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Friday, January 30, 2004
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OLD SCHOOL DAYS
Part One “Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool.” Counterpunch, August 2003. “Saul Bellow’s mind is a fetid enclosure. [Ravelstein is] shockingly bad, [and its portrayal of Bellow’s ex-wife is] the most cruel violation imaginable.” Garry Wills “Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind is both malodorously reactionary and - as a culturally conservative screed coming from a closeted homosexual - sickeningly hypocritical.” [I made this last one up; no time to Google an anti-Bloom shit-fit this morning.] When the way left gets mad, it gets way mad. And few symbolic locations seem to madden it more than my old school, the U of C, with its literary (Bellow), philosophical (Bloom), and political (Wolfowitz) non-left luminaries. One of these three is dead and the other two are elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem to matter -- looked at from the left, even the long-shriveled Leo Strauss strides like a colossus along the Midway. It’s different when you’re there. I remember years ago heading down 55th Street in Hyde Park with my boyfriend, and passing a hunched figure walking shakily along the sidewalk. “That poor homeless man...” I murmured. “That’s Alan Gewirth,” said my boyfriend. “Current President of the American Philosophical Association.” Still - was I living a kind of childish fantasy in Hyde Park? Did I think I was gamboling about in a bright meadow while I was really shut up inside a privy vault? Some people on the left seem to think Chicago at least used to be an okay place: Robert Silver, founder and editor of the New York Review of Books, recalls his undergraduate days there in a recent interview in the Guardian: “It was a marvelous school because everyone had to study the same things, in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences and mathematics. So everyone had read Plato and Freud, and Marx and St Augustine. It created an atmosphere with all these veterans coming back. I was 15; my roommate at one period was a bomber pilot who was 30. We all had to learn genetics; we all had to learn something about physics. They treated you completely as a grown-up.” But no doubt for a lot of people the authoritarian curriculum Silver describes (not to mention that bloodcurdling bomber!), and the institution’s indifference to the distinction between tough grownups and sensitive young people, still condemns the place... Anyway, since the University of Chicago has taken on a rather iconic right-wing status lately (I haven’t even mentioned their reptilian economists touting baby trafficking and anything else that’ll make a buck), I thought I’d suggest, in the second part of this post, some of what I found so valuable about my time there - none of it having anything to do with political wings. I recount these incidents and moments of understanding not because they happened to me, but because I think they convey something of what can be gotten from a reasonably serious undergraduate or graduate university experience. |