Joan P. Vestrand
Associate Dean, Ann Arbor Campus
Thomas M. Cooley Law School
3475 Plymouth Road
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105
Tel: (734) 372-4900, ext. 8777
Fax: (734) 372-4909

Dear Dean Vestrand:

Looking at your catalogue and faculty listings, I notice that none of your faculty specializes in jurisprudence. Therefore, I believe we may be of benefit to one another. I taught at Eastern Michigan U. for 29 years as the resident philosopher of law, ethics and advanced logic and, now, after an extended period of retirement, I am eager to get back in service on a part-time basis at your Ann Arbor-located campus. I am competent in philosophy of law and the associated area of jurisprudence. My courses have covered a wide range of topics: the concept of law, judicial reasoning, theories concerning the purpose and justifications of punishment, and, lastly, causation in law. Additionally, my courses always deal with normative issues such as abortion, euthanasia, affirmative action, and capital punishment. Both the first cluster – the abstract topics – and the second set – the practical issues – are essential to a solid grounding in jurisprudence.

I believe my record as a distinguished teacher can be documented and I have also compiled a solid list of publications in peer-reviewed journals. I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with you to discuss a part-time position.

Sincerely yours,

Sidney Gendin

Sidney Gendin, Ph. D.
Professor Emeritus, Philosophy of Law
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, Mi 48197
734 476 4495

(2) Mr. Gendin, thank you for your interest in teaching at Cooley Law School. Unfortunately, all adjunct professors must possess a juris doctor degree as part of the qualifications for teaching a course.

Dear Joan:

Thank you for your very prompt response.

Sincerely,

Sidney

Everyone should know by now that I am an over-the-top exaggerator and given to blurting out half-baked thoughts without pausing for a breath. So, it is not surprising that I called for an end to all colleges. Utterly indefensible.

There remains a germ of truth in what I said. Most people are not served well by 4-year institutions. They don’t graduate and they don’t learn much. If you ask the average college student who Joe Biden is, he may know. If you ask him who the Vice-President of the U.S. is, the odds against his knowing are pretty high. The myth that students are enriched in many ways by going to college is just that – a myth. Put it to the test and ask those who ballyhoo enrichment just what that enrichment consists in and get ready for big disappointment. While you’re at it, force all college educators to take an exam on a wide variety of topics outside their narrow specialties and be ready to watch them drown in the sea of ignorance. Precious few chemistry profs can name two Supreme Court Justices; ditto, Health Education professors. In any department, professors do better guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar than they can come within 100 years of estimating when Bach lived – and they certainly can’t recognize the difference in his style from that of Gershwin [who dat?]. Even within a field, specialization is such that you can bet your bottom dollar that in any math department those who know what a LaPlace transform is haven’t a clue about number theory.

The simple truth is that most so-called liberal arts colleges as well as so-called research-oriented universities serve mainly to give jobs to people who can’t hack it in the external world. This is okay with me. As a socialist, I am against mass starvation. Still, these people, for the most part, don’t educate. They are there for themselves, not for you. As a prime example of this, I offer you ME.

But we do need them — in much smaller numbers. Probably all that is worthwhile from the perspective of the advancement of knowledge comes out of 50 to 70 colleges. So, let’s have them. Let’s have the others, too, so long as we are willing to admit their chief purpose is to stem the tide of unemployment.

Having said all this, I do want to do a complete turn around and give 3 cheers for a certain form of education – the community college. They can do a better job at vocational education than the 4-year schools can, hampered as the latter are by too many Moby Dick-like courses. (That includes 19th century opera.) The obstacle these community colleges face is the self-defeating notion that they are not as worthwhile as their big brothers. FALSITY ON STILTS! Young people ought not to be bludgeoned into imagining that they will miss out on something if they don’t ever learn what opera is, if they don’t know why “secret’ and “esoteric” are not quite the same, if they don’t take a course in logic, the goal of which, according to insane legend is to teach people “how to think.” Good god, hardly anyone who teaches basic logic knows how to think. In any case, those who teach the course and who do know how to think also know that it is not the purpose of an introductory logic course to teach people to think. [I refuse to say more about that because, as bad luck would have it, the explanation is long and technical.]

As technology grows by leaps and bounds almost by the hour, we need more people with the right skills for it. In the first half of the 20th century, as agriculture declined, we trained people to be electricians, plumbers and machinists. We still need these people- more than ever – but the skills necessary for doing those jobs are tougher and you can’t get them any longer from apprenticing at your uncle’s shop. You not only need to be able, you need to know how – and, believe me, those two are very different. [A spider can build a web, but does he know how?] That is why vocational training is shifting to vocational education. And that is why you can be an educated person without knowing a Bach partita when it is jammed into your ears. Good community colleges have instructors who can teach, not merely drag you through a rote routine. No one does job preparation better than the community colleges. The old joke, “Why, my goodness, I learned more in 6 months on the job than I did in 4 years in college” will no longer apply when old-fashioned on-the-job training is compared to what can be learned at a first-rate community college.

So, beef up the learning in the kindergarten through 12th grade years, make teaching at community colleges more attractive by giving tenure a shot (decent salaries comparable to what people get at 4-year schools wouldn’t be a bad idea, either) and then, [who knows?] just maybe we can make college education something other than a fool’s paradise.

Abyss = a seemingly bottomless chasm. Abysmal = the lowest quality of work

Political discourse is often described as appealing to the lowest common denominator. Appealing to it, yes, and appalling, too. The “lowest common denominator” metaphor doesn’t make sense in the political realm because zero is not a denominator. Using the well-regarded Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale (probably built into your computer alongside the spell checker) to examine the length of words and sentences, the number of paragraphs, and other language parameters in order to gauge the complexity of the debaters’ speech, researchers discovered that the grade level of the language of famous political debates, from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 to current series of presidential debates, has declined from a 12th grade level to a high 7th-grade reading level. Bush allegedly scored a low of 6.3 in a televised debate with Al Gore. Don’t you believe it. Had it been 11.9, you would have noticed no difference.

Just look around you at 7th graders and 12th graders. Do you actually notice a difference in what they can comprehend? The F-K Reading Scale would have us believe that older teenagers have better reading skills than younger ones. Have you noticed that? Have you actually heard much difference in the speech of 7th graders from 12th graders? And just for fun, compare the 5th grade with the 7th, insofar as their comprehension skills are concerned. Do you have to get down lower when you talk with 5th graders than you do with 7th graders?

It all flattens out by the 5th grade for the vast majority of Americans – the elements comprising the “lowest common denominator.” The debaters have no reason to lament the sad state of political discourse because they couldn’t do more than they do do. Beyond the mere level of their own syntactic incompetence is the fact that politicians, due to their unfamiliarity with words, are unable to pronounce words. The letter “w” defeated our preceding president, leading to the hilarious but mean-spirited mocking of his “George Dubya Bush.” When did you last hear anyone on TV properly pronounce “inapplicable”? Never, in fact.

“Stop using ‘big’ words” or “Stop using ‘fancy’ words” is the complaint of the indolent, the stupid, and all those who hold up their ignorance as a badge of honor. Anybody who really has advanced beyond 12th grade English (in some better sense than the Flesch-Kincaid measures) understands there are subtle differences even between words that are thought to be synonyms. To be cognizant of something is not merely to be aware of it. Anybody who has ever had to write a complex sentence knows that commas are not arbitrary things to drive us insane but have many important uses. Chief among them, perhaps, is that they help us differentiate unrestricted clauses from restrictive ones. How else are to distinguish between “The soldiers who came in very late missed dinner” from “The soldiers, who came in very late, missed dinner.” By using paraphrasis, we could get around the need for commas, but why should we? Language has not evolved over thousands of years for no good reason.

Going to college and majoring in Renaissance Poetry, or even Generative grammar under the watchful eye of Noam Chomsky, won’t help much because those who major in these fields already have considerable fluency in language. They are not studying these superannuated, antediluvian topics in order to be able to hold their own in conversation with political hacks. They study them for the joy of studying them.

When I was in high school, or maybe it was college, the language shibboleth of the time was that the study of Latin helped you to learn English. Commonsense tells us it is the other way around. Many times you encounter a Latin phrase and if you have a very good English vocabulary then you may be able to make sense of the Latin. Never in all your life have you been able to take the simplest English sentences and put them into Latin. Try “The cat is on the mat” and see what luck you have.

Let’s face it. There is no point in crying over spilled blood. According to Gresham’s Law, bad money drives out good. According to Gendin’s laws, (1) bad neighborhoods drive out good ones and (2) the habitual practice of bad English drives out your facility with good English. They go hand in hand. I am sorry to say, “We ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.” Pay attention. Really pay attention and observe how many people work hard at being stupid. In thirty years, every neighborhood in cities with over 4 million people will have ALL the kids taking those statewide education assessment tests scoring below average, taking all the humor out of the old joke, “We’re all above average.”

More than 100 years ago, Henry Adams, grandson of a president and great-grandson of another one, wrote in his outstanding autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, that the only value of a Harvard education was that it enabled people to make good contacts, useful for later life. What he said is as right today as it was then.

What happens to people who go to college? 80% of college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes will never get a bachelor’s degree. [From an article in yesterday's NY Times} Only half of all college students will get a degree in fewer than six years. {Same article] That’s a lot of tuition cash to show for nothing.

What are the alternatives while we wait around to reform the idea that going to college is such a hot idea? Leading economists say they “would steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.”

“It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.” And much of their training, he added, is feasible outside the college setting.

Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Vedder says, “Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a B.A.) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.” But why, Professor Vedder, do you think those “postsecondary teachers (I think they are called college professors) need a doctorate? Only because, when they apply for a college teaching post, someone says “Only those with Ph.D’s. will be considered.” Is anybody out there so crazy that he thinks I know more philosophy than longshoreman Eric Hoffer knew?

The point of a college education is to allow you the chance to read Moby Dick, the poetry of Ovid and other such things with like-minded folks who want to sit around and talk about these books. For such comraderie, nothing beats college. If you want a “career,” why bother with college? More exactly, why is going to college your chief path to a career? Who put that obstacle in place? Oh, sure, studies show that college graduates earn more money over the course of their lives than other people – there is even enough difference in these earnings to make up for the costs of college. But that is a self-fulfilling obstacle. All we need to do is stop making college the gateway to good jobs. What is it you want to be? A brain surgeon? Go ahead and be one. A lawyer? So? Be one. A brassiere salesperson? Why do you need to study in a business school? All the barriers to these and all other jobs attainable only with college degrees are artificial and arbitrarily imposed. So, you really don’t know how you could possibly be a good brain surgeon without going to college? Well, I suggest you find out by going to college for awhile, reading Moby Dick and learning to think for yourself.

I have known dozens of students who majored in essentially vocational subjects who have told me, “You know, I learned more in four months on the job than I learned in four years of college.” In that case, why the flickendoodle did you have to go? Why do we want future brassiere salespersons to study Moby Dick? I’ve got nothing against Moby. I read it once cover-to-cover in the abridged version without the exhausting whaling chapters. I liked it. So what? What’s it got to do with anything other than that it gave me the chance to talk about it with fellow ridiculous lovers of literature. Why should anybody be forced to read the stuff because he wants to be a brain surgeon? Let him discover Moby’s worth on his own five years after he is a certified surgeon, if that is what will make him happy.

I don’t speak with sour grapes stuffed in my mouth. As it happens, college served me well, but that is because I went into the one field that college is good for – teaching in a college. I learned little that I could pass on to students who did not show an interest in philosophy. There were subtle benefits that a certain minority of students who were not particularly interested in what I taught managed to get but not enough to justify being forced to attend in order to get on with their lives. The point of making people suffer through The Faerie Queene, Moby Dick, philosophy and history was to help employers find out who had staying power and who hadn’t. Employers don’t want to hire people they must train for four months quitting on them after one year. They figure that anyone who is such a prick as to put up with all that seems garbage to them is their man.

Of course, as education is currently structured, chances are you will also learn little from the time you enter kindergarten until you stagger out of high school. I don’t know if it has to be that way but that is how it was for me and 90% of all others. We have brainwashed people into thinking going to college is a good idea even as they can’t say why other than to offer up the standard clichés. For now, I’ll settle for putting an end to the idea that not going to college is shameful. We have to start somewhere. Later, we should think hard about making primary and secondary schools something other than the nearly total waste of time it is.

(1) Soon after Mattie Harrell and her family moved to a new neighborhood in Vineland, New Jersey, a man fired four rounds from a .22-caliber gun at the house. The first bullet pierced the wall near Harrell’s 8-year-old son’s bed. The perpetrator, a white man, later told police that he had fired at the house because he wanted to let Ms. Harrell and her family, the first African-Americans to move to the neighborhood, know that they were not wanted. The Harrells stayed, but several years after the incident they were still the only African-American family living in the neighborhood.

(2) The night after a Black family moved into their new house in a predominately Italian neighborhood, a mob of roughly one thousand whites, who had been rioting in a nearby park, surrounded the family’s house and began to throw stones, breaking the windows. The following evening, two hundred teenagers gathered close to the family’s home shouting, “We want blood.”

Though these incidents are similar, what is most interesting about them is that nearly forty years separate the two incidents. The first occurred in the late 1950s, the second in 1994. , Violence directed at racial and ethnic minorities who have moved to white neighborhoods is not uncommon. In fact, scenarios like the ones described above are so common that scholars have coined a term for it: “move-in violence.” Whites in such neighborhoods block the penetration as if defending against a foreign enemy, using any means at their disposal to deter the migration.

We are making a big mistake if we suppose that “white flight” is the only way we deal with black people moving into our lily-pure neighborhoods. A special report published in 1987 by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 45 cases of arsons and cross burnings directed at minorities who had moved to mostly white neighborhoods in cities and suburban area in the mid-to late 1980s. In addition to the cross burnings and arson, the report documented hundreds of acts of vandalism and intimidation (i.e., threatening phone calls and letters) directed at preserving housing segregation. The Klanwatch report noted several other important hallmarks of the violence. First, only a minority of these neighborhood-based hate crimes were committed by avowed white supremacists. According to the report, in cases where the perpetrators could be identified, “the perpetrators of these attacks are rarely found to be card carrying racists.”
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The celebrated poet, Nikki Giovanni, needs no long-winded introduction.   This poem is from her recent collection Love Poems, published by Barnes and Noble.   I like it but I have edited it.

Concerning the Burning of Old and Alone Though Not Lonely Black Churches

There is no reason to ask
WHY? since to ask “WHY” is to enter some dark and crazy spot
where one presumes there is REASON and A REASON that will
make sense which is not to say there is a craziness.
But there is knowledge here and there is a purpose here
but there is NO REASON
People who will burn a cross will burn a church
The building may be rebuilt but the creak
of a stair… the smell of the polish in the pews
the old kitchen where Sunday dinners were reheated
the icebox where the iced tea was kept… the too narrow
steps leading to the damp and dusky basement… the leaky
window that could not always keep the cold at bay… the knowing
that this building was built by these hands to worship this God who
has Delivered us… No, that cannot be rebuilt
The people who have burned crosses will burn a church
Something will be lost and the world just a bit sadder
for the loss of the building……. But the people who sift through
ashes know that fire is a friend and that fire can be a foe
But the people who use fire are lowdown.
And the people who know that some people are lowdown will watch
the fires….. will forgive the trespasses….. and will go right on
thanking their God for His powerful……. magnificent Deliverance.

It will take more than poems by Nikki Giovanni to end this sort of thing.  It will take moral courage on the part of those of us who hate these crimes to fight back wherever and whenever we witness it.  It will take the courage to stay the course for many years when our own homes are targeted by those who live by hate and fear.

On or about March 1, I wrote this post:

This morning, as she seems to have done a million times,  JoEllen Vinyard dragged her frail body out to her car and, after some preliminaries that would have discouraged anyone else, lugged her small self through wind, snow, and sub-freezing temperture to her school.  She unloaded her scooter and fought her way through the bitter cold into the building where, along with people almost as nutty as she is, she readied herself for an interview of a “candidate,” – a young man probably about 30, recently Ph.D’d in some branch of history the interviewers knew next to nothing about.   The game of “bluff and raise” began.

The innocent shmeggeggy was one of three finalists from among 80-100 freshly scrubbed neophytes who had applied for a job at EMU, America’s equivalent of the British asylum, Bedlam.    The interviewers wanted to know whether Dr. X was the right person for the job.   They listened to him as he droned on and on, spouting something in his “area of expertise.”   They asked a few questions and he gave nifty responses.     They marched him off to a classroom to observe his teaching “technique.”   Yes, he did well.  He introduced himself to the students.   He smiled at the right moments, made liberal use of the blackboard or came prepared with “powerpoint,” probed the students gently with questions they were free to respond to or not, exactly as they chose.  He gave a fine summary of his learned lecture.   A grand time was had by all.   Off to lunch they went where he put his napkin on (or in?) his lap, did not speak with mouthfuls of food, did not interrupt his betters, listened to them with rapt attention and announced how delighted he had been with the class participation that morning.   It was a beautiful day and the sun shone through and melted the snow.

The show has two more command performances scheduled for next week.     To each of these events, my wife will drag herself, if her faithful scooter does not break down (as I hope it will).    The audition conductors had waded their way through 80-100 candidates before whittling the field down to three.   It was not easy work, and consumed many dozens of hours.  Each candidate came with letters or recommendation saying “Dr. X is the finest student we have ever had here at… (Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, or wherever).  We wish we had a place for him in our own department.”

Many experts in social psychology have pondered the selection game and all have concluded it is a waste of time.   How, then, to choose?   It is hard for old-fashioned stuck-in-the-mud faculty to accept this but the simplest way is not to choose at all.  Put the names of all applicants into a hat and draw one out.   It is not unlike how to decide who should get custody of children in unpleasant divorces.  Just toss a coin.  You should take a look at Jon Elster’s book, Solomonic Wisdom to see the good sense of this approach.   It will never happen because people think they are smart.   They aren’t, but even if they were, they are no good at using their intuitions for decision-making purposes.   When I taught, I tried to persuade my colleagues they were wasting their time and, worse, they were wasting mine.    Go back to the days of Paris in 2000 B.C. and reflect on how stupid he was to kidnap Helen.   Big brother, Hector knew the headaches the youngster was causing him.   Sure enough, hordes of superstars like Achilles came for revenge and they got it.  For the next 4000 years, that set the standard for stupidity but those in charge of the world have done their best to be as ridiculous as The Kid From Troy.

The whole game is mad and pointless.  Nothing can be learned in a single day by watching a candidate who has super-prepared himself to be sweet, smart, and eager.  So, I am glad I quit and wish I could persuade JoEllen to do the same.

Where has all the good sense gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the bright men gone?

Long time ago

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

It is not surprising that the Gay Rights Advocate [GRA] makes painfully slow progress in his struggles with the Anti-Gay Community [AGC].  The fundamental error of the GRA is that he focuses too much attention on the pseudo-arguments of the AGC.   He seems to believe that the AGC mainly depends on reasons – albeit bad ones – for its position and, thus, he underplays the importance of blind prejudice.   He knows that, in the ante-bellum South, hatred and irrational contempt were the main explanations for the awful treatment black persons received but he wants to believe that the AGC is more civilized.   And it is true that, on the surface, the AGC is ashamed of its blind prejudice and falls back on “arguments.”  Still, the reality is that not much depends on these pseudo-arguments.

The most popular of these arguments is that God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.  Accordingly, the AGC is content, and the GRA wastes his time trying to show errors in this Adam/Eve argument.   I won’t rehash the mistakes in the Adam/Eve thesis for they are well known.  Other motives for resistance to gay rights are (a) the practice of homosexuality is disgusting, God or no God; (b) widespread homosexuality is anathema to the maintenance of a family-oriented society; and (c) homosexuals are laden with a wider variety of character defects (including a tendency toward disease-promoting promiscuity) than are heterosexuals.   I suppose there are others as well.

Not much can be said against (a) because it is only an admission of a prejudice.  One can scream “Shame on you!” at persons addicted to (a) but that won’t do much good.  One hopes that in time this prejudice will vanish but, meanwhile, I have no good ideas how to make it go away.  I hear talk about “education” but haven’t a clue as to how that works.   With respect to (b) and (c), education may make sense but with respect to the feeling that homosexuality is disgusting, the cry for education is nebulous and trite. Our so-called educators have no special skills in doing away with blind prejudice and usually resort to nothing else than propaganda that aims to substitute their own biases for those within the anti-gay community.  Brainwashing, in many contexts, may be fine but it is not actually a form of education.

With respect to the idea that homosexuality is deadly in that it will wipe out family-oriented values, one can patiently appeal to all the counter-evidence and, insofar as there are people who rest their case on (b), one can make some headway –  I think.  The trick is to do this in a calm, dispassionate way, recognizing that these members of the AGC are not delusional but only misinformed.   The case against (c) works in a somewhat similar way but, to be perfectly honest, is harder.

Sometimes, those in the GRA movement say there are no differences other than sexual proclivities between themselves and heterosexuals.   Sometimes, they like to say they can tell their own by subtle forms of behavior.   That implies you don’t have to see homosexuals in action to know they are homosexual.   If this is true, then this strengthens the idea that among the many character traits homosexuals have some of them will be defects.  Why this should matter for social policy is not clear unless these defects are such as a tendency toward criminality or give rise to criminality.  On the face of it, this is false but this false belief can be countered, I hope, by education and simple resort to statistics.

Those with a sanguine temperament put their faith in education and believe that in the long run the AGC will wither away.  I, myself, am a great believer in ebb and flow and expect that we will experience anti-gay sentiment rise like a phoenix from ashes and become even more prominent than it is today, only to fall back again.   There is not much to be done except be like Sisyphus, always prepared to roll that stone up the hill again.  However, discouraging this may be, it is the best we can hope for and, if we are not ready to admit the battle is endless, we in the gay rights community are doomed to see our gains will disappear.

Most people who know me think I am very smart.    The trouble with this assessment is that the bar is set very low.

Sure, if you compare me to the average summa cum laude graduate from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, I am practically a genius.    But what kind of standard is that?

Michael Moore reports in his book, Stupid White Men, that a study of 556 seniors at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford showed how extensive is the stupidity of our best of the best.   70% of them don’t know the Civil War occurred sometime between 1850 and 1900.  Nor have they ever heard of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  They don’t know what either the Iliad or the Odyssey is about.  Only 1/3 of the English majors at these hallowed institutions have taken a course on Shakespeare.  But 98% of them do know who Snoopy Dog Dog is and 99% know who Beavis and Butthead are.

What all this shows is that schooling (as we experience it, not as it has to be) is a waste of time and it can’t be corrected by the means Moore suggests.   He wants smaller classrooms, better pay for teachers, and the usual reforms that are drearily recited by those who care.   What is needed are better parents, and how do you get that?   You need better teachers but you can’t get that by inveigling smarter people to go into education by bribing them with higher salaries.    You need a system that is not defined capitalistically, by the demand that schools teach the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce the United States needs to maintain its role as the major global economic and military power.  And how you gonna do that?

We need to stop the brainwashing beat of the tom tom drum that incessantly hammers out the trash that we are the greatest country in the world.   It is precisely that kind of lunacy that holds us back.   Let’s work ourselves into the top 20.  That will take 20 years and we can go from there.     So, whatcha say, gang, do you want to join me in complaining about our schools and our country or do you want us to sink further into oblivion?   And if you have to ask me what the first step is, we are off to a bad start.

Forty years ago, Robert Brustein wrote an essay in which he said that the job of those who teach in the lower grades is to teach to children.  That is, to be children-centered; subject matter was not terribly important.     The job of of those who teach at the high school level is to teach subject matter to children – one balances the need to encourage children with the job of getting them to know what is valuable.    Those who teach at the college level should teach the subject and let the devil take the hindmost.   Unfortunately, beyond this, he had no solid advice.  His attitude exuded, a  ”Damn it, man, let be alone!  I’m a Yale Professor and I cannot worry about those who are unprepared for the work I do.”     In the same vein, at about the same time, the great godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote an attack on affirmative action at the college level with respect to hiring.   He pointed out that for the vast majority of jobs, adequacy in performance was adequate.   When a boss hires a man for an industrial belt line job, the only question is “Can he do the work?”   When hiring a college professor, the standard is the same as it is when hiring a professional basketball player:  Is he the very best i can get?    Colleges must aim for excellence, not adequacy.

I was impressed with both essays, but that was long ago.   Just what kind of wonderful work was Brustein engaged in that he had a right not to care about those who sought him out in the hope he could make them a little better than they would otherwise be without him?     What compromises in his teaching methods would he have had to make if he were merely teaching at, say, Princeton?   Was his essay not merely a rallying cry written for the most elite of the elite?   It took me decades to see this because i had the idea that colleges served some purpose or other, that to achieve these purposes, some standard or other had to be announced loudly to the world.    As for Kristol, how did he imagine excellence could be determined?   Was he, himself, excellent?   In the opinion of thousands of his critics, he sets a low water mark for intellectual work.  I don’t necessarily share this view but I take note of the fact that excellence has many ways of being judged and each of these ways is itself highly subjective.

Looking back at my own career (begun in 1964) I can see many changes in my methods but am at a loss to know whether I improved or worsened over the decades.  In lecturing less and adopting more recitation, did I get better?   Did I make a mistake in lecturing less?    What, when all is said and done, is the evidence I became better or worse at my job?   How valuable are student evaluations?   What of peer appraisal?   How can I balance the work I did in the classroom with the scholarly work I produced for journals that students could not have understood, even had they been interested?     Is congeniality with colleagues part of the mix?  Did I get better at that or worse?       I am sorry to report that 40 years after i first read Brustein and Kristol, I am more in the dark about what my role ought to have been and how well I performed than I was as a neophyte.

College professors whine at the deterioration of today’s students, maybe for good reason but maybe not.   I am sure that if we could go back in a time machine and listen in to the faculty at the University of Paris in 1500, we would hear most of them saying that students are not what they used to be in the good old days – 1480.   For all I know, such complaints may be legitimate.   For all I know, student complaints about faculty in 1500 may also have been legitimate.

Ah, for a good game of basketball or baseball where no one has to wonder, much less worry, about the performances of Lebron James or Babe Ruth.    Or do we?

As if it isn’t bad enough that heterosexuals enjoy being married, homosexuals blindly want to follow their lead.   The current campaign in Argentina is a fine example.

30 large organizations of gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks have bandied together to be an instrument for disseminating the actions that sexual minorities undertake to defend their rights.   Now, most of what they want seem to me to be reasonable and uncontroversial but one thing they want is the right to marry.  Of course, if this is just a symbolic gesture to insist on equality with those weirdoes who like to limit their sexual activity to those of the opposite gender, it’s no big deal.  But if what they want are the headaches that go with marriage – squabbles over divorce settlements, inheritances, adoptions and which of the dead guy’s three widows should get what shares after he croaks, they don’t know what they are letting themselves in for.     The leader of QUEER, the leading magazine sponsoring rights of queers, says, ”Our movement is still fighting for recognition of the rights that are due to us.”   Senorita Romero, the head honcho says she wants the ”right to marry, a law recognising the gender identity of trans people, school curricula that promote diversity and teach students not to discriminate again community, and the repeal of any discriminating criminal code provisions.”     I can buy into all this except the school curricula idea.   The only school curricula idea i will ever endorse is the banning of all public and private schools anywhere and everywhere on planet Earth.  Really, truly, honestly, and thoughtfully, can you think of anything more stupid than sending kids to school?