… deceive me…

So in love with you am I!

… and, as expected, does after all award an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.

Clyde Haberman, quoting the chair of CUNY’s board of trustees on freedom of speech, asks the crucial question.

If free expression is such a “bedrock” principle, how come it didn’t occur to any of [the trustees] to make that point while Mr. Wiesenfeld was holding forth on Mr. Kushner?

Here’s UD‘s guess on the answer to that question. Her guess is based on absolutely no inside knowledge — just knowledge of Wiesenfeld’s bull-like personality, and knowledge of the way genteel groups of people – like university trustees – tend to behave.

UD suspects Wiesenfeld is a well-established irritant on the board, a person the other trustees dread and try to pretend doesn’t exist. When he suddenly went off on Kushner, the main thing going through the minds of his fellow trustees, let’s say, was How do we neutralize this guy prontoprontoPRONTO?? How do we make him go away? From their point of view, anything was better than challenging Wiesenfeld on this (or any other) matter and having to enter into a conversation with him. So they went along. They gave in.

… on them?

[UD thanks her sister for the article.]

… for-profit colleges going on right now, on the Kojo Nnamdi show.

… as I read Christopher Hitchens on having lost his voice.

… I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to.

[I have always been able to sing. ‘Twas in the genes. My father was in the Johns Hopkins Glee Club, and had a marvelous voice. My mother sang light opera and spirituals very prettily. They were always singing. We were all – my parents, their four children – musical, the house vibrating with guitars and pianos and recorders. I’d take my nylon string guitar into the bathroom and sit on the hamper and sing Joan Baez-style English ballads.

Last night, in my quiet house – my husband in Saudi Arabia, my daughter in Ireland – I took out my ratty, forty-year-old copy of the Joan Baez Songbook and sang, with the book’s simple piano accompaniments, all of the Lyrics and Laments, the Child and the Broadside Ballads, until my voice ran out of steam.  All of the songs I sang with the nylon string guitar when I was fifteen.

That was a pleasant losing of the voice, a losing that happened after it had been used to generate deep and happy memories.   After it confirmed that my fifteen-year-old voice and its ballads were still in there.]

… I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way that you talk.” At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence… If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

[My fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun.  Yes.  When you teach writing to smart and sensitive undergraduates, you’re torn between championing to them the personal pronoun and worrying about their being self-indulgent with it.  And yet over the years I’ve seen that self-indulgence rarely.  One of the best papers I received, just now, in my Novels of Don DeLillo course, took issue with DeLillo’s characterization of Phoenix and the American desert in Underworld.  Its main character was displaced to Arizona from Brooklyn, and in the novel Brooklyn was all about authenticity and roots and identity, Phoenix about white noisy drift and vacancy.  But my depth, wrote my student, resides in the desert; and this is why…]

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.

… It’s in engagements like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

[And of course Humboldt’s gift was precisely – like Ravelstein’s gift – his self, his nuance, his idiolect, his stamp.

And if, in finally allowing yourself to hear the actual human voice, what you hear is what DeLillo’s character, James Axton, at the Parthenon, hears –

I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

– then, well, what did you expect? What do our most well-tuned voices tell us? Why does Wayne Koestenbaum love the voice of Maria Callas? “The steel and the wobble announced a predicament; [I] loved the mistakes, because they seemed autobiographical, because without mediation or guile they wrote a naked heart’s wound.” The gift Humboldt and Ravelstein carry is the high-level articulation of their woundedness.  Precisely Christopher Hitchens’ current gift.]

Hippie professor smearing wormshit all over campus.

Background here.

Mr UD is in Jeddah, La Kid’s in Ireland, and UD‘s home in Garrett Park, gazing at three ugly cardinal babies in a nest near her front door.

Earlier in the day, UD and her sister did some explosion tourism, visiting the site of a house across the train tracks from UD‘s place that blew up a few nights ago.

He was nominated for state health director, but shortly after accepting the nomination he turned it down.

He has just resigned as head of family medicine at the state university.

Allegations of medical reimbursement fraud keep following him around, but no one’s saying much.

If he is guilty of this, what an amazing, high-level instance of corruption this would have been – state health director! Even by Hawaii’s standards — it has long been one of our most corrupt states — this would have been quite an accomplishment.

Neal Palafox remains a tenured member of the UH medical faculty. I wonder how long that will last.

… to pay its bills.

But for you, zero.

William Deresiewicz, in The Nation, talks about the future of university education.

Nearly all [proposed university reforms] involve technology to drive efficiency. Online courses, distance learning, do-it-yourself instruction: this is the future we’re being offered. Why teach a required art history course to twenty students at a time when you can march them through a self-guided online textbook followed by a multiple-choice exam? Why have professors or even graduate students grade papers when you can outsource them to BAs around the country, even the world? Why waste time with office hours when students can interact with their professors via e-mail? … [But learning] isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement — the leading forth of new ideas and powers — that can happen only in a seminar. …It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

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

Update: From Robert Nozick’s obituary in the Harvard Gazette:

Nozick’s teaching followed the same lively, unorthodox, heterogeneous pattern as his writing. With one exception, he never taught the same course twice. The exception was “The Best Things in Life,” which he presented in 1982 and ’83, attempting to derive from the class discussion a general theory of values. The course description called it an exploration of “the nature and value of those things deemed best, such as friendship, love, intellectual understanding, sexual pleasure, achievement, adventure, play, luxury, fame, power, enlightenment, and ice cream.”

Speaking without notes, Nozick would pace restlessly back and forth, an ever-present can of Tab in his hand, drawing his students into a free-ranging discussion of the topic at hand.

He once defended his “thinking out loud” approach by comparing it with the more traditional method of giving students finished views of the great philosophical ideas.

“Presenting a completely polished and worked-out view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original work in philosophy and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it.”

Kenneth Turan reviews a Korean film whose main character, an aging woman, makes a

typically impulsive decision to take a poetry course at a local adult education center. Attracted by the hand-lettered sign that reads “You Can Be A Poet,” she finagles her way into the class and sits spellbound as the charismatic teacher tells the group “the most important thing in life is to see. Poetry is all about discovering true beauty in our everyday life.”

As she tries to write a poem, true ugliness intervenes.

[W]hat’s difficult [the character’s poetry teacher tells her] is not writing the poem but finding the heart to write one, and as Mija becomes aware of the corruption of the society she lives in, the intensity of her quest for purity and poetry increasingly impresses us.

The film’s trailer.

… UD figures universities with a penchant for sketchy money guys (Yeshiva had Ezra Merkin too) have instituted Trustee Early Warning systems so they can dump the guys before the federal government moves in for the kill.

Brown University’s TEW system must be going

awhooogawhoooga

right now.

UD can’t track all of these stories – the protracted litigation, the endless terrible publicity, the money that has to be found for lawyers and settlements. They’re constant, a constant feature of the modern American university.

…yet another target for his political rage.

So far, he has failed to have his way with two targets: A professor, and a playwright.

Despite Wiesenfeld’s insistence that the professor be fired for views about Israel with which Wiesenfeld strongly disagreed, the university professor was not fired. Well, he was fired, but then he was rehired because of free speech protests.

And now, it’s just been announced, the executive committee of CUNY’s trustees will shortly meet. It will almost certainly reinstate the honorary degree Wiesenfeld succeeded in withholding from Tony Kushner, another person with whom Wiesenfeld strongly disagrees.

It’s a strange, and probably really frustrating, pattern. Wiesenfeld gets his way; he gets the people purged. But then the decisions are reversed.

And why? Well, as the head of CUNY’s trustees explains:

Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name.

It’s a credit to CUNY that they appointed to the board a man whose free expression is … so remarkably free. Remarkably.

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

Oh. And to make the Stalinism complete: Wiesenfeld has said he’ll forgive Kushner if Kushner will make before him a public apology for his apostasy.