangs on that bird's successful launch from the birdhouse, and although the Good Book assures us that His eye is on the sparrow, He is, after all, omniscient, so He has lots of unused RAM for such things.  But why should this avian domestic drama lose its appeal for me so abruptly?

I am, as I have often observed, a writer before all else, and to write is to transmute some moment of transient reality into eternal art.  Once I had found the right words to report the Bird House moment, it underwent a transformation for me into something approximating art.  Its potentiality as a subject of a blog post was realized, and hence its importance to me ended.

Kierkegaard observes that the essence of the ethical is repetition, whereas the essence of the aesthetic is novelty.

I have often observed very much the same pattern in my philosophical writing, but until now I do not think I fully understood its meaning.  My first book, published just half a century ago, was Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, a scholarly explication of Kant's First Critique.  The customary academic response to such an achievement would have been for me to become a Kant Scholar, which is to say, someone who goes on to write other books about the same subject, gives conference talks about the same subject, reviews other books on the same subject, and very quickly becomes known as "Wolff, the Kant scholar."  But in fact I did nothing of the sort.  Almost immediately, I began writing about nuclear disarmament, then about political theory, then about educational theory, and finally, after the passage of some time, about Kant's ethical theory.  It was thirty years before I wrote another original paper about the First Critique.  The same thing happened with regard to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.  After publishing in 1960 a major paper, much read and reproduced, on Book I of the Treatise, I never again published a word about Hume until I began writing my blog tutorials fifty years later.

I have often remarked that I am not a scholar.  I mean by that not merely, or principally, that I write books and essays that lack footnotes, but that my writing is not, for me, a participation in an on-going scholarly discussion.  Rather, writing for me, despite the fact that I write serious argumentative non-fiction, is an act of artistic creation.  That, I think, is why I never show what I have written to other scholars before publishing it.

FAILURE TO LAUNCH

If there are any readers of this blog as devoted to low movies as I, they may perhaps have seen the 2006 effort, Failure to Launch, a Sarah Jessica Parker/Matthew McConaughey trifle about a young women whose profession it is to hire herself out to exasperated parents who cannot get their grown sons to move out of the family home.  Parker seduces the men, woos them into leaving home, picks up her paycheck, and moves on.  The parents in this forgettable film are the always wonderful Kathy Bates and -- surprise, surprise -- pro football great Terry Bradshaw.

Susie and I are currently watching with bated breath an avian version of this cautionary tale.  Six months ago, we bought a wooden birdhouse and had it installed on the porch of our third floor condo.  Several weeks ago, we discovered that the birdhouse was inhabited by a sparrow couple and their two babies.  For a while, we just peered out of our bedroom window, which looks catty-corner at the end of the porch where the birdhouse is mounted, waiting to catch a glimpse of one parent or the other landing on the birdhouse and feeding the babies by regurgitating food into their open maws.

In the past few days, however, things have taken a dramatic turn.  As the babies grew larger, they started thrusting themselves more and more insistently out of the small round entrance to the birdhouse, cheeping plaintively for food.  Then, yesterday, one of the babies suddenly appeared on the edge of the porch below the birdhouse.  It had either flown out or had fallen [or, indeed, had been pushed by its larger sibling -- there is very little fellow feeling among baby birds, apparently.]

At this point, something truly remarkable happened,  An entire flock of sparrows showed up, only two of which at most could have been parents of the little bird, and landed on the porch within a foot or two of the baby.  Apparently, it does indeed take a village.  We went out to dinner, and when we returned, the baby had disappeared.  Either he flew or he fell -- there is no third way when you are a bird -- but Susie went downstairs and could not find him on the pavement.

Now the remaining baby, who at this point is larger than its parents, is staying in the nest, calling imperiously for food.  I think it may be time to get Sarah Jessica Parker on the case.

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

The NY TIMES today carried the obituary of Jean Bethke Elshtain, well-known as a neo-conservative political theorist.  The news of her passing triggered in me a series of recollections and musings about a phenomenon I have never really understood.

When I was a young man, there were very few distinguished senior White American intellectuals on the left to whom those of us coming up could look for guidance and inspiration.  One after another, men and women who had been strong voices on the left in the thirties turned to the right and ended up supporting Republicans and conservative causes with a patriotic fervor they would have mocked when young.  Some turned away from progressive politics because of the Moscow show trials, others after the Molotov-Ribbentrop entente.  Many, who were Jewish, turned conservative because of the establishment of Israel.  For young men and women of my generation, coming to maturity in the early fifties, there were precious few role models.  I have always thought that was the appeal of Herbert Marcuse.  Even if we could not really understand what he was writing much of the time, we could see that he had somehow made it to middle age and older without suffering what seemed almost a genetically encoded turn to the right.  My own father, son of a socialist leader and a socialist himself as a teenager, eventually came to support the blackballing of communist teachers in the New York City public school system to which he had devoted his life.  My letters home from college in the earliest years of the 50's are filled with my arguments with him about that shameful episode in New York history.

In the late 50's, a group of young Harvard graduate students and Instructors formed something that we jokingly called The New Left Club of Cambridge.  We would meet for bag lunches from time to time in my office and talk about politics.  Among the most ardent and committed leftists in the group were a young graduate student couple, Steve and Abby Thernstrom.  Stephen Thernstrom was on his way to a distinguished Harvard career as an historian of lower class life in Puritan New England.  His wife, Abby, earned a doctorate from the Harvard Government Department.  Something -- I have never understood what -- turned them from committed progressives into embittered apologists of the Right.

I met Jean Elshtain in 1973 when she joined the UMass Political Science Department as a young Assistant Professor.  She was bright, lively, focused, and a strong progressive voice then, a colleague of my friend and sometime fellow seminar leader William Connolly.  I invited Jean to take part in my left-leaning interdisciplinary undergraduate program, Social Thought and Political Economy, and for several years she did.  I really liked Jean, and had great hopes for her.  And yet, as the years passed, she turned more and more to the dark side of the Force, eventually becoming one more in the panoply of neo-con intellectuals.

What is it in America about growing old that does this to so many promising young thinkers?  Not all, I am happy to say.  My generation [interpreting that term somewhat loosely] includes Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Gar Alperovitz, Sam Bowles, Rick Wolff and a number of other strong left-wing voices who never wavered from their commitment to progressive causes as they aged.

My own difficulty as a young man in finding older figures to identify with and seek inspiration from stirred in me a desire to provide this sort of guidance to young men and women coming after me.  If I have managed to do that to one or two, I will feel that my time on this planet has not been wasted.