Visiting Scholars

Posted on May 14, 2012 by John Churchill


One of Phi Beta Kappa’s crown jewels is the Visiting Scholars Program, a scheme that for well over a half century has placed distinguished scholars on hundreds of campuses for short stays comprising a public address, classroom visits, informal colloquia with faculty, and ─ most especially ─ student conversations. Since the middle 1950s, there have been about 5,000 such events, and for the last few decades, they have been ably administered by Kathy Navascues. Her work in selecting the visitors is facilitated by a committee that includes people, themselves eminent in their fields, who are in a position to know who would be good at this kind of thing, possessing the expertise for an interesting and productive visit, as well as the requisite disposition to carry it off. Their judgment has been vindicated consistently: The Visiting Scholar alumni list is an all-star cast.

But such a committee requires a capable chair. Phi Beta Kappa has been fortunate over the decades to have had extraordinary people as chair of its Visiting Scholars Committee, and none more able than the person whose life was celebrated recently in a service at the Friends Meeting House at Swarthmore, Helen North.

The setting was, of course, spare, simple, plain, with no adornment to distract from the words that would stem from people’s inner light. Friends and colleagues offered reminiscences and tributes, while the scent of lilacs wafted in from the lawn through windows open to the April warmth.

The portrait of Helen that emerged was complex but consistent: a keen intellect, a gracious spirit, a person whose multivalent beauties created a kind of reverential awe and whose capacities for personal caring won her a strong cadre of close friends. Perhaps the sweetest stories came from former students who told, in their various ways, how friendship had emerged when Helen broke through the barrier of awe with a gesture of care. Care for her students’ intellect, care for their careers, care for them as persons, all merged in her.

The stories presented Helen North as a person in the round: first of all, a powerful intellect, but also quite serious about her Catholic faith, devoted to her Irish heritage, a person who relished conviviality, and who not only loved, but bet on, horses. Besides her strictly, and immensely well-respected, academic work, she with her sister, Mary, was author of a guide book to ancient Christian sites in Ireland. There was a story about her persuasiveness in convincing a farmer to allow her troupe through his field to see a Celtic monument. At Phi Beta Kappa we saw that same persuasiveness in her guidance of the Visiting Scholars Committee and in her gift of consistently capturing, for the program, elusive academic stars.

Among the tributes was one with a distinctive Phi Beta Kappa slant, delivered by Joe Gordon, Helen’s senate colleague and personal friend. Joe implicitly reminded us that the point of such occasions is not simply to reminisce about the departed, and to express our love and respect, but also to place that person’s life in the context of the whole we all share, a whole comprising these moments of transience, given to us, that we can use well or not so well. He urged us to remember that we are all, in that sense, visiting scholars. Helen had a good visit, indeed.

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Things Come Loose, or Seize Up; They Break

Posted on May 8, 2012 by John Churchill


“There, that’s done!” we think, having driven the nail, tightened the screw, or snugged up the nut. We patch the hole, caulk the pane, smooth out the rough bit. “There! Done!” And maybe it is. For a while.

But things come loose again and fall off. Or having been set to the perfect swing and play, they seize up and won’t turn at all. They wear out and break off. The lubricant dries up. “Metal fatigue,” someone says. Or “Plastic. That’s all it’s good for.” Deep down we know this about things. Nothing stays fixed. “As good as new” conceals an implicit admission: Nothing stays new, either.

And yet, we constantly ignore what we know in favor of an idealized expectation that things won’t go, seemingly spontaneously, awry. Wittgenstein nailed this mindset in its philosophical manifestation. We are prone to think, he wrote (Philosophical Investigations, #193), of a machine as representing an idealized version of itself, in which all the possibilities of movement are fixed and given, forgetting that gears break or melt, and that all sorts of things can go wrong. When we discuss machinery, one of my mentors once noted, we seldom feel the need to specify that it isn’t constructed of butter!

Wittgenstein’s actual point is about logic ─ our tendency to invest in it the idealized fixity and necessity we impute to the image of the machine. Whereas, in fact, in his view the stability of logic rests on the non-ideal but reasonably dependable facts of human agreement about what counts as what, about how measurements come out, and about how we carry on with the shared processes that compose the human world. If people didn’t generally agree on the outcome when one counts and the other watches, how much of our lives would become impossible? Or if our agreements in the meanings of our words weren’t as dependable as they are, however imperfect that is?

What he wrote about our tendency to live in a world of philosophical idealizations, when it comes to logic and language, is equally true of the mundane realm of our interaction with the material world, and of our participation in the human world, where personal interactions are forever failing to accord with their theoretical patterns, and no general account of human behavior ever seems expansive enough to accommodate the myriad ways in which things can go ─ shall we say? ─ differently than expected. Perhaps dreadfully wrong.

There is frustration and disappointment lurking in all this, of course, though also fascination and continual, inexhaustible amusement, as new ways in which things can foul themselves up appear in regular succession. Horace Walpole said, “Life is tragedy for those who feel, but it is a comedy to those who think.” For better or worse, humans do both.

If the machinery of life is imperfect, so must be our power to repair it, and our judgment about what sort of repair, from time to time, may be needed. I have cited Wittgenstein and Walpole. Here’s Lewis Carroll.

At the Mad Tea Party, the Hatter begins fussing with his watch, and on consulting Alice, finds that it is two days wrong in indicating the day of the month. This fact triggers a complaint about botched maintenance. “‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works,’ he added, looking angrily at the March Hare. ‘It was the best butter,’ the March Hare meekly replied.” Butter, we have learned, is suited neither for the construction, nor for the lubrication, of watches. However, it is hard to have a decent tea party without butter, and what that shows is how important it is to remember what end you are pursuing. There! Done!

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Love and Light in the Midwest

Posted on April 30, 2012 by John Churchill


Somewhere on the slightly more reputable end of the spectrum of jocular and abusive nicknames for courses ─ nicer than “Rocks for Jocks” and “Cowboy Calculus” ─ lies that general education standard “Physics for Poets”. The term does capture in a neat way something of the drive, in a broad education, not only to cover but also to relate different fields and disciplines. It gets at the “connections” piece. Connections keep turning up, and they integrate our vision.

So there we are, Scott and I, standing in front of Laird Hall at Carleton. I thought I was looking at a sculpture on a pedestal. He saw that it was a sundial. (And that it was a few minutes slow.) It was a modern-looking bronze abstraction, mounted on a traditional, flowery, stone column, with a line of poetry running around the top rim:

“Love alters not, nor light, with Time’s swift flight.”

How cool, I thought. Four syllables borrowed from the very heart of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, along with the contrast of love’s endurance against the flux of time, combined with a reference to the constancy of the speed of light, which, as we know from Einstein, stays the same no matter what is changing in your frame of reference. And slightly sprung iambic pentameter, almost a rhythmic match for the “bare, ruined choirs” line in Sonnet 73. Cool, indeed: physics for poets.

“Oh,” we said, “this thing is using light to tell the time just as it is holding up light as a parallel metaphor for love’s constancy. The unchanging measures the changing.”

But wait. It was clear to us that the sculpture and its pedestal were of differing provenance. The date on the base was 1909. The bronze was nearly contemporary. The first was dedicated to Anna T. Lincoln; the second to Laudie Porter. Apparently the column had once been topped with a less ornate sundial. So we were looking at a layered memorial, an original fixture repurposed.

Miss Lincoln, we later discovered, had been head of “the boarding department,” from 1879 to 1903. She fed Carleton, and promoted athletics and campus beauty. The single line of verse was written by the dean of women, Margaret Evans, described as Miss Lincoln’s close friend. Laudie Porter was the deceased wife of David Porter, the distinguished classicist and musician who served at Carleton before going to the presidency of Skidmore, 1987-1999. David has been an important figure in Phi Beta Kappa over the decades. How dense and how good, these intersecting rays of light and love!

There was another issue. The line of poetry was on the 1909 part of the column. I had read it as incorporating Einstein’s theory of relativity. But would the constancy of the speed of light have been an available metaphor in Northfield in 1909? Maybe. The timing is just possible. Or maybe not. It’s a question for some local literary sleuth.

But the question also points to one of the great contentions of literary criticism in the 20th century. Does meaning depend on the author’s intention? On the text itself? Or the reader’s own creative contribution? Is it legitimate to find a reference to Einstein in a line penned by an author who may have had no such thing in mind? Can we do what we like with a text? What about putting a new sundial, memorializing another beloved college figure, atop a column memorializing someone else? Well, love alters not.

The sundial, by the way, was slow by Central Time. By local solar time, it was spot on.

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Things Are Connected

Posted on April 23, 2012 by John Churchill


If you look up “garrison cap” in Wikipedia, you’ll find the article is illustrated with a photograph of Omar Bradley, the very capable World War II general, wearing one. The garrison cap is the front-to-back, bill-less headgear we see so often in snapshots of G.I.s from that era, often tilted at a jaunty angle as a part of a rakish persona projected by some young man who clearly felt that, though he had to be in a khaki uniform, he could still look like a fun guy. There is just such a photograph of my father-in-law somewhere in the family albums ─ Wild Bill Hill from Holdenville. The garrison cap, of course, still turns up in military dress around the world, as well as in some sorts of civilian dress.

If you look closely at the construction of the cap in that photograph of Omar Bradley, though, you’ll see something interesting. The fold of cloth that is firmly sewn into the flat construction of the cap runs down one side panel, overlaps the front crease, and angles on the other side down to the bottom edge. The parallel piece of cloth forming the panel on the other side is tucked under the first one at the front crease, and then disappears beneath it on the first side. What’s up with this criss-cross?

Well, let me tell you about a church service we went to the other day. A group of Javanese Christians, Indonesian immigrants to the U.S., were worshipping in the Presbyterian Church in Rockville, Maryland, and celebrating the 75th birthday of a friend of ours. So up we went. These Javanese Christians address God as “Allah,” and attach epithets like maha mulya ─ that’s Sanskrit. One minute the reading is about Abraham and Sarah, the next, the story in the sermon is about Krishna and Arjuna. In my head I was dropping little Google map pins on the far-flung geographical origins of these elements that had turned up here in suburban Washington by way of Java ─ with more than a little Dutch Calvinism in the mix.

Then I noticed the ministers’ hats. Constructed out of lovely batik fabrics, these hats clung low to the head, held on by something like a horizontal headband, with one side panel folding across the front crease, and the parallel panel from the other side tucked under. In the back a little twisted knob of cloth hung down a couple of inches. Recall that I am at this moment regarding something I didn’t grow up looking at, and that the linguistic and cultural riches of the scene have prepared me to see connections. Oh, I thought. These are stylized turbans! The folds of the structured cap are the remnants of the wrapped cloth, and that little hangy-down thing in the back is the remnant of the knot that held the turban together. In context, it made sense. If vocabulary and theology had flowed from southwestern and southern Asia into the islands that became Indonesia, why shouldn’t headgear as well?

It was that experience, though, that drove me to look up the history of the garrison cap. Why is there that fold of cloth across the front crease? Can it be that the garrison cap, too, is descended, sartorially, from the turban? Well, have a look at the Glengarry. Side panels, back-to-front orientation, little ribbons down the back ─ for what? The Glengarry is said to have been invented by a late eighteenth century Scot, called “Glengarry” after his ancestral estates, who lent his name to the hat which became an icon of Scots bonnetry. And the progenitor of various military millinery. But Glengarry himself had been off at Oxford in 1790 ─ rubbing shoulders with what exotic influences? The Brits had been in India for a very long time by then, and after all one of the famous portraits of the greatest Scot of them all, David Hume, depicts him sporting ─ yes! ─ a turban. So when Wild Bill Hill from Holdenville posed for that picture of his, garrison cap all askew, was he, too, wearing gear derived from south Asian turbans? The word “khaki,” after all, is Urdu for “dust.”

Photo above: Omar N. Bradley, official portrait.

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The Moral Hazard of Reading

Posted on April 16, 2012 by John Churchill

Analysts of the economic debacle of recent memory (and continuing experience) have acquainted us with the concept of moral hazard. It seemed to me early on that the idea was being used to fix blame on people who had succumbed to the lure of borrowing beyond their means, and was part of a strategy of assigning responsibility for the crash on those who were losing their homes to foreclosure, or who were “under water” on a mortgage. Then it seemed that it was also being deployed to characterize the behavior of lenders, too: seeking the short-term profitability of making loans whose hazard they could quickly off-load onto someone else, reaping gain while avoiding the responsibility for the long-term viability of the loans and the consequences of their ultimate default. It turned up, too, deep in the machinations of some of the great merchant banking houses, who seemed to have designed investment packages they expected to do poorly, and then bet against the customers to whom they sold them.

Moral hazard, then, is a hospitable host who serves drinks all around. To give in to moral hazard is to enter into, or to lead others into, a state of affairs that offers significant benefit for the agent, but also the likelihood of a significant downside whose impact can be directed away onto others, or into another time, or some other place in the scheme of consequences. A state of moral hazard exists when situations are structured to make it inviting to seize that benefit and displace that bad result, so that only one’s moral restraint, unbolstered by self-interest or law, stands between us and taking advantage of the system. There is moral hazard when we could reach out and take some good that others will pay for, held back only by the sense that, in Richard Nixon’s immortal words, “It would be wrong.”

If there is a lesson to be gleaned from our recent experience, it may be this: that it is a good idea to minimize the extent to which any system of human interaction depends for its viability on people’s capacity to withstand the sweet attractions of moral hazard. But who would have guessed that it extends to our habits of reading?

Recently, I had the great pleasure of participating in a day-long seminar, under Phi Beta Kappa’s aegis, led by Columbia’s Carol Gluck, an Aspen Institute discussion leader. We read and discussed passages from classic and influential texts. It was, Carol said, not so much “the Great Books,” as “the Great Paragraphs.” But there was plenty of food for thought. Let me just mention two of the texts.

Hobbes. Grim old, gritty old Hobbes. Trenchant, truculent, convoluted in that see-if-you-can-track-this-syntax 17th century style, giving it to us straight and cold: “And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The “war of all against all.” Competition, diffidence, and glory. And so on. A confession: I don’t know how it is with you, but when I read these stretches of Leviathan, I am thrilled. They reach into some space within me and pluck chords. “Yes! That’s it!” something sings inside me. “It is like that!” I was reminded of a student of mine once, years ago, who had discovered Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and told me that he was getting up at the crack of dawn to stride across campus, book open in his hand, declaiming the advent of the Ubermensch to the morning sky. It must have felt great. I know, for me, this last time through Hobbes, it felt great reading about the dark self-interest that grounds our being.

But the next reading was Mencius. The presiding metaphor was not war but gardening. The style was not declamatory but conversational, full of images, similes, invitations to compare and reflect. Is human nature good or bad? Well, says Mencius, it’s not automatically and inevitability either. But there are “four beginnings.” Everyone has capacities for compassion, mercy, shame, and respect. These can be cultivated, and the result can be a humanity that is, in fact, good, and not wicked. Not even morally neutral, but actually good. This warmed my heart. I found myself thinking of a favorite passage in Aristotle’s Ethics, to the effect that the virtues do not arise in people by nature, though we are by nature fitted to receive them. “Yes!” I thought. “This is it!” I thought of the fact that I have spent my professional life trying to carry forward the work of institutions that are founded on the idea that cultivation can improve people, their lives, and their world. So that’s why it’s worth it!

So where’s the moral hazard? The moral hazard lies in the temptation to luxuriate in the almost sensuous affirmations offered by these texts, wallowing on the one hand in the tough “realism” or on the other in the tender affirmations of hope and careful nurture. In their different ways these texts are seductive. Quickly let me say that I am not trying to set them out as morally equivalent. I am just saying that in their different ways they tend to draw you in, give you rewards, and tempt you to savor the good feeling, while deferring the contemplation of consequences.

What happens if I bank exclusively on the principle that human behavior is dominated by a self-interested propensity toward violence? What happens if I bank only on the idea that we can be cultivated into goodness through the nurture of the sprouts of virtue? What happens if I shift my loyalty from one to the other, and back again, and never bring them into one set of balances? Or if some of us deposit all their credence on one side and the rest of us on the other? What are we doing but relishing the frisson of affirmation, while displacing the reckoning of consequences onto someone else, or some other time, or somewhere else in the system? This is no way to do.

So the question is this: How do we so order our reading lives ─ or our institutions ─ to minimize the dangers that ensue when we rely only our capacity to resist moral hazard?

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Do Not Push (or Do?)

Posted on April 9, 2012 by John Churchill


The back flap of the bed of a dump truck is mounted on a pair of hinges that connect its upper corners with the rear upper corners of the sides of the bed. There is a locking mechanism at the bottom, to keep the flap in place when the bed is loaded. The lock can be released when the hydraulic piston lifts the front end of the bed and turns its bottom into a steepeningly inclined plane, dumping the content past the free-swinging door.

All of this contraption is, of course, as rugged as can be. But everything mechanical is prone to failure, as we know. Things break, so care must be taken. You don’t want things done that warp the hinges or the lock or the flap itself. And so it was that the back of the dump truck I pulled up behind the other morning on Connecticut Avenue bore the bold stenciled warning: DO NOT PUSH.

It’s an admonition not to come up behind the truck with, for instance, the bucket of a front-end loader and engage that door, exerting force drawn up by diesel combustion from the ground through the tracks and the body of the loader and the arms of the bucket and its very teeth onto and into the truck’s now fairly delicate-seeming mechanism. Do Not Push.

But quasi-intentional misreading is the delight of life. So I saw the words and thought first of a sort of industrial-age Sisyphus, poised behind the truck, ready to heave a naked shoulder against its massive frame. “Don’t try it,” said the sign.

Then the meaning sprang free of context, and I saw the sense float off into wide applicability, like a chapter title in Huckleberry Finn: “Over-reaching don’t pay!” In a quite similar vein, Do Not Push.

It seemed very likely something Satchel Paige had said, in that sequence of lines for life: “Never run.” “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you,” and so on. “Do not push,” Satchel Paige might have said. “They might push back.”

And then I thought how Paige himself did, in his own way, push, and how important it is, in a world of competing and contrasting ─ indeed, opposing ─ recommendations, to know when to apply which maxim. He who hesitates is lost, but look before you leap. You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.

And that, finally, is a lesson about the role of rules in life. You gotta know which ones apply, and when. How do we learn that? Well, we learn from cases. What rules mean and how they work and when and how they are to be applied and which ones over-rule which others and why, are things learned only in the vast and various play of cases.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to capture the cases and summarize them, providing a setting which they could be discussed and their lessons considered? Wouldn’t we want to provide people, preparing for the responsibilities and opportunities of life, with a context in which they could spend time and energy gathering the skills will they need to sort through rules and situations, and the imaginative capacities they will need to understand them? Those skills and capacities would make them better at their jobs, better citizens, better human beings all around. And along the way they’d gain a sense of what has meaning, and value. What a wonderful thing that would be. It would be worth pushing for.

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So Many Different People in the Same Device

Posted on April 2, 2012 by John Churchill


Within Phi Beta Kappa’s purpose of advancing excellence in the liberal arts and sciences, the Society administers several programs designed to perpetuate the philanthropy of legators, among them the Romanell Lectureship in Philosophy. Patrick Romanell was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brooklyn College who for many years taught philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso. He and his wife Edna Romanell endowed the professorships a few decades ago. Since that time, a succession of distinguished philosophers has held the annually-awarded post, each delivering three lectures, and receiving, along with the honor, a stipend.

Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own that “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.” Even though the various Romanell lectures over the years would in fact be far from frivolous even without the stipend, Woolf’s dictum does apply in this respect: It is indisputably a good thing to have a tangible reward attached to scholarly merit, however great its independent, intrinsic worth. So we thank the Romanells continually, and wonder at the relayed skein of intent and causation that runs from their gift to the current event. In recent years the lectureship has been in Madison, Norman, East Lansing, Tucson, New York City, Durham, Princeton, and Cambridge, to name a few, and has connected since the beginning 28 professional philosophers with the Romanell thread. Nice, nice, very nice.

This year’s Romanell Professor was Alexander George (pictured above) of Amherst College. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the third in the series, dealing with David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein on religious belief. The College did it up right, with a bagpiper to celebrate Hume’s Scottish heritage. (The silence from the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would have been less expensive ─ and less fun.) After the piper, Professor George launched in, knitting us back and forth from Enlightenment Edinburgh to Wittgenstein’s Cambridge, by way of Sir James Fraser’s Golden Bough.

He spoke about Hume’s powerful criticisms of belief in miracles, about Wittgenstein’s criticisms of reductionist understandings of religious practices, and broadly about why and how do people generate religious beliefs. So the topics were, by their very nature, engaging, in a culture that still puzzles ─ privately, publicly, and politically ─ over questions about what religious beliefs mean, and how they are held.

The presentation was intricate, but the ample audience of perhaps 100 stuck right with him, and gave evidence of their engagement with his thought in the quality of their questions at the end. There were requests for clarification: “Do you mean that . . . .” There were issues of interpretation: “When Hume says . . . , do you think he means . . . .” There were challenges, some of them pointed: “Surely people who hold religious beliefs are due . . . .” It was the very model of reasonable discourse. A joy to hear, and take part in. Just, I think, what Patrick and Edna Romanell intended to support.

And the afternoon was laden, too, for me, with the kind of personal rewards that make my work for Phi Beta Kappa such a great delight. Chatting with Professor George ─ whom I had never met ─ before the talk, I discovered that in separate decades, years ago, we had lived in the same building at New College, Oxford. An inconsequential coincidence in itself, maybe, but the sort of thing that adds humane texture to lives spent puzzling about, among other things, the bearing of Hume’s thought and Wittgenstein’s on important issues. Nice, nice, very nice.

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Love and Money: The Funding of Higher Education in America

Posted on March 26, 2012 by John Churchill


The right time to think about the funding of higher education in America is now. We are moving into the season for offers of admission, offers of financial aid, acceptances, negotiations, withdrawals, and wait lists. Some colleges will “make their classes.” Some will not. Some family budgets will accommodate the offer at the first-choice school. Some will not. Resources from myriad directions channel into the packages that will make higher education possible for many, though the financial exigencies of families and institutions alike will often drive choices more decisively than the educational aspirations sought or offered.

Why does college cost so much? This question is the title of an enlightening book authored by Robert Archibald and David Feldman, economists at William and Mary. Their conclusions shatter some convenient myths. For one thing, faculty tenure isn’t the expense bugaboo of popular imagination. For decades, costs have been rising while the proportion of instruction delivered by tenured or tenure-track faculty has been falling steadily. If tenure is fading while costs are climbing, tenure isn’t the cause. For another, the cost of college to students and their families reflects, in part, the dramatic retreat of the states away from funding higher education. Pressed by health care, incarceration, and other expenses, states provide less and less of the revenue stream of state-supported universities. Increasingly reliant on tuition, newly-built endowment resources, grants, and contracts, the state institutions are looking more and more, in their revenue structures, like private institutions.

Doesn’t technology cut costs? Well…, no. Technological innovation reduces cost in the production of goods, when automated, repetitive processes can be turned over to robots. Educating someone is not like moving a car down an assembly line. Education is provision of a service, not assembly of a standard product. What technology does, in education as in medicine, is raise what Archibald and Feldman call “the standard of care.” More is possible, and we demand more. “More” is more expensive.

Their most insightful revelation comes in terms of this goods/services distinction. Technological innovation does indeed tend to drive down the cost of goods. But higher education, along with almost everything in the service sector, goes up with technological innovation. In fact, higher education turns out to be a very typical service sector “industry.” Like the cost of legal services, medical care, dentistry, and other services intrinsically dependent on local, highly-educated providers, the cost of higher education follows a different time path from the cost of goods, durable or non-durable. College costs are anything but unique; they are typical for the sort of “industry” higher education is.

Of course colleges and universities should strive to contain costs, to provide reasonable efficiencies, to avoid waste, and to provide appropriate assurances that value is provided for money paid. But the idea that higher education is a morass of gross inefficiency, awaiting rational reconstruction in light of sound business principles, is a myth that excites resentment with misunderstanding. It is a myth that feeds, too, on the increasingly prevalent half-truth that higher education is essentially a private good, a commodity for sale to individuals, worth it just in case it redounds to their personal economic benefit. Fair enough. But higher education is also an investment in the social fabric of the country, a public good, with purposes and effects beyond the individual and beyond the economic. Yes, going to college is about getting a better job and being better off. But it is also about the country having the sort of citizens we need to survive as a democracy, and about raising the quality of life for everyone in many, complicated ways.

That means that there is a public stake in the flourishing of this vast and various system. In the famous tower building at the University of Texas at Austin, the carved legend above a doorway reads as follows: “It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.” The line is from the Declaration of Independence, the declaration, that is, of the Republic of Texas, in 1836. We are now in a political season of retreat from the public responsibility stated there. It’s time to take a stand, to reverse the erosion of public funding for higher education, and to acknowledge this enterprise for what it is: Our necessary investment in a common future as a country.

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You’ll Need To Go Wide

Posted on March 19, 2012 by John Churchill


The president of Centre College must have punched me in the shoulder a half dozen times during lunch. John Roush ─ affable, amiable, infectiously good-humored, and every bit still the star running back he once was ─ entertained Scott Lurding and me over lunch in the commons that balances stately Old Centre across the greensward. I sat next to John. Scott was out of range.

Our visit was one of many stops we have made across the country on our “Listening Tour.” From Cambridge to Tucson, from Gainesville to St. Paul to Austin. We have spent the academic year seeking to learn what people are saying about higher education in America. We wanted to hear from the people who are doing it.

We’ve talked to presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, students, staff. We’ve been at flagship state universities, small liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, big privates, and community colleges. We have heard a few apocalyptic visions, some calm confidence, and every shade of struggle in between. There’s a lot of variety in American higher education, and what you are feeling in this climate depends entirely on how the wind hits your institution and how you’re equipped to deal with it.

The purpose of the tour, of course, is to gain a better sense of how Phi Beta Kappa can position itself, and reshape its activities, to be most useful to the institutions that also carry forward the banner of the liberal arts and sciences. So part of the point is to hear the various views on the health of that particular educational enterprise. How are the liberal arts and sciences doing? Where are the threats and tensions? What can we do?

A part of that question, naturally, is about the status of the continual project of advocacy and persuasion. Do prospective students seek out the liberal arts and sciences? Are they convinced of their value? Are their families convinced? Is your board, your legislature, your faculty, convinced? What’s the standing of the arguments?

The answers have been as varied as the institutions. Some are recovering from bouts of vocationalism that were intended to “save” the institution through diversification, “relevance,” and apparent usefulness to students’ immediate career aims. Some have stuck to their lasts, confident that the enduring, broader usefulness of the liberal arts and sciences will vindicate their curriculum and their approach. Centre is one of these.

The very welcome buffeting of my shoulders was punctuation in John Roush’s case for the liberal arts and sciences. “Liberal arts education prepares you,” he said, “for the time that comes in life, when you need to go wide.” Yes. That’s it. In my mind’s eye I saw a younger John, ball tucked in his elbow, sweeping around the end for yardage. Going wide may be a definitive moment in a career, some crux or crossroads on the journey. It may be the intermittent, hardly differentiated, occasions that crop up along the way, when breadth of perspective or broader capacities are just what you need. Most of us, sometimes, maybe often, need to go wide. Then we need the virtues cultivated in the liberal arts and sciences. That’s as obvious as a punch in the shoulder.

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Sioux City Sue

Posted on March 12, 2012 by John Churchill


In my life I have had, for example, the cuckoo theme from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony get planted in my head, running incessantly for hours: coo-cuckoo, coo-cuckoo, coo-coo, over and over again. That’s not so bad, compared to what happened recently as a result of a visit to a small city on the Iowa side of the Missouri River. And I don’t mean Council Bluffs. I mean the city that gave its name to a depression-era ditty you could experience right now, if you’d like, on YouTube, in multiple versions performed by just about any sort of ensemble you like, from jug band to Western Swing orchestra to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians: “Sioux City Sue.”

I discovered this YouTube cornucopia in a sort of “hair of the dog” expedition. Recently, I went to Sioux City, Iowa, and by association got the song stuck in my head. After a couple of days of “Sioux City Sue,” I struck on the idea of really listening to the song, in the hope that experiencing it through my actual ear would remove the replay from my mind’s ear. I have to say, that doesn’t work any more than having a morning nip is a constructive palliative to the ills of last night’s superindulgence. But it does give you some idea of the incredible versatility of this old tune.

At length, though, somehow, the experience ran its course, which is to say, it stopped without my having any idea how or why. I just noticed that the tape had stopped playing. And just in time, too, for that opened availability of attention to other aspects of my visit to Sioux City, Iowa. Like the reason I went there to begin with.

It was Morningside College. Morningside is a small, Methodist-related liberal arts school, a place of the sort characteristic of the Midwestern heritage of small liberal arts colleges, both the product and engine of progress and enlightenment. In today’s higher education world, increasingly dominated as it is by corporatized models of institutional organization and industrial scale, Morningside and its congeners are surviving and in many cases thriving, as small, cottage-industry workshops of liberal arts education, pre-professional work, and democratic, republican (little “d,” little “r”) culture. It’s hard not to believe that there is something critical to the ethos of the country in these places.

I went to pitch in on a celebration. A pair of alums of Morningside, Jim and Sharon Walker, sponsor an annual faculty award, given at a banquet to three outstanding teachers. Listening to the judges describe the winners was like attending a seminar on effective teaching. What comes through is the wholehearted commitment of these people to their work. But “commitment” is too thin a word, as if it were just a matter of resolutely setting one’s hand to the plough. “Devotion” might capture the intense emotional involvement that was described. “Immersion” might get at the totality of it. “Humanity” might do justice to the broad richness, across the spectrum of a person’s being, that these winners brought to bear on their work. These people aren’t just working at jobs. They really aren’t even just practicing professions. They’re exercising ways of being in the world, ways that are focused on teaching.

Of course, this sort of thing happens in other contexts as well. There are great, committed, devoted, immersed, humane teachers in the big institutions, too. But every institutional context offers its characteristic positive supports and its characteristic risks for lives of this sort. To generalize recklessly, the little places make it too easy to relax into Mr. Chips, while the big places invite compartmentalization. The trick, I guess, is to know what sort of advantages and risks each different environment offers, and to reap the benefits of the former while resisting the potential damage of the latter ─ a truism applicable to most any situation, but useful to remember, nonetheless.

So have a look at Sioux City. And next time you’re browsing YouTube for kicks, check out “Sioux City Sue”: Big Band, garage band, or the Gene Autrey, singin’ cowboy version. But it’s your own risk. I warned you.

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