… Anthony Grafton described this blog as a “long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it,” UD, madly flattered as she’s been, has brooded a bit over focused.

In fact, long before Tony mentioned focus, UD had given thought to this feature of her blog, a blog titled, after all, University Diaries. How bound to the campus must it be?

As University Diaries has gained a good readership, UD finds herself sometimes talking about things that have little to do with universities — odd stories she finds funny and thinks her readers might also enjoy; and, more significantly, details of her life qua humanoid.

Of course you could say that any data you receive about UD — and her husband, also a professor! and her daughter, a university student! — is, stretching things a bit, university-related. But how much of a critique of the university as we know it is a photograph of UD‘s kid singing backup for Bruce Springsteen?

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UD‘s commitment to focus sometimes means she obviously, desperately, attempts to draw a university connection to a story that really has none (Bernie Madoff went to Hofstra!); but more often she’s simply interested in writing about a story or a scene from her life that involves I guess you’d say culture, broadly conceived.

Since a serious liberal arts education understands itself to be producing cultured people — people familiar with world history, philosophy, political theory, art, science; people able to argue almost anything intelligently; even people who regard themselves as artisans of culture (musical performers, creative writers) — it has, over the years, seemed to UD that details of her life and the life of some of the people she knows that may reflect the rewards, as she sees them, of having been liberally educated, wouldn’t be out of place.

I mean, there are connections between doing something well and knowing things… Which seems an obvious thing to say, but in an anti-intellectual culture it can annoy people when you suggest, for instance, that ignorant histrionic poetry is a bore, educated controlled poetry often very exciting, etc. As T.S. Eliot wrote:

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are what we know.

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Anyway. Here are two absolutely non-university stories that for whatever reason UD feels like sharing.

Well, maybe in a rather twisted way there is a university connection.

Seamus Heaney recalls a recent Letterkenny hospital stay while recuperating from a stroke:

“[Bill] Clinton was here for the Ryder Cup. He’d been up with the Taoiseach [Bertie Ahern] and had heard about my ‘episode’. The next thing, he put a call to the hospital, and said he was on his way. He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed. But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous, really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost. We had about 25 minutes with him, and talked about Ulysses Grant’s memoirs, which he was reading.”

Like a kind of god!

I dunno. This, plus a moment from Hillary’s trip to India, in which after a long day of travel and diplomacy she charmed hundreds of university students with tales of her love of Indian food, got me thinking.

These stories remind me that I’ve always been staggered by the genial hyper-energetic hyper-sociability of the Clintons. I’m grateful there are people like these in the world, shooting from the Ryder Cup to Ahern to the entire ward of a hospital in one afternoon; flying to India with a still-sore elbow and charming hundreds with tales of your love of their cuisine… But while I’m no Richard Rorty (Watch this clip from an interview with him and tell me professors, even big famous ones, aren’t pathetic.), I’m (Did you watch it? Did you find yourself torn between laughing out loud and crying?) pretty (Doesn’t it read like a satire of a psychoanalytic session?) introspective (Directed by Woody Allen?). (Am I cruel, that I laugh more than cry when I watch this?) (Doesn’t the funny language on the screen deepen the satirical feel?).