Swoops, Fell and Fair

Posted on May 20, 2013 by John Churchill


Not too long ago I had a week or so of Macbeth. Who knows why? In the space of seven days the Scottish Play thrust itself into my awareness a half-dozen times. And oddly enough, most of the attention fell on a single scene: the bit where Macduff, having gone off to England, learns that his wife and babies have been killed at Macbeth’s bidding.

That’s the scene that gave the language one of its gem-like phrases: “one fell swoop.” Macduff is grieving over the sudden, simultaneous loss of his whole family. Leave aside the worry whether he sacrificed them to gain tough-guy street cred with Macbeth. He uses a hawk-in-the-hen-yard metaphor, speaking of his chicks and their dam, and the hell-kite, or hawk from hell, that snatches them out of life in “one fell swoop.” It’s a murderous attack, swift and evil. “Fell” here is a lovely touch. Its poetic resonance sounds out the depth of resolute wickedness, determined malice.

I found one definition of “fell” that identified it as a Scots term meaning “sharp and biting.” Another etymology traces it to Old French, and connects it with “felon.” It’s a nasty word. Or rather, a good word for nastiness. In a fell swoop, something truly awful happens suddenly.

So it was a bit odd to note recently that the director of a major museum, commenting on the tremendous advance made by a single gift of dozens and dozens of important paintings, said, “In one fell swoop this puts [the museum] at the forefront of early-20th-century art.” Well, not so fell a swoop, that. A fair swoop, rather. A very fair one, as swoops go.

So is this a pedantic observation? “Fell” isn’t a word you meet with every day. And in my experience, it’s always in this swooping Shakespearean phrase. If the phrase loses its baleful connotation, then “fell” vanishes pretty much entirely. It’s just a redundant syllable in a phrase that will have come to mean “all in one go,” in a neutral way. And that will be a loss.

People who study language tell us that change is the norm. Words shift and slide. Words disappear, get invented, change meanings. “Whom” seems to be going the way of “forsooth,” and the antecedent “anyone” seems ready to accept “their” as its possessive. But, oh, I hope not to see “it’s” become possessive. I think there are some differences worth retaining and so, sometimes, good reasons for resisting the drift of usage. In general, when words get worn so smooth that they no longer offer us the opportunity to deliver precise differences, or differences of tone and flavor, we lose something.

It seems to me a good thing to have at hand the different resonances and connotations of “fell,” “wicked,” “evil,” “malicious,” “heinous,” and whatever else lurks in the thesaurus in the neighborhood of “bad.” At the very least, having “fell” around keeps rich our vocabulary of moral discrimination. And it preserves the depth of this rhyme, likely from the 17th century:

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.
The reason why, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well:
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.

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College: Are We Paying, Investing, or Building Endowment?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by John Churchill


Next fall, October 17-19 to be precise, Phi Beta Kappa will partner with the American Conference of Academic Deans in a conference with a question for a title: “Is There a Case for the Liberal Arts?” We pose the query against a backdrop of talk and action that has presupposed a negative answer. In late fall, 2012, the task force appointed by the Governor of Florida issued its report, recommending more central control over higher education in that state, skewed tuition to make it even less attractive to study core liberal arts topics, and the shaping of curricula according to the dictates of something called “market-driven strategic demand.”

Meanwhile, the wave of gubernatorial challenge to the value of the liberal arts and sciences also crashes in other states. In Indiana, Mitch Daniels’ move from the governor’s office to the presidency of Purdue included the issuing of an open letter containing the ominous phrase “abstruse topics of no real utility.” File that next to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s statements to Bill Bennett: “I’m going to adjust my education curriculum to what business and commerce needs to get our kids jobs as opposed to moving back in with their parents after they graduate with debt,” McCrory said, adding, “What are we teaching these courses for if they’re not going to help get a job?” The rhetoric in Texas is well-known: It was there that the movement emerged for pricing a college degree in parity with a Chevrolet Bel-Air of decades past.

That comparison captures neatly the conception of higher education as a consumer item, something people buy for a price and then possess and use. This is wrong precisely because it externalizes the relationship of the education to the one being educated. You don’t “buy an education.” You become educated. What you are paying for is an experience of transformation, not an object you could put on the shelf or drive off in.

There are other ways of bending economic categories to the assessment of higher education. W. Robert Connor, former head of the Teagle Foundation and of the National Humanities Center and an eminent classicist, asks in a recent blog: “Is spending for higher education an ‘investment’?” No, he argues, because the very word “implies recovery in the same form as the original expenditure,” namely, money. He writes (at www.wrobertconnor.com), “Paying for a college education is not an investment; it’s a form of smart consumption.” That means it aims at benefits to be delivered in, as it were, a different coinage. Connor thinks that by acceding to the language of “investment,” we have conceded the measurement of higher education’s worth to those who, like the jurymen in Alice In Wonderland, write everything down and reduce the answer to shillings and pence. He’d have us stop talking about higher education as investment, because that image obscures its deeper value.

But I recently agreed to give a talk whose title was set thus: “The Value of Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century Economy.” As if I knew what those last three words meant. As if anyone did. I’ll give the talk, all right. It will be about creativity, innovation, flexibility, agility, coping with the unexpected and the unpredictable, and about the challenge that lies beyond the routine and the manageable. There will be a nod in the direction of the economic benefit that accrues to college graduate: about a cool million dollars worth of difference over a lifetime, on average, according to recent studies. But it’s the non-pecuniary impact that really matters. It’s the gain in meaning, in human texture, in understanding as opposed to knowledge, in grace as opposed to technique, that really matters. It’s the public good, in adding to the endowment of democracy, that really matters. (I hope Bob will let me use “endowment” in this way, because I don’t mean money.)

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The Dominion of Folly

Posted on May 6, 2013 by John Churchill


It was Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1930-1941, who explained, at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Alpha of Rhode Island chapter at Brown University, that Phi Beta Kappa’s celebration of liberal education “signifies freedom from the tyranny of ignorance and, from what is worse, the dominion of folly.” Hughes went on to say that mere learning is not the aim we seek and honor, “so much as intelligence served by learning.” Right on, old boy! (If I may?)

Since we go on about how education in the liberal arts and sciences fits people for responsible citizenship, and elevates the tone of our civic culture by providing citizenry equipped with informed opinions and keen skills of deliberation, attuned to matters of meaning and value, we might do well to ask how we’re doing at that. Are we having much success in escaping the tyranny of ignorance and the dominion of folly?

It’s been a discouraging season. Every cycle of news seems to bring some new—but sadly familiar—evidence that irrationality governs our cultural and political world. Closer to home, a look at Phi Beta Kappa’s book awards is sobering. Wonderful books, this year as ever. About what? One is about the evidence that we are living in a way that will make the world unlivable. One is about how a work of literature contributed to world calamity. The third is about one of those occasions when divine guidance inspired unspeakable savagery. And come to think of it, last year’s winners were all about colossal calamity, as well.

The first thing to say is that books like these deserve praise because they oblige us to face gruesome reality. The second thing to say is that it doesn’t have to be like this. If we really believe that intelligence, augmented by learning, will give humanity a better chance of escaping this cycle of horror and dysfunction, and if we really believe that good judgment, augmented by skillful, imaginative, sympathetic deliberation, stands a chance against fear and fantasy, then we need to bend our efforts to make it so.

Ignorance and folly are easy. They require no work. We just go along until, from time to time, we have to shed tears over the blood on the sidewalk, shake our heads in sorrow over the failure of Congress, and then divert ourselves from thinking about how we have let all this come to pass, and how we allow it to persist.

Ridding ourselves of the tyranny of ignorance and the dominion of folly is tougher. Overcoming ignorance requires assiduous pursuit of truth. That takes dedication, steadiness, work. Work’s the sort of thing that can replace ignorance with knowledge. But overcoming the dominion of folly also requires soul-searching. It can’t just be a matter of assembling the shortcomings evident in the actions and opinions of others, and finding ways to point them out. When we who favor the liberal arts and sciences go on about “the barbarians at the gates,” we are clearly indulging that temptation. If Socrates was right about “Know thyself,” the irresistible temptation to diagnose the follies of others must be complemented by a willingness to enter into an earnest critique of our own sensibilities and predilections, examining whether, on reflection, we have sufficiently well deployed our sympathies and our imagination, whether we have entered adequately into the life-narratives of others, and whether folly may yet have been only imperfectly eradicated from our own sensibilities.

Only from the context of that self-criticism can we invite others, whose sensibilities and predilections differ, to enter into their own self-reflection along with our own, with any expectation that they might do so. Maybe they will, but it won’t help if we stigmatize them at the outset. Instead of indulging a Manichaean dichotomy, maybe we should frame our disagreements in terms of the Ladder of Love from Plato’s Symposium. All of us, we presume, seek good. All of us are constrained, more or less empowered or hampered, by the cultivation of abilities and disabilities that facilitate or weaken our grasp. Let us then join, we who disagree, in examination of the variety of ways we see the good, and in searching the features of ourselves that variously empower those perceptions. Let’s replace the dominion of folly with the community of deliberation.

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Exactly?

Posted on April 29, 2013 by John Churchill


You overhear things. Not so long ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I overheard a guy telling his companion, as we bypassed each other on the sidewalk: “My cousin is a veterinarian in Melbourne, Australia.” OK. Why was that worth conveying? What context gave it relevance? A while back in a pancake house in Little Rock, I overheard a man telling his fellow breakfasters: “I live in Oklahoma! The house is in Oklahoma! The State of Tennessee can kiss my ass!” A tax dispute, I’m guessing.

Well, this morning I overheard a woman say to her cellphone, “There’s a fifty percent chance. . . .” Really? I have no idea what was being given such precise odds. But I have a strong hunch that no calculation had taken place. She had done, I’m betting, no study of the actual probabilities that whatever it was—her boyfriend would turn up drunk, the dog would need an operation, her mother would arrive inconveniently, who knows?—had exactly the probability of point-5. What “a fifty percent chance” really meant, surely, was something like this: “This may happen; it may not happen. I have no clue which is more likely.” It’s like the TV weatherman telling you there’s a fifty percent chance of rain. Don’t count on anything.

What that shows is that giving something this fifty percent off-the-cuff probability conveys no information of the sort that could shape your behavior or expectations. Unless you count conveying no information as conveying the information that you’re not being told anything. But you’re being given no information in the guise of the quite precise claim that there’s a fifty percent chance.

Which brings me to my point: We are surrounded by bogus precision. Grade point averages are calculated out to the third decimal place. But what information is carried by a thousandth of a point, when the input came in whole numbers, three orders of magnitude coarser in analysis than the difference between a 3.897 and a 3.896? What difference is reflected when these scores are ranked? What difference is reflected in batting averages of .297 and .296? At what remove from the input of whole numbers of at bats and hits does the information stay relevant? A difference of .001 is a difference of one in a thousand. In a 162-game season, do you even get a thousand at bats? Maybe?

Another sort of bogus precision lurks in close elections. A gubernatorial recall in Wisconsin failed by something like 53 percent to 47 percent—clearly a significant margin. But in the critical Florida presidential recount of the year 2000, which was stopped by the Supreme Court, the final margin was fewer than 500 votes out of 6 million cast. No one believes there is any method of counting that many votes that yields reliable accuracy to such a microscopic difference. There being no peaceful alternative, the country acceded to a decision. Even though that decision pointed to a difference no informed observer believed to be significant, it took on a faint simulacrum of legitimacy. Bogus precision does that. It makes the indeterminate seem to be something. Sometimes we may need that. But I think it would often be better if we kept in mind that we were manufacturing clarity, not discovering it.

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In Praise of Hard Reading

Posted on April 22, 2013 by John Churchill


Over the entree at the Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards Dinner, April 6, 2013, I got a foretaste of Jim O’Donnell’s talk when I asked him if he had looked at Peter Brown’s recent book, Through the Eye of a Needle.   “Yes,” he said, “I’m wrestling my way through it.  That’s a compliment.”  I understood that, but the full sense emerged only later, after the presentations, when Jim rose to talk to the crowd on “Learning to Read, the Hard Way.”

An eminent scholar of Late Antiquity, as well as former Provost of Georgetown and sometime adviser to the Library of Congress on information technology, he combines an old-fashioned dedication to delving in the text with a very new-fangled dexterity in the world of hyperlinks and sophisticated “reading aids.”

His question was this: What becomes of hard reading in an age of easy and abundant reading?  But wait.  What’s “hard reading?”  Well, reading that’s difficult.  Reading that’s real work, as opposed to reading conceived as a casual, pleasant diversion, used to sell pre-schoolers on the activity and prevalent in the sales of books to beach-goers and air travelers.  Reading, said Jim O’Donnell—real reading, anyway—is not  diversion but “a bear.  Real reading is really hard work.”  Hard reading is the activity of taking difficult and challenging texts, and wrestling meaning out of them.

Hard reading is threatened on various fronts, including threat by the notion that texts ought to yield up their meanings with minimal effort by the reader.  At this point, his remarks resonated with those of Christopher Krebs of Stanford, a classicist and winner of the Christian Gauss Award for his book A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich.  Krebs had described, earlier in the evening, his difficult but sublimely rewarding engagement with Tacitus’s Germania.  Tacitus’s prose is so refractory, said Krebs, that he deserves a place among the great Roman poets.  And that’s a good thing.

Hard reading, said O’Donnell, is threatened by the availability of texts studded with hyperlinks, giving the reader at a click the help that, in the old days, would have come only from the searching of uncertain memories, fumbling through ragged dictionaries, and scratching up rough notes.  Now it’s clean, clear, and instantaneous.  Easy.

“Technology,” said O’Donnell, “smartens things up and dumbs them down at the same time.”  There ran through his talk a reverential wistfulness for the feats of memory and wet-brain analysis achieved by old-time scholars, a spectrum from St. Jerome to Toynbee, scholars who had done it the hard way, slogging, trudging deep, and then  remembering, not skating light across the top of the text, lubricated by hyperlinks whose information blinks into and out of being in a flash.  He offered praise for hard work, close concentration, and lasting understanding, as opposed to easy going, flighty attention, and having little to carry away.

Anticipating his return to the classroom next fall, O’Donnell said he wants to awaken in his students an awareness of the process of reading.  I think he really meant the work of reading.  The reason for this came clearest when he spoke explicitly of the seductive and diverting tendencies we indulge when we follow link after link, first down this rabbit hole and then the next, sliding down branching tunnels of information, ever further and further from the object of our initial interest. “Way leads on to way,” and all that.

These reflections made it clear that his real topic was the management and control of attention.  Attending to how we read is paying attention to our own powers of attention and concentration.  It is giving regard to the ways in which we cultivate or fail to cultivate the ability to think, really to think, about something that may merit such close scrutiny.  The loss of the ability to read hard, to read when it’s work, to read with concentration and active engagement—focused engagement—would be a great loss to our endeavor to understand our world and ourselves.

As Wittgenstein wrote in a similar context:  Sometimes the going can be too smooth for our understanding to gain purchase.  Back to the rough ground!

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Serendipity

Posted on April 8, 2013 by John Churchill


A colleague showed me pictures from her cousin’s wedding, and we fell into a conversation about nuptiality.  I will spare the specifics, but it was about the impulse to marry.  This, then, deftly evading thought about the Wife of Bath, brought me after I had left my colleague’s office, to musing on Robert Herrick’s famous ditty from the mid-seventeenth century, “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time.”  Thanks to some high school inspiration—a required assignment, perhaps, or a imagined assignation, as likely—I had committed it to memory long ago, and there it was, floating up.

The lines that surfaced first befit the wedding pictures:  “And while ye may, go marry.”  They came up murky like the messages in those old, black fortune-telling balls, the ones you’d shake and then stare at, waiting to see the answer come up, inky, then clear.  Pretty soon the whole poem was up and clear, and I ran through it a couple of times in my head.

It struck me hard that this poem was really a song, begging to be sung, not just recited.  But to what tune?  Immediately, from God knows where, came an answer:  the old carol tune we know as “As Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night.”  I tried it out.  It worked.  Even the repetition of the last line of each stanza seemed to work.  And it had the sweetness of traditional English country music.  I was charmed.

But where had that tune come from?  Three seconds worth of Google removed decades of ignorance.  Handel!  Of course.  The pastoral become stately, keeping its sweetness with a mix of grandeur.  Here; try it if you know the tune.  And if you don’t know the tune, Google the above-mentioned carol, and you’ll catch it in two times through.  Then sing along, only with Herrick’s words, repeating each last line:

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.

Lovely!  Well done!

Now this is the point at which I pause to wonder whether I really made this match of words to music, or whether I ever heard just this, somewhere, somehow, and so whether this setting has been lurking in my unconscious mind, waiting to be evoked, waiting in secret to present itself as a discovery.  I’ve been reading stuff on Oliver Sacks’s thoughts on memory, personal identity, and the phenomena, such as confabulation and unconscious borrowing, that put our reliance on memory as a source of accurate representation of the past, or a source of valid testimony, into such keen doubt.  Keen, because, once we question memory, what remains?  Even Descartes didn’t doubt whether he understood—remembered correctly—the meanings of the French and Latin words in which he expressed his suspicions.  Grim worries.

But gather ye rosebuds, while ye may!  There is sweetness now.

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If You Exit Past This Sign, You Must Re-enter. . . .

Posted on April 1, 2013 by John Churchill




“No! I don’t have to re-enter!” I protested in silence. “My aim is to leave this airport as expeditiously as possible and to stay away as long as I possibly can. Till day after tomorrow!”

Let me be fair. The sign read, in its entirety, “If You Exit Past This Sign, You Must Re-enter Through Security.” But the two-word prepositional phrase doesn’t solve the problem. What the sign says is this: Exit here if you dare, but if you do, you must go back in. Through security. All who leave must re-enter.

Ascribe my interest in this sign, if you wish, to the fatigue of travel, to the deformation professionelle attributable to having taught informal fallacies to undergraduates for longer than was good for my sensibilities, to a sense of humor keenly attuned to the absurd, or to all of those factors, mutually reinforcing each other. But the fact is, I do take interest in what signs actually say, as opposed, often enough, to what they were meant to say, or even what those who read them take them to mean. No one, I presume, reads that sign to mean what it says. No one takes it as an instruction to go back into the airport’s security zone. For that, of course, would lead to an endless loop. Like the instructions on the shampoo bottle: “Wash. Rinse. Repeat.”

My not-quite-willful misreading exploited an omission. The people who put up the sign supposed that the reader would supply a presumed conditional clause. Something like “and if you then want to be again inside the security zone.” The sign could have said: “You are leaving the security zone. No re-entry at this point.” Instead they choose to assume an unlikely intention; namely, wanting back in. Just as the people who composed the shampoo instructions assumed you’d have the wit to ignore “Repeat” on the second time through. Lots of people do, no doubt, the first time through.

All this is trivial enough, though it points to something ubiquitous and possibly momentous. The bits of language that we utter or write float, so to speak, on the surface of a sea of supposition, assumption, intention, and unimaginably complex activities of all sorts. What gets said explicitly is the visible tip of an iceberg of situational preconditions, gestures, uptakes, inarticulate signals, and responses. Think how “Good Morning!” could be made to mean “I’m glad to see you,” “You’re late to work again,” “Where were you last night?” and so on almost indefinitely. There are questions we pose intending the hearer to understand we don’t expect an answer, answers we give, proleptically, to questions we don’t expect the other to deign to ask, responses given in such a way as to signal the other that we don’t mean it, in effect issuing an accusation of impropriety in the asking of the question.

Playing silly or not-so-silly games with the literal meaning of what does get said and written is a way of drawing attention to that obscure sub-level that supports the literal and gives it its sense and direction. And it is a good thing to be reminded of that dimension. Notoriously, some people are better at navigating its depths than others. It is easy to find yourself beyond your depth, perhaps taken there by someone who senses that environment more fully than you. And that raises the question, how do we learn our way around that unarticulated world? How do we learn to navigate it?

Well, by learning language itself. By growing up. By paying attention. And by continuing to pay attention and by extending our attention beyond our own narrow sphere through the experiences of others in history and fiction. Through the humanities. If you exit past that sign, you probably will re-enter in ways you won’t enjoy.

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Know Thyself. Or Maybe, If You’re the Senate, Not So Much!

Posted on March 25, 2013 by John Churchill




On March 20, 2013, the U.S. Senate reached a compromise said to have eased progress toward enacting a budget for the fiscal year that is now about half over. Prescind from the question what that timing shows about the level of dysfunction in Congress, and have a look at what went into the compromise. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma insisted on specific restrictions on NSF funding, specifically, he insisted on “an amendment that broadly restricts the ability of the NSF to approve any grants involving political science unless the agency can certify them ‘as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.’” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2013) Coburn had earlier been on record opposing NSF funding of studies of how voters in this country perceive how Congress operates, including such topics as the Senate filibuster, and the legislative branch’s relations with the executive branch.

The Chronicle further reported that “the Senate vote drew condemnation from Michael Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association, who called it a dangerous act of political interference in science.” Brintnall called the action “chilling.”

Let’s take Coburn’s position down to a common sense level. He’s saying that taxpayers’ money should not be spent to examine how Congress operates or at least what people think about how Congress operates. Well, why not? Why not suppose just the opposite, that it is a perfectly legitimate expenditure of federal dollars to try to find out whether people believe that their servants in Congress are serving them well? In fact, why not suppose that this is an important, even an essential, activity the federal government should be promoting?

Here’s the case for thinking that it is. First, let’s talk about accountability. Arguably, elections themselves provide congressional accountability. The rascals can always be thrown out. Can, yes, but are they? When you consider the power of incumbency, the role of Big Money, the impact of gerrymandering (in the House), and the sorry state of campaign discourse in this country (more red herrings than a Baltic fishing fleet), there’s a compelling case to be made for further study, beyond voting results, of what people think of Congress.

Isn’t it a responsibility of a democracy to practice self-critical inquiry into its own forms and processes? To evade that inquiry is to imply not only that our structures and processes are perfect, but also that whoever is running them now is doing so to maximally possible good effect. Does anyone believe that? If you don’t believe that, then you have to believe that studies of public attitudes toward government can, in principle, be worthwhile, and that it would be healthy for democracy if we encourage some good ones. Which is, presumably, what the NSF, as a minuscule part of its activities, has been doing. But Senator Coburn wants that to stop.

Speaking of red herrings, he throws one out, asking whether such studies save lives or make the United States more secure. A direct and immediate demonstrable consequence of that sort is a pretty high bar, one that would bring into question vast stretches of important research in many fields beyond political science. It is not sound thinking to apply it selectively to stop research whose results you might find inconvenient.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Posted on March 18, 2013 by John Churchill




A few days ago, I had the opportunity to spend the better part of a day with a collection of people who care deeply about the liberal arts and sciences. They were heads of various agencies in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, where Phi Beta Kappa’s national offices are located. The neighborhood is a mix of organizations related to higher education in America, an alphabet soup, really, with the AACU, ACE, AAU, APLU, CIC, NAICU, and our own distinctive Greek letters, nestled among embassies like Argentina and Zimbabwe (Phi Beta Kappa’s immediate neighbors), Botswana, Namibia, and so on. Interesting part of town.

Anyway, we liberal arts and sciences types had gathered for show and tell. Everyone at the table had some project in planning or in process bearing on the health of the arts and sciences in contemporary America. I was there to talk about our new Advocacy Initiative, to learn about the context of complementary projects in which our efforts will find their place, and to seek ways in which these different activities might offer mutual reinforcement. My hope was not disappointed. But I was also reminded of a fact known to anyone who has ever taken part in a lively seminar, or even a late night bull session: Close, sustained attention to any good topic will dissipate commonality.

And that, it seems to me, is the valuable lesson. Agreement, under examination, will fracture. That’s just how it is. It turns out that our shared vocabulary means something a bit different in your use than in mine. It turns out that the reasons behind the conviction you share with me are different from mine, even incompatible with mine. And so on.

For my part, I am enthusiastic about the arts and sciences in part because I am sure that they are the studies through which, most effectively, we learn that we do not have to agree about everything in order to work together for worthwhile ends. They are where we learn to balance and negotiate conviction and compromise, resistance and cooperation. So our very cordial community embraces a diversity of aims, even within the common interests.

Some of the organizations represented are planning or conducting research: research about the practical impact of the arts and sciences in people’s careers and lives. Some are focused on demonstrating the contention that small colleges have unique advantages for accomplishing valuable educational ends. Others are concerned to make the political case for funding arts and sciences research at major universities. Some, like ourselves, aim to change the conversation about the purposes of higher education in America.

We want to change that conversation by deepening its economic dimension beyond the first job. We want to broaden that conversation by reminding people to take into account a wide range of purposes beyond the economic. We want to give people permission to think about citizenship, personal development, about meaning and value, and about making good decisions in the public sphere, as well as in the private. We want to help people think about higher education as a public good.

As we gather our energies to effect that change, we will be collecting both data and narratives. Numbers tell the tale, but stories convey the human meaning. The story about the importance of the arts and sciences in sustaining the life of the nation, and in making more human the lives of individuals, needs convincing quantified expression. But it also needs human texture. We’ll bring both, collected from friends with whom we agree on enough, as we keep talking it through, to make common cause. That’s what work together looks like.

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Dinner with a Friend

Posted on March 11, 2013 by John Churchill




The other night I had a conversation over dinner with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. Our professional paths had crossed for decades when we were small college deans—I in Arkansas, and he in Minnesota and then the Pacific Northwest. Over dinner we caught up on our lives and careers. The delights of grandchildren on the one hand and projects at work on the other. We talked and dined for two hours, then shook hands, wished each other well, and headed out our different ways into the night.

As I have thought since about the richness of that experience, I have come to understand how critically its possibility depended upon a matrix that should not be taken for granted. I suspect that he and I first met through the American Conference of Academic Deans, an organization I became involved with because of a friend I knew through the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS). The ACS was, during my tenure, and still is, I am assured, sustained by a Council of Deans: a close-knit, relentlessly frank set of colleagues who understood that their purpose was not only to help run a consortium of distinguished colleges, but also to provide the friendship among peers that no provost has at home.

In this way I came to see that my dinner conversation with a friend from across the continent, with its blend of personal and professional content, was a node in a big, complex, multi-dimensional network in which I have had the extraordinary luck to be placed. It is not by happenstance that people of similar personal and professional responsibilities and interests—in Arkansas and Florida—come to know and help each other. Still less deans from Arkansas, Minnesota, and Washington State. That this sort of thing happens at all is dependent on institutions, organizations, that might well not exist if our concerns stopped at the boundaries of our own campuses or their equivalents.

A few years ago Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone gained much attention for its warnings about the decline of social capital in America. We have been, in recent decades, interacting less in organized ways, apparently, belonging to fewer clubs and leagues and associations, restricting ourselves more nearly to an isolated individualism. This trend would be, of course, the loss of one of the things that Tocqueville famously noted about Americans in the early nineteenth century—our tendency to band together for every imaginable social, political, and recreational purpose. This would be a major change in the fabric of the culture.

It is interesting to consider whether the rise of social media—Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like—would mitigate this trend, perhaps even reverse it in a substantial way. Or would they simply substitute an ineffectual simulacrum of genuine association, deepening the problem by making it seem to have been solved? How can we tell?

This line of reflection turned to Phi Beta Kappa, itself an organization that would not exist but for the conviction that bridging personal and professional commitments in the service of shared values is a worthwhile endeavor. It led me to think about the importance of seeing other members, conversing, planning, working on projects together. It helped me frame our upcoming National Advocacy Initiative for the liberal arts and sciences. At a personal level it also helped me to make sense of another interaction I’d just had.

I recently missed the opportunity to see another old friend, who had shared my undergraduate major, whose signature is next to mine on our Phi Beta Kappa chapter’s registry book, and who had helped our family through a crisis years ago. We had planned to meet near the end of the holidays, but when the time came, we exchanged emails admitting that were both tired and mired in sneezes and that it would be best to wait till next time. That, too, was a confident expression of friendship, and good evidence, if more were needed, why Phi Beta Kappa is right to give that designation to one of the stars on our key.

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