… from UD‘s house in upstate New York is SUNY Cobleskill.  

Quite a distance down the hill.  The house sits way up in tiny Summit. We drive to Cobleskill, the closest town, for groceries.

A news story about SUNY Cobleskill is just beginning to break, and if its details check out, yikes.

… In a blistering complaint, a professor claims the SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill removed him from as dean because he objected to the school’s policy of recruiting unqualified students, many of them black, solely to get its hands on their tuition, “for the express and admitted purpose of making budget, knowing that these students are not reasonably likely to graduate.” He claims black students were fraudulently induced into enrolling so their tuition could “subsidize agricultural programs, which run at an annual deficit,” and which “serve white students almost exclusively.”

In his federal complaint, Thomas Hickey says he was a tenured professor and Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He claims the campus president and vice president for academic affairs lowered academic standards and admitted students they knew were unlikely to graduate, and even falsified some students’ records to make them eligible.

… Hickey claims he discovered that a student who earned a B+ in English Composition was functionally illiterate.

He claims [Anne Myers, Academic Affairs VP] changed the school’s Academic Review standards by lowering the threshold GPA to 1.0: “On Dec. 2, 2008, Defendant Myers sent an email to the faculty stating that ‘in light of the budget, we will use a 1.0 [Grade Point Average] cut off for first semester freshmen for Academic Review.'” And he claims that “as one point, she suspended Academic Review entirely.”

Thomas Cronin, a physics professor, responded to Myers’ email with one of his own, according to the complaint. It said: “The list of academically and morally corrupt practices that ensue from our inability to adhere to our own standards is rather long. One of our worst offenses is that we admit, and re-admit students absolutely unqualified and absolutely incapable of achieving a college degree. Many go into debt or cause their families to go into debt into [sic] order to attempt a college degree. This is an absolutely corrupt practice and it may be criminal. If we have done this to even one student, then we are guilty of a very low form of corruption.” …

The Open Letter form is treacherous. Scathing Online Schoolmarm herself would never use it. If you’re going to use it, be careful.

SOS featured one of these years ago, by the poet Michael Blumenthal. Addressed to his creative writing class, it attained a certain notoriety. SOS admired its honesty, its capture of the emotional sleaze at the heart of some writing programs… But it carried the same sense of off-putting personal grievance most of these things carry, and therefore wasn’t really effective.

Here’s a more recent open letter to one’s students, with commentary in bracketed blue by SOS.

**********************

Empathy, Not Apathy
An open letter to my students.
By Karla Jay

[Terrible title. Lame. The words empathy and apathy are constantly coupled in writing, because they share athy, and because they’re both affective states. So the title’s a cliche. But worse than this, the title’s emotional. It’s mushy, without substance. And since the biggest problem with open letters tends to be their self-involved, self-righteous, prescriptive feel, the title does not bode well for the writer’s argument.]

[The writer begins with a summary of her letter:]

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the the street. The Internet has turned you away from the world. [The initial cliche is just asking for it. It’s old-fashioned to use cliches, and this writer has therefore copped to being archaic in her first phrase. She’s also factually incorrect. While this new technology won’t save the world, it has been very effective in a number of venues at gathering up large numbers of people.]

Dear Students,

Where have we—your elders-failed? [Do you really want the biblical elders? And do you really want the  where did I go wrong thing?  The hand-wringing Jewish Granny rhetorical question thing?]

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University uprisings. The students had many grievances, including the university’s attempt to build a private gym in a public park and its involvement in the war in Vietnam, as well as the war itself and the unpopular draft. This year marks the 40th anniversary of both the Stonewall uprising and Woodstock. My involvement with a radical feminist group, Redstockings, also began four decades ago. I emerged from these events and groups as a radical lesbian, feminist and pacifist, committed to a lifetime of global struggle and local issues. [Weird list. Begins with the private gym and then throws in the Vietnam War. After that begins the overstuffing which only makes things vaguer and less substantive — Woodstock, Stonewall, Redstockings, and patting herself on the back for her lifetime of struggle as a … and here’s another list – lesbian, feminist, pacifist. All of these things are good things. The point SOS is making involves the writer throwing all she’s got at the reader from the get-go.  It’s both intellectually confusing, in that there’s too much going on, and unpleasantly boastful: Look at all I’ve done! Look at how little you’re doing!]

Reflecting back [Drop back.] on these catalytic events, I wonder why you, my beloved students in women’s and gender studies at Pace University, aren’t out at the barricades in the fight against the interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread genocidal acts against women, the lack of equality for the queer community and evildoing by the banking industry. [More undifferentiated listing. Most people – certainly most of this woman’s students – have complex affiliations, positions, commitments. They may oppose Iraq but not Afghanistan, may not believe that genocide is the right word to use in discussing women’s issues, may not believe bankers satanic. This early in the essay, it reads like personal articles of faith rather than arguments about the world directed to other people. Beloved embellishes our portrait of the writer as Sardonic Granny.]

I have tried to interest you in local crises through involvement in community outreach courses in which you work two hours or more per week in battered women’s shelters, at food pantries, in homeless shelters and with underprivileged children. I want you to become the next generation of activists. About one third of you enjoy your stint and get over feeling that community service is for felons. [This is good. Funny. Should have done the whole thing like that.] You stay on because you’ve bonded with your new community, knowing deep down that somehow you got more out of it than they did. (When I lost most of my eyesight and became a recipient of social services myself I found out that “it’s easier to give than to receive” is not a cliché but a hard truth.)

It seems to me, [Drop the comma.] that many of you don’t see current “issues” as connected to you. [Why the quotation marks around issues?] That nothing is “real” unless you’ve seen it on reality TV. [And why around real? Just makes it seem the writer herself questions the existence of reality.] The violence in the world can’t match the latest hit film. [Lame. See how abstract it is? Like the title? The writer can’t come down from her speech-making and talk in specific, human terms to people.] Since there is no draft, attending college is no longer a prelude to going to Iraq or Afghanistan, except for those on ROTC scholarships. You think feminism is passé. For those of you who are white, racism is over, too, because Obama is president. There is no gender or racial gap at your minimum wage jobs at Abercrombie, The Gap and as student aides, but you haven’t entered the real work force yet. There’s a Stonewall Coalition at the university, but you don’t need that because New York City has so many queer bars and you have the fake I.D. to get in. You’re oh-so-out, though most of you can’t apply the LGBTQ words to yourself in my queer courses. [Way, way bad. Again the listing, but here it’s transparent petulant complaint. The world isn’t the way I want it. People aren’t doing what I tell them to do. And if you think the election of a black president means shit you’ve got your head up your ass.]

I observe your lives. [At this point in the letter, the reader is correct to doubt this assertion.] You are smart and can do things via computer I can only dream of. But few of you read a newspaper or even online news sites. However, you are constantly texting and twittering—opening e-mail seems too dated. You want the news to be as brief and fast as Twitter; you would like classes to move along in some more amusing format like animé. You avoid doing research if it involves books; the text you read is on your cell.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the street. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had blogged “I have a dream” on Facebook, how many would have twittered back, “Yeah, dude, I had a dream last night, too.”

Life online has turned you away from the world around you. This virtual life is more real to you than planet Earth. [The writer makes a clear distinction between the bracing reality of her world and the pointless narcissistic unreality of her students. But because she has failed to establish her world’s stronger reality in her opening paragraphs — because it seems in fact rather unreal, dated — the distinction fails.] As Taylor McHugh, one of my activist students put it, “Students feel apathy, not empathy.” [The writer has no empathy with her non-activist students — the sort of empathy that would be plenty critical, but would also exhibit nuanced understanding. So her apathy/empathy thing doesn’t come off.]

When I was a student, the mimeo and ditto machines were the closest thing we had to going viral. Maybe some of us went out because we had nothing else to do, but there was only so long we could stay inside scrutinizing our Ché Guevara and Madame Binh posters. It was also so much less dangerous back then to risk losing a college degree over an uprising. [I don’t understand this final sentence.]

I understand how different your world is from mine. [No, she seems not to.] I know how much harder many of your lives are than mine was 40 years ago. My total undergraduate education at Barnard cost approximately $16,000, which my scholarship covered part of. According to US News and World Report, for example, the average indebtedness of a 2008 Pace graduate was $29,622. The minimum wage jobs that I worked at for $4.00 per hour should be $16 by now, not $7. 25. I shared an apartment on the Upper West Side with three other students for under $75 each per month.

I know that some of you have one job on the weekends, another at night; some of you work late as waiters, showing up the next afternoon to class hardly able to stay awake. (I know one of you worked all night at a supermarket, studying by sitting between the plastic bag holders when there were no customers.)

[These paragraphs, while not very well-written, are good faith efforts to sympathize. They do not really empathize.]

Some of you help support a single mother or siblings, but most of you simply have other priorities. You want things: brand-name clothes and shoes, iPods, iPhones, flat-screen TVs, fast laptops. Acquiring them takes weeks of work. Your drug of choice is consumerism, and you are its slave: You are Gen C, not Gen Y. [Way to retain the one or two students still reading at this point. Call them slaves, drug addicts.]

If I blame anyone, though, it is my colleagues and those of us on the Left who fail to lead and involve you. [Sardonic Granny again. Spends hours beating you over the head for your failings and then shrinks back into the chair and pretends she thinks it’s really her fault.]

I could blame the recession, but even in times of prosperity, most faculty members teach and go home. For most, there’s no sense of responsibility to students outside the classroom. Some, mostly from the humanities and social sciences, supported an SDS uprising against Pace University’s former president a few years back and helped oust him. It’s easier and more lucrative for faculty to research, teach extra courses or become a consultant on the side. For some, teaching IS the other job. [Teaching, says SOS, primarily involves presentation and discussion of important ideas and phenomena. Dispatching students to the ramparts is something else.]

We on the Left haven’t done our jobs. Some organizations, such as the Left Forum, Third Wave Feminism and NARAL, encourage on-campus recruitment and participation. But we probably would be appalled if our students wanted to do more than simply support our efforts. [Why does she use the word appalled?] We have not encouraged them to become leaders, instead of followers. In our early twenties, many of us founded or led organizations. Now we are still leading them, while the young remain powerless. They are the new women, relegated to making sandwiches and answering phones or e-mail rather than taking charge. The more Left groups became organized, the less the young were to be found in the hierarchy. Many groups suffer from “founders’ syndrome,” in which the original leaders are still there and not planning to step aside any time soon.

If we cherish our goals more than our own prowess, it is time for activists and tenured radicals to see ourselves as mentors and partners rather than leaders. This is how I now approach education, but shifting my attitude meant that I had to relinquish much of my power in the classroom. And that in turn has forced the students to take charge of some of the teaching, to abandon their comfortable passivity. It was and still is scary for all of us to some degree, but my battle-wise colleagues and comrades need to understand not only how much we can teach the young, but also how much we can learn from them if we will only listen. [This is just confused. It’s just a very confused essay. It begins by establishing the writer’s belief that her students are confused and out of control — drug addicts, slaves. It ends by shifting its grievance from students to battle-wise colleagues. They need to understand how much they can learn from these lost souls… ]

From an article in the Boston Globe:

[Jack] Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members.

… But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses.

… Summers pushed to invest 100 percent of Harvard’s cash with the endowment and had to be argued down to 80 percent, financial executives say.

… Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor and a former dean of the college, attributes the failure to address the university’s financial risks to the ancient structure of the Harvard corporation, which functions as its board. “With only the six fellows plus the president, there is inevitably going be a lot of deference to the people who seem to have the most authority, especially if the president is strong-willed,’’ Lewis said. “Whether or not anyone in particular made a mistake in this situation, it shows a fundamental structural problem. The power is just in the hands of too few people with too little accountability.’’

… Amid plunging global markets, Harvard would lose not only 27 percent of its $37 billion endowment in 2008, but $1.8 billion of the general operating cash – or 27 percent of some $6 billion invested. Harvard also would pay $500 million to get out of the interest-rate swaps Summers had entered into, which imploded when rates fell instead of rising. The university would have to issue $1.5 billion in bonds to shore up its cash position, on top of another $1 billion debt sale. And there were layoffs, pay freezes, and deep, university-wide budget cuts.

… No one wants to repeat the black day when university officials had to swallow hard and reveal a $1.8 billion loss…

From the Washington Post:

… This fall, [George Washington University] became the first school in the country to offer scholarships to squash players, cementing its commitment to a sport that has been played at the collegiate level since 1931 but has just recently become more popular on college campuses.

… GW, one of four non-Ivy Division I squash programs, recognized the academic value of squash student-athletes to the school, too. In the seven years of existence, the men’s team has won the athletic department’s team GPA award twice.

… Two years ago, GW men’s coach Wendy Lawrence and women’s coach Maura Myers approached the athletic department about getting funding for scholarships and initially were rebuffed.

“I think the university assumed that squash players already had money,” Lawrence said, referring to the game’s reputation in the United States as an elitist sport played mostly at exclusive prep schools and Ivy League universities.

That was and continues to be somewhat true — recently, the family of one of Lawrence’s players donated $100,000 to the team — but the men’s and women’s squads at George Washington also have athletes on need-based financial aid. Tuition, room and board at GW is $51,775, one of the more expensive amounts in the country.

Six months after the rejection, however, the coaches received an e-mail. Both teams would be given partial scholarships to award new student-athletes starting this fall.

“We wanted to treat all of our programs the same,” GW associate athletic director Chandra Bierwirth said. “This seemed to be the natural piece of the puzzle.”

… In five seasons, the women’s team has gone from 29th to a ranking of 15th last year. They are currently the second-highest nationally ranked team at George Washington, behind men’s rowing…

The writer’s talking – in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times – about the tax exemption on sports income at American universities.

Many booster clubs are recognized as charities under the federal tax code. At Florida and Georgia, to name just two universities, the athletic departments are set up as charities. Universities also have access to tax-exempt financing when building ever-larger stadiums and arenas. Boosters and donors benefit from generous tax deductions when they buy the best seats or endow an athletic scholarship. That’s right: colleges now endow their quarterbacks and linebackers the same way they do a distinguished chair of American literature.

If university presidents wanted to slow the corruption and waste of big time campus sports, they could, suggests the writer, “ask Congress to rescind the tax breaks on the commercial income earned by athletic programs.”

Then he laughs at the thought that any president would have the guts to do that.

***************************************

Update: Mr Punch, a reader, offers a correction:

Actually, he’s not talking about “the tax exemption on sports income at American universities.” He’s talking about the tax deductions and exemptions for sports-related donations. As UD has often pointed out, there isn’t any net income at the vast majority of institutions.

Here

are

three

articles from three universities about the class on Wednesday before Thanksgiving controversy.

(Very pleasant, thank you, and I hope yours was too. Highlight: Playing Rock Band, UD‘s sister on drums, La Kid on guitar, and UD warbling into the mike. We did all these songs I sort of know… sort of know the chorus, maybe… Ramblin’ Man, Kids of America, American Woman… Started mentally ramblin’ during Ramblin’ Man… I was thinking Allman Brothers didn’t Cher marry one of them Sonny always seemed dumb named one of his kids Chesare because you couldn’t expect people to figure it out if they named him Cesare…)

So here’s my take on Should we cancel Wednesday classes before the holiday.

***************************

What’s happening, most broadly, at the American university right now is what UD calls Invisibility Drift. Classes used to meet three days a week; now most meet two. There used to be very few holidays and cancellations; now there are gobs. Official cancellations and particular professors cancelling for this and that reason. Some class sessions you just watch a film, which you can do anywhere, at any time, and there’s nothing class about it… I mean, no one’s up there teaching you something; there’s no discussion going on. The classroom, the professor, other students, the university — all incidental. I’ve read more than one Rate My Professor complaint about professors in courses like these turning out the lights, starting the film, and leaving. See you next Tuesday! Enjoy the show.

Add to this high levels of class skipping among students (I did plenty when I was an undergrad), high levels of watching tv shows on your laptop or texting while you’re in class, high levels of guest lecturers instead of the ostensible professor teaching the class, high levels of blowing the course off and looking at downloaded stuff in your dorm…

You get the idea. The university as a physical location where professors and students interact in real, flesh and blood time and place vanishes. Does your professor look at you and talk to you and think in front of you? Do you look at the professor and listen to her and take notes? Do students look at each other and talk to each other? Bring books and look at the places in the books where the professor directs their attention?

No. Ain’t much attention going on in the vanishing classroom. People are absent — physically or mentally.

So look at it this way. Administrators are aware that at $50,000 a year or so they need to, well, pay attention to the fact that their enterprise as more or less originally conceived and priced is vanishing. At least at British universities, where you seldom see a professor or take a class, they don’t charge much of anything. Here in a quintessentially postmodern transaction you pay immense sums of money for white noise. (Let’s not even talk about the Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies major you’ve chosen.)

Am I saying it’s all evaporated? No. I’m talking about a trend. I’m talking about administrators’ awareness of a trend.

******************************

So slot this into yet another canceled day — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And keep in mind that when you cancel the Wednesday you also basically cancel the Tuesday and eventually the Monday — There’s some psychological principle going on here, I guess… a kind of infinite regression principle in which once you cancel Day Z, Days X and Y are imperiled…

You can see, I hope, why universities are reluctant to do this particular deal. I mean, think about it from the perspective of the many schools like Auburn and Georgia where classes are further dumped left and right because of football games … It begins to look as though we might as well forget classes for the entire months of November and December.

Many universities are therefore doing nothing for the time being about the Wednesday. They leave it up to the professor, who tends to cancel classes. Over time, so many professors will cancel as to make it impossible for the few professors who hold Wednesday class to do so. Everyone will be gone. Professors will lecture to a whistling nothingness.

**********************************

Me? I hold class. Quite a few students showed up in both classes, and we had relaxed, excellent discussions (of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist and DeLillo’s Underworld).

(I mean, I thought they were great.)

A pharmacy student at this Hungarian university pulled out his gun and began shooting during class. He killed one student and badly injured others in the room. He has been captured.

Local media quoted other students as saying the alleged gunman had recently been acting strangely and did not get along well with his classmates.

There are passages – certain rousing conclusions, like this one from Concerto and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 909 (doubtful) – that amaze and exhilarate me as I play them. They heat the blood.

In the morning, before I leave for campus, I play these passages again and again. My heart, my mind, my hands — everything’s sort of feverish. The spotlight over the notes on page 95 of Johann Sebastian Bach Miscellaneous Keyboard Works Toccatas Fugues And Other Pieces illuminates the little world in which I sit as long as I can, picking out sounds and smoothing them.

While I teach, while I order coffee, while I sit on the metro, these final notes flow through my mind. Not just these notes; all the variations on them that whoever wrote it worked through the piece.

Whatever else my mind’s doing during these hours, it’s also spinning harmony after harmony.

At some point I drop this game and decide to sing all parts at once of the Domine Deus duet from Mozart’s Great Mass. High low up down alto soprano strings.

Later in the evening I return to the piano.

For years I made do with my father’s Waldorf spinet. Not much point tuning it, and I didn’t much care, being a good singer and a bad pianist.

As I got better on the instrument, I wanted more sound, and I had the spinet taken away. I bought in its place a pretty good baby grand.

It’s a beautiful thing to see, this piano, in a corner of the living room, its lid propped high, light from the deck windows on its dark wood.

I bought a red rectangular leather cushion for its black bench.

The high shelves behind the piano are all about my music books. Everything’s out of order. Suzanne’s between Handel and Haydn.

I like grazing the shelves, thinking I’ll sing this, getting distracted by that.

Anyway, this is what I’ve decided to thank this Thanksgiving. The piano that takes up a spotlit corner of the living room and heats my blood.

Dispositions assessment for new candidates approved (includes consultation with UMN general council) [sic]

This excerpt from a University of Minnesota school of education task force draft says it all.

The professor who wrote it doesn’t know how to spell counsel. The same professor looks forward to subjecting applicants to the school to an assessment of their cultural competence – cultural competence here being what the task force tells applicants it is.

Applicants who don’t want their social views investigated and approved by admissions officers might save themselves money and anxiety as to the correctness of their views by not applying.

Applicants who read the criteria by which they will be considered culturally competent, and who alter themselves to conform to the school’s standards of cultural competence should feel encouraged to apply. This group should understand, however, that even if admissions officers find their degree of competence acceptable at this time, applicants will continue to be scrutinized closely on the matter throughout their years at the school.

The reason the task force thinks it might want to check in with the general council is that someone in the group has an inkling that political litmus tests might be considered unconstitutional.

But constitutional questions are the least of it. Who but an idiot would apply to this school?

Something stubborn in me says no lessons.

So I’m sludgy, inept. I never practiced scales, never understood how to count beats, never took in the mysteries of dynamics and continuo.

When I catch myself running smoothly along two lines, moving a prelude’s harmonies as Bach intended, I’m astonished. A fluke, a folly. Give monkeys enough time and one’ll type Hamlet.

Yet it’s also true that a few years ago I began digesting fugues and sonatas (“Music is the best means we have of digesting time,” says Auden.), began starting a piece and finishing it, rather than reaching a moment of frustration (my hands too small to box with octaves) and fluttering the pages of the music book in search of fewer sharps and more adagios.

I still won’t get anywhere near Brahms — well, maybe a lullaby — but I can do some Schumann. I feel most certain of my footing with baroque and classical, and longtime readers know that a good deal of my playing accompanies my singing Henry Purcell compositions.

********************************

Have to prepare for class. More later.

UD too hastily judged the Duke lacrosse team when some of its players were accused of rape. She never said “They’re guilty.” But her initial commentary had an accusing tone.

She does not intend to make that mistake in responding to this story.

The attorney for a Sacred Heart University lacrosse player charged with helping two teammates sexually assault a woman says the accusations are a gross exaggeration of alcohol-fueled hijinks.

Wayne Keeney, who represents 19-year-old Timothy Sanders of Ashburn, Va., says Sanders and the 18-year-old female student were having consensual sex when two teammates sneaked into the dorm room as a prank.

But he says the other two students — 19-year-old Nicholas Travers of Smithtown, N.Y., and 18-year-old Zachari Triner of Marshfield, Mass. — had no sexual contact with her. She has said Sanders held her down while the other two raped her.

Police say all three were charged Sunday with conspiracy to commit first-degree sexual assault. Sacred Heart officials declined to comment, but Keeney confirmed all three have been suspended from school and the lacrosse team.

… four? It’s almost impossible to count. Here’s the trustees page for UDC. A careful reading yields four real voting trustees… though I’m not sure.

And then you go to this Washington Post article and it identifies a whole other person as chair of the board of trustees.

This Post editorial notes that ten out of the fifteen seats for trustees are empty — the City Council and the Mayor can’t agree on appointees.

Meanwhile one of our most troubled universities operates with virtually no trustee oversight.

He’s talking about Northeastern University’s recent decision to drop football.

[Northeastern University’s neighbor, Boston University,] appears to have invested well in its 12 years without football. Not having a Saturday tailgate does not seem to have hurt … its national and global rankings as an academic institution. The athletes in the remaining sports do remarkably well. Its male athletes have a graduation success rate of 89 percent, including 100 percent for its African-American male basketball players. Its female athletes have a 97 percent graduation success rate.

… Northeastern scored a touchdown by dropping football.

Crystal, one of my students, emailed me an hour ago about this short story by Don DeLillo, in the latest New Yorker.

It’s sweet and rich, and, as we say in the biz, intertexual, its title, Midnight in Dostoevsky, taken from “Meditations in an Emergency,” a poem by Frank O’Hara.

(Odd coincidence: I spent the day before yesterday laboring over a poem by O’Hara…)

DeLillo’s story is told from the point of view of Robby, an undergraduate at a wintry upstate New York campus. He likes to take snowy walks through a nearby town (as I read DeLillo’s descriptions of its faded-grandeur houses and frowsy diners I picture Worcester, a place near UD‘s house in Summit, New York) with his friend Todd. While walking, they have endless quarrels about what they see around them — how many boxcars there were in a passing train; what sort of jacket a man they see on the street is wearing. Their quarrels are as charming and funny as the same sorts of quarrels the Gladney family enjoys in White Noise — an endless amiable nattering among people insistent on the rightness of their own take on things.

White Noise, though, presents a postmodern world in which no one’s right, a world whose every aspect surpasses the ability of even highly-educated people to understand it. The humor in the natterings, in fact, lies in the patent inadequacy of everyone’s descriptions and interpretations of everything. Underneath the confident assertions lies total intellectual futility.

The upstate town the characters in “Midnight in Dostoevsky” walk through is largely deserted; always a little dusky on these short winter days, it seems to them a haunt of what they call “souls” and “spirits” departed. Subdued even more than it ordinarily is by the heavy snow that’s fallen, the town appears to Robby a sort of nothingness, a vagueness onto which he and Todd try to project some clarity, some reality, some meaning.

The only way they can do this is through their quarrels: “Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine…” Dialecticians, they generate a sense of event, a sense of the real and the true, only from the clash of their minds.

**********************

Their Logic professor is a depressive disengaged man who stares into space pronouncing one disconnected phrase after another: the causal nexus; the atomic fact. “He didn’t want to know who we were. We were passersby to him, smeary faces, we were roadkill….He did not bring books to class, never a sign of the textbook or a sheaf of notes, and his shambling discourses made us feel that we were becoming what he saw before him, an amorphous entity. We were basically stateless.”

But Robby and the other students like this. They like sitting in silence (there’s no discussion), pondering the professor’s pronouncements. “He challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false. Isn’t this what great teachers do, the Zen masters and Brahman scholars?” What the Logic professor’s really doing is flattening the students themselves into nothingness, emptying them of their reason for being, etc., so they can enter a sort of radical thought. The students might not know how to do radical thought, but they instinctively understand that they’re being emptied out and prompted toward it.

A fellow student tells Robby about having by chance sat across the aisle from the professor at a local diner.

“He said he was reading Dostoevsky. I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said, ‘Dostoevsky day and night.’ ”

“Fantastic.”

“And I told him my coincidence, that I’d been reading a lot of poetry and I’d read a poem just a couple of days earlier with a phrase I recalled. ‘Like midnight in Dostoevsky.’ ”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

So here’s the relevant section of the O’Hara poem, the poem with the phrase the student likes in it. The speaker, just dumped by a lover, expresses anger at how badly he’s been wounded by the rejection, and wonders how to live an invulnerable life:

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away…”

I checked. There are at least five St. Serapions. I think O’Hara liked the name because serape — a cape — is implied in it. The saint of white robes, the saint of temporary shelter from the storm, from the filth of life — the saint who whites out the world, uncolors it with the pure uncolor of Russia’s white nights — the poet yearns toward that saint’s dissolution because of the intensity of his pain.

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“Imagine a surface of no color whatsoever,” he said.

That’s back in the DeLillo story. That’s one of the Logic professor’s weird isolated statements.

“I’m emptied. Ready to go,” says Charles Wright in Disjecta Membra.

The discipline of self-emptying, the practice of wrapping yourself in robes of white so as to be able to emerge again, ready to go, seems at the center of this story and these poems.

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Todd and Robby become obsessed with an old man who lives in the town and who walks the same route they do. Who is he? What’s his story? Like Quentin and Shreve in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, they go back and forth in conversation, imagining together, constructing together, a detailed life story for him. They tussle in particular about the sort of jacket he’s wearing. What is his serape? How is he wrapping himself up against the wound of the world?

Walking in the town alone one day, Robby thinks:

In snowfall, the town looked ghosted over, dead still at times. I took walks nearly every afternoon, and the man in the hooded coat was never far from my mind. I walked up and down the street where he lived, and it seemed only fitting that he was not to be seen. This was an essential quality of the place. I began to feel intimate with these streets. I was myself here, able to see things singly and plainly, away from the only life I’d known, the city, stacked and layered, a thousand meanings a minute.

The town is a surface of no color, its absence of feature allowing Robby, whose urban life weighs on him with too many meanings, a new clarity of perception.

He reads Dostoevsky in the library. He listens, as usual, to the Logic professor:

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”

We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.

“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny…”

The obsessive to and fro, the everlasting assertion and denial, between Todd and Robby, is a kind of living logic, is itself you could say the logic of living. It’s a vibrancy and an ordering teased out of the mental chaos and blur of the singular mind.

The highest order version of this practice, let’s say, is the art of fiction, the making of stories, the generous act of non-creaturing other creatures through the fashioning of clear and ordered narratives for the vague and disordered beings we glimpse along the street.

“I was myself here,” says Robby, praising the empty town which allows him to perceive his own emptiness — the same thing his Logic instructor is trying to make him see. Emptied, he’s ready go, ready to narrate the world more truly.

… Northeastern University ends its football program.