French Bulldog Puppy—Public Intellectuals (Bloom to Piketty)

Click here for the "Celebrity Commentary" Resource Center—(all posts available)
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Celebrity Commentary" (coming soon)
This is a "small" (小) post—click here for an explanation of Round and Square post lengths.

***  *** 

One year ago on Round and Square (1 February 2012)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Dunkin' Joe

[a] French Musings PD

I don't know who you are, 
but I will find you...[1]

[b] Capital RF

...and tell you that I am reading Thomas Piketty's  
Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I am just as 
intrigued by how an obscure French academic becomes a 
rock star as I am by his analysis.

This reminds me (the fame part, if not the argument) 
of the late Allan Bloom, who managed to sell a million 
copies of his book about twenty-five years ago. 

Rear legs and forelegs up and out for public intellectuals 
(no matter the persuasion). Out of the ivory tower and into
the big, roiling world of ideas with consequences.
           [1] I like Liam's opening, and he gave me a biscuit to use it today.

[c] Clarity and Complexity RF

 [Originally posted on May 1, 2014]

Lectures (4)—Understanding with a Human Face

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."

[a] Lens

This Round and Square post is dedicated to an event (big for me and small for the community) taking place in Beloit, Wisconsin today. I am very pleased (and humbled) to receive the Rotary Club and Greater Beloit Chamber of Commerce's monthly teaching award. I have loved teaching ever since I started doing it about twenty years ago, and this particular award means a great deal to me. It is my home community, and the very best part of it is that it is shared—month after month and year after year—by teachers of all kinds and at all "levels." I dislike that word, "level," because it blurs the fact that elementary, junior high school, and high school teachers are even more important to our society than college or graduate teachers are. I have a role to play in the whole configuration, just like all of my colleagues teaching in colleges and universities, but we are building upon the fundamental work of those who educate the students we inherit. Most of the teaching awards out there focus on each of the "levels." This one, very appropriately, mixes it all up, and honors teachers from the community who teach sixth-grade science, elementary reading, special education, high school geography, and, yes, even East Asian history and anthropology. It is a great credit to the Rotary Club of Beloit that they "get" the fundamental importance of education from preschool and kindergarten all of the way beyond high school. 

[b] One-room history RF

The Rotary Club is busy, so I have three minutes (in the "live" version) to explain something about myself as a teacher. Ellen Joyce, my colleague and chair of the history department at Beloit College, remarked (when hearing that I was to speak for three minutes) that it would be worth being there just to hear me speak for three minutes. Since she is introducing me today, she can see if I can pull it off. I also want to mention Dean of the College and Provost Ann Davies, who nominated me for this award. I truly appreciate it. It is also a pleasure to thank my former colleague in Beloit College's education department, Tom Warren, who has always been an inspiration to me when it comes to engaging with students. His organizational work from the time I was nominated on was as efficient and orderly as I ever could have expected. It means a great deal to have the support of my colleagues and the community. Above all, as I have mentioned, it is an honor even to be considered in the same conversation with my real heroes—preschool, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers who make my job very easy, indeed.

This is the long version of a "three-minute" talk. 

***  ***

Human...Understanding
On a cool, thawing Minnesota spring day in 1980 I had the most important educational experience of my life. I never saw it coming; I never had a clue.

It was one of those hopeful early-March days in southern Minnesota. I went to my early classes and then saw fit to go for a run through Carleton College's spacious arboretum, where I had been running and thinking ever since my family moved to Northfield, Minnesota ten years earlier. On that spring afternoon, I was troubled by something I could not shake, no matter how hard I tried. I had been studying the Chinese practice (even then defunct for the better part of a century) of footbinding. That day, I had learned in my Chinese history class that the practice was not known until the tenth or eleventh century, became the prime mover of marriage politics for eight hundred years, and then died out, almost as quickly. It was completely gone by 1930, as I was told.

[c] Written RF

I had heard about the practice before, but mostly through popular culture "lenses" that did not help my understanding very much. I had not known that it was unheard of for the first two thousand years of China's historical—"written"—tradition, that it dominated almost every aspect of Chinese cultural life from about 1200 until almost 1900, and then died out in just a few decades. I had no idea, but I was befuddled.

And a little angry.

As I tap-tapped through the spring mix of leaves, melting snow, and mud—on the familiar ten-kilometer trail along the Cannon River—I kept thinking about how much I despised this practice. I could not get around it; I had feelings about it. I thought to myself that it was bad for women, men, adults, children—everyone. No good could come of it, I mused. I really didn't like it, and it had as much to do with the relative recency of my "understanding" of the many dimensions of the practice. I had (had) no idea that it was a part of "family strategy" in China for many generations, or that relatively poor families often went through extremely difficult choices with regard to future marriage possibilities and current family labor necessities (bound feet and work in the fields did not go together very well, to say the least). Raising hackles I never knew I had, I ran on, disturbed.

[d] Trail RF

Later that afternoon, I went to see my anthropology professor. It so happened that I was also in a course called Peoples and Cultures of Africa. In that class, I was struggling with the ways in which various tribes (called Nuer and Dinka) would raid each other and steal each other's cattle. I was bothered by the way in which it was all right (as I saw it from my readings) for Nuer to think of their Dinka neighbors as "other," and "lesser." Then they stole their cattle—or vice versa.

I had feelings—powerful ones—and I wanted to talk.

I had no way of knowing it then, but this was about to be the most important educational experience of my life, and it would stay with me right up through the South Carolina primary last Saturday...and today's State of the Union speech. It has affected every aspect of my teaching and learning ever since then.

When Professor Riesman opened the door that day, I had no idea.

He asked me to sit down, and I unfurled my frustration over footbinding and what I perceived as mindless aggression between neighbors in Africa. I spoke of China and what today we call "the Southern Sudan." I did not speak about the United States and Europe, and it never occurred to me why I had not done so. I let out my frustrations about these matters, and then finished my confused ranting and imbedded questioning with a phrase that I have come to recognize in my own teaching. My own students say it all the time, and it is one of the most important pivots—and teaching moments—I encounter, every semester of every year.

     I am really angry when I read these things. I have strong opinions about
     them, but I know that I shouldn't...because that's their culture. It's their
     business. Not mine.

A later professor of mine (Allan Bloom) would mock such lines almost before they were out of a student's mouth. He would have reviled them as the kind of soggy relativism that had ruined America's students, so he argued. He wrote a book about it. He would have pontificated without reflecting further. I am writing a book about him.

But not Paul Riesman.

His way of thinking was far more nuanced. He practiced the Socratic Method in a way that most teachers bungle. Clearly, he was ready for my question and inarticulate ranting. It was not as though he had "heard it all before," because, if you ever spoke to Paul Riesman, you knew that you were the only person who mattered. Ever. This could be uncomfortable, which should tell you as much about the student as the teacher. He wanted to understand what you were thinking, and that had everything to do with his exemplary teaching.

     So...you are saying that you can't have feelings—human feelings, your own
     feelings—because it is "their" culture? Are you saying that you can't let yourself
     feel your own emotions if you are going to understand something? Are you
     telling me that you can't have human emotions and rigorously analyze human
     life at the same time?

Dumbfounded.

[e] Curving RF

I wish that the English language had more words for my befuddlement, but dumb is a pretty good start for my perplexity. I wish that language and emotion were more closely merged than they ever can be in...life. My consternation was quintessentially postmodern, and I could not make it divide along the lines I wanted—feelings, on one hand, and analysis on a completely unrelated "academic" side. I think the word "objective" cropped up at some point in my thinking.

I had no idea how to respond, but I tried.

     How can I allow myself to have negative feelings about things in cultures I don't
     live in? How could I even have a right to an opinion?

Of course, I did not speak grammatically ["in which I do not live..."]. Grammar had nothing to do with it. The real question was more troubling. Like everyone else, I had spent loads of time having opinions about things regarding [sub]-cultures I did "live in." It was called "politics" and "history." My own—whatever one's "own culture" means. I felt very comfortable having strong opinions about things in American society. I even (this took me some time to recognize) had come to "understand" opinions and political stances with which I did not agree. Paul Riesman helped me to see, with one series of questions—one thirty-minute (or so) meeting in his office—that opinion and analysis, lived experience and discerning judgment, can merge in the very being of a very human being..can both have feelings and understand others.

As spring became summer, I let it sink in. By doing so, I avoided the more simplistic ways of looking at his message, such as interpreting it as an ability to debate "their side." No, Riesman was implying something much more expansive—something that felt both exhilarating and vaguely dangerous.

What a concept. It had never occurred to me...except in my own culture. I could have my own opinions and understand that culture is contested. I could start to see that "Chinese culture" itself had many nooks and crannies, and that a simplistic phrase such as "that's their culture" was as defeatist as it was intellectually indefensible. The other lesson I learned from Paul Riesman was even more dramatic. It is one thing to learn both to acknowledge your own human emotions and to understand—in deep and discerning "human" ways—people who are "other" than you. At one point in our many classes and meetings, Professor Riesman  mentioned that anthropology was at least a potentially "subversive" discipline." What he meant, as I understand it, is that the best student of cultural understanding will seek to understand even the most befuddling, irritating, thorny...

[Insert your own example from politics or "culture" here]

...example of difference in even your own society. My, my. That has been harder for me to do than even to understand footbinding or cattle raids among neighbors. How am I going to understand...really understand...the other side? We don't do much of that anymore in the nation of my birth (at least not as much as I like to think we once did).

I started by having Professor Riesman's questioning make me rethink the way that I looked at East Asian and African history. I finished by, well, changing my life.

You see, anthropology and history (if they are done well) are a little "subversive," in a good way. If we do it well, we learn to understand even things with which we don't agree—things that perplex and bother. We don't often end up agreeing, nor should we feel the need to, but we start to understand that there are various and challenging ways of viewing the world. If this seems "easy" (and many of my students initially think it is and that they do it routinely), I would urge you to think again. It is not a matter of being able to create a quick synopsis; it is a matter of understanding the complex thought of another. If we start to understand that life and personality and culture is complicated—profoundly so—is it possible that we will never be able to understand the world in simplistic ways again? Is it possible not to think that "everything is equal" or "subjective," or "the same" while still coming to an understanding of how others, even opponents, think?

I surely hope so. I have bet my teaching career on it.

[f] Politics RF

Where is this going? Does it mean that I might watch Fox News and yet might try to understand—really understand—MSNBC's evening programming? Yup. Does it mean that I might read the New York Times and, on my very own Kindle (or Nook) read the Wall Street Journal...every day? Yup.

I'll go so far as to say that the true educational ideal might even be to understand...

 ...Wisconsin politics.

No, really to understand.

What I learned from Paul Riesman that afternoon in Northfield, Minnesota is that understanding, humanity, and analysis are all of a piece. This is difficult stuff. It is also the world in which we live. Are we even going to try to understand things with which we don't agree? I have taught for years and years, and Paul Riesman's teachings have inspired mine. If only a few more people would go against the grain (think about really understanding "the other side," even if you disagree or vote otherwise) what might become of our society?

What if we really sought to understand (I mean really understand) the other side?

Check that. I mean...the other sides?

Nothing has ever shaped my thinking as much.

[g] Culture RF

Flowers Bloom (6)—Settling In

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Flowers Bloom."

[a] Reading  RF

During the summer, I will be posting segments of a memoir project I have begun that discusses teaching, learning, scholarship, reading...and the venerable, odd University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose bestseller The Closing of the American Mind rocked American education almost twenty-five years ago. I have already written a little bit about Bloom on this blog, and had promised to start posting more pieces starting in June. Read the introduction to the series if you want the full context, but the individual posts are meant to be read on their own (with hints throughout of the larger context).

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6

Flowers Bloom—A Teaching Memoir

By the autumn of 1988—a year later—a great deal had happened. Allan Bloom’s incendiary book had sold millions of copies. This was unheard of for an obscure professor of political philosophy, and Bloom himself reveled in every moment of the attention. He appeared on every television show that would have him—smoking ceaselessly throughout, and appearing irritated if ashtrays were unavailable. He was asked to give the commencement address at Harvard University that spring, and began with the memorable lines—which echo the trap-settings of Closing, and into which almost every commentator fell again—“My fellow elitists…”

[b] Tower view  RF

He also watched his portfolio grow…and grow…and grow. He was not the least bit shy about speaking of this, and it was a topic of conversation in almost every class or chat I was a part of. He referred often to the reviews of Closing, and referred regularly in interviews to the fact that he was going to make the most of his “six weeks of fame.” He smoked tirelessly, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. My favorite reference to the enormity of the change for a college professor who, as though by thunderbolt, became a multimillionaire, comes from his friend’s faux biography—Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein. 

          Anyway, he never opened the telephone bills…Those were paid by Legg 
          Mason, the vast investment firm in the East that managed his money. [He 
          said], “I don’t like electronic printouts, I’m certainly not about to study them. 
          Don’t bring anything up, don’t hand me a statement unless the principal 
          falls below ten million.[1] 

Allan Bloom was easy to caricature. I remember asking a classmate in May 1988 if he thought any of our professors might be joining us in running the "Hyde Park 5K." He replied, "Allan Bloom would have to find a place to set down his drink first." So it went, and Bloom loved it all...even in just sensing that people might be talking about him.

In the meantime, I had been busy with the mundane work required of people who wished to develop some expertise in anthropology, history, and Chinese literature. I took seminars in anthropological theory, classical Chinese, and Chinese historiography. Allan Bloom was accruing capital, even as he slept, but he kept on teaching. All of us who worked with him heard about his legendary tastes, if not the income pie charts. I sat in on his seminar—jointly taught with Saul Bellow—on Samuel Butler’s minor classic The Way of All Flesh. It seemed a fitting title for a course taught by a professor who woke up to wealth and fame on a spring morning about a year before.

The long summer of 1988 passed (mine was taken up by intensive study of Japanese), and we came ‘round again in October to the opening event for the year—the Committee on Social Thought sherry hour. I remembered distinctly the sherry hour of a year earlier, and was fairly content that I had made some progress toward my goals. My reading list had taken shape, and I had already written a few essays, even as I continued to develop my skills in classical Chinese. I had even come to know Allan Bloom fairly well, although I knew that I never wanted to be “his student.” No, I would carve my own path, much as I liked the guy. He was a real kick, and filled with a firehose of ideas all of the time. Never-ending. Spraying. I loved it.

I wouldn’t be “his student,” but I would talk with him, and the last year had provided many such opportunities. It could not have worked better if it had been a plan. My pride (and possibly academic specialty) had separated us in a formal sense, but that was precisely what allowed me to engage Allan Bloom in ways that were far more interesting to me than ever could have been possible had he been reading, say, drafts of my doctoral dissertation. I was able to have a few fairly lively give-and-take sessions with him over the course of the year, and watch the fireworks that were Bloom/Bellow in class (the bestseller meets the Nobel Prize). Not a bad first year.

[c] Names  RF

As I reflected on these matters, I settled in with my glass of sherry—like a good anthropologist, I was serious about eating and drinking what the natives ate and drank, odd though it seemed. I began to talk with a gaggle of students and professors who seemed energized by being back together with colleagues after a long summer—any lingering resentments covered by a fine mist of alcohol and social cohesion. It was at this point that—if I were “in the field,” in Taiwan or elsewhere, I would have had my notebook—I witnessed one of the oddest cases of name-dropping as cultural practice that I have ever seen. I also realize that I am name-dropping as I tell it. Such is culture and (it happened twenty-three years ago) history. 

So…the group contained about fifteen professors and students. It was formal; the professors talked and the students listened (and drank). Edward Levi, former president of the University of Chicago and U.S. Attorney General, began by saying that he had spent a few days in the early summer chatting with both the mayor and the governor about some of the retail locations on Hyde Park Boulevard, and that he felt that the University had a chance of integrating more effectively into the wider southside community. We were all interested in this topic, because we knew that the University of Chicago was an island (and not in the best sense) in a racially divided city. We were impressed.

From there, the conversation took on a social power of its own. I still hope, someday, to create a theory of name-dropping around what I heard that day. We sipped our sherry as Saul Bellow picked up the thread. He spoke of various discussions with agents and a summer spent working on a wide range of manuscripts. Coming from him, this spoke volumes. Bellow was not a struggling writer trying to find work. He was the quintessential man of letters, and even such mundane talk left me with goosebumps. That was not enough for Bellow, though. He concluded his part of the conversation by noting, pointedly, that “When I was speaking in July with [Secretary of State] George Schultz, I mentioned to him that…” I couldn’t remember the details of the advice or remonstrance, so stunned was I that Bellow had taken Levi’s mayor/governor and “raised him.” The cards were on the table, and only one player was left.

Edward Shils, the distinguished—if by that time somewhat aged—sociological theorist, cleared his throat. He began slowly, describing various discussions he had been having over the paperback version of his book Tradition. I thought to myself that here was a professor who had come to understand marketing, even in the obscure world of academic publishing. With a title like Tradition, he was sure to appear on everyone’s reading list for decades and decades. People would assign it without having even read it. The title did all of the heavy lifting. Brilliant. As before, we were already impressed.

The game of academic one-upmanship was not over, though. I could only think of chiefly contests that consumed enormous amounts of tribal energy as I watched this spectacle. Here before me were three “big chiefs” of the University of Chicago. At least within the academic world…everyone knew them. They were the powers of this little island called the Committee on Social Thought—some with influence that went far beyond its ivy-covered shores. Who would ever think that there would need to be competition?

I immediately learned otherwise, even if I had thought to doubt the power of competitive discourse—with the mayor and governor giving way to the secretary of state in just a few minutes. Edward Shils gave a brief cough, took a little sip from his drink, and said, “In July, during my audience with the pope…”

***  ***

I had not seen Allan Bloom walk into the room. What followed would set the tone for the rest of my time with him, and at the Committee on Social Thought. True to course, he moved quickly, jerkily, with his drink spilling a little behind him. He was focused though, and anyone who ever came to know him fairly well observed these motions with a kind of odd affection. I am not the first to point out that Professor Bloom was anything but graceful. Saul Bellow, again, says it pointedly and well.

          He was a curious man to watch at the table. His feeding habits need getting 
          used to. Mrs. Glyph, the wife of the founder of the department, told him once 
          that he must never again expect her to ask him to dinner. She was in her own 
          right a very rich lady, big on high culture and an entertainer of visiting 
          celebrities. She had had R.H. Tawney at her dinner table, and Bertrand Russell, 
          and some big-shot French Thomist whose name escapes me (Maritain?), and 
          lots of literati, especially the French. Abe Ravelstein [Allan Bloom], then a 
          junior faculty member, was invited to a luncheon to honor T.S. Eliot. Marla 
          Glyph said to [Allan Bloom] as he was leaving, “You drank from your Coke 
          bottle, and T.S. Eliot was watching—with horror.”

          [Bloom] told this on himself. And on the late Mrs. Glyph…And somehow I 
          can’t believe that drinking from a Coke bottle was the whole story. (And what, 
          to begin with, was a Coke bottle doing on the table!). Faculty wives knew that 
          when [Bloom] came to dinner they would face a big cleaning job afterward—
          the spilling, splashing, crumbling, the nastiness of this napkin after he had 
          used it, the pieces of cooked meat scattered under the table, the wind sprayed 
          out when he laughed at a wisecrack; the courses rejected after one bite and 
          pawed to the floor. An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers 
          under his chair. He wouldn’t have minded. He didn’t pay much attention to 
          such things.[2] 

[d] Bloom  PD

I came to like those odd motions, and spillage was just part of the conversation with Allan Bloom. He spilled ideas just as readily as he did coffee, beef, and gin—dozens for every one that a more mundane academic could muster. It was messy…and fruitful.

“Robert, Robert”…he said with focused determination as he charged a liquid trail across the carpeted room. “The Closing of the American Mind is going to be translated…into Chinese!” 

I knew that I had found a place, at least on the margins of Bloom’s consciousness and on the Committee on Social Thought. I finished my drink and went home to work on my Fundamentals Exam readings. 

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6

Flowers Bloom (2)—An Open Book

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Flowers Bloom."

[a] Open  RF

 During the summer, I will be posting segments of a memoir project I have begun that discusses teaching, learning, scholarship, reading...and the venerable, odd University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose bestseller The Closing of the American Mind rocked American education almost twenty-five years ago. I have already written a little bit about Bloom on this blog, and had promised to start posting more pieces starting in June. Read the introduction to the series if you want the full context, but the individual posts are meant to be read on their own (with hints throughout of the larger context).

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6

Flowers Bloom—A Teaching Memoir
An Open Book

As I opened the letter from the Committee on Social Thought—its heft had calmed me considerably—I began to think about how I was going to organize my time over the next six months, the last period of preparation that I would have before my years of planning and hoping would turn to actual graduate training. I was in, and the pressure was on. I had received a fellowship that humbled me—what was called then a "Century Fellowship"—and had heard from one of my college professors that they expected me to do well. It could have registered as negative pressure, but I was floating. I felt like a Daoist who had found the way.

[b] Leaves  RF

I learned that I was to begin my studies in October, and that I would spend my first two years attempting a complex balance of work in Chinese history and literature, on the one hand, and reading deeply from a list of twelve to fifteen “great books” of my own choosing, on the other. For the former, I was to study my languages, engage in seminar work, and begin the slow process that would lead eventually to the doctoral dissertation. I knew even then that I would take anthropological theory and classical Chinese, and look for the kinds of seminars that would teach me more about the “borderlands” between history, anthropology, and Chinese literature. For the latter—this strange concoction of a dozen or more “great books”—I was less sure, but I set out to learn more. I had already studied some formidable texts in my two years in Taiwan.

Now, I was to make my choices early, consult all faculty members (getting their signatures in the process), and begin the process of methodically studying the texts, reflecting upon the perspectives of other scholars, anticipating questions, and writing several original essays, to be submitted to the Chairperson each spring. That line of inquiry would culminate in the third year with the Fundamentals Examination—nine questions in three, broad categories, from which I would eventually write three “substantial” essays over a four-day period, with a fifth day added (it seemed quaint, even at the time), for “typing.” This was the fundamental goal that would shape my life for the next three years. It would be the most formidable cut in the entire program. “Don’t blow it,” I murmured to myself. I was in, and now it was time to put all of those years of longing together.

***  ***

Within a week, I heard the word “bloom” again as a proper name—Allan Bloom, the “unparalleled” translator of Plato’s Republic. I had read his translation carefully three times while in Taiwan, and was enchanted by the audaciousness and insight of Bloom's “interpretive essay” at the end. I had also—just by chance—discovered that Bloom had translated Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, a kind of Enlightenment era Republic focusing on child rearing and education. I had found a copy on a quick trip to Hong Kong, and began it with an utter disdain that turned rapidly to admiration and eventually into a permanent sense of awe for both the author (Rousseau) and the translator (Bloom). I still regard, to this day, the translation of Rousseau’s Emile as the greatest service that Allan Bloom has done for English-speaking humanity. Any of a small number of people could have translated The Republic in an astute new way. By now, several more have done so. It took a genius to “see” that Rousseau’s Emile is one of the greatest books ever written.

That is all that I knew of Bloom by the time that I had processed my acceptance into the Committee on Social Thought. It was only a few weeks later, though, that I heard his name again. It seems that the professor had written a very different kind of book that had caught the attention of several reviewers, including Christopher Lehman-Haupt, writing in the New York Times and published jointly in the International Herald-Tribune, which I read avidly. Lehman-Haupt liked it, and wrote that it “hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric-shock therapy must be like.”  I was intrigued, and not least because I saw myself (or a vision of what I wanted not to be) in his portrayals.

Allan Bloom fools you in his remarkable new book, The Closing of the American Mind, which hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric-shock therapy must be like. He begins by describing contemporary college students—or at least the ones he has taught and observed at such schools as Yale, Cornell, Amherst and the University of Chicago, where he now teaches—and he finds these students wanting and symptomatic of what’s wrong with American society today.

They don't read the classics. They get their information from movies and drug out on rock music. They lack passion and commitment and the capacity to love. They are confused, and the universities they seek help from merely reflect their confusion. The problem, Professor Bloom asserts, is the relativity of truth in the academic mind today. “Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings–is the great insight of our times,” he writes. But this openness has had the paradoxical effect of closing the American mind.

[c] Breeze 

His criticism of students was pointed, but I was less offended than fascinated. I could not help but see all of the intersecting themes from Western intellectual history coursing through his arguments. He might be saying on the surface that students don't read enough, but he was invoking great thinkers with whom I was only beginning to be acquainted. 

It all sounded rather odd—an argument and a set of texts that would be hard to put together in one place. Plato, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Heidegger, Nietsczhe…and a complex argument about the failure of the American university system. Was the Committee on Social Thought a breeding ground for scholars putting together oddly disparate texts in pursuit of larger questions?  I was not sure, but—if so—I wanted to be a part of it even more. The critiques of the text had not yet begun to surface, and the New York Times’ about-face was still several weeks away. In any case, I had not yet read the book. I special ordered a copy at Caves Books in Taipei, and waited.

It took a month for the book to arrive, but the reviews began to cool, even as the Taipei weather warmed. I continued to study classical Chinese, read a great and complicated history of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), and walk with my “anthropological” notebooks up and down the alleys and byways of Taipei—leaving the city for southern and western locations (the pull of “the exotic” was ever upon me) whenever I could put a few days together. I started making lists of books that I might want to study for the big exam that now was fewer than three years away, and I longed—pined daily—for a setting in Chicago that still seemed a distant dream.

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6 

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Growing up History...and Culture

Flashback to early education. How "longing" for knowledge can begin early, even (and perhaps especially) on the North Dakota prairie.

Flowers Bloom (1)—Letter from Chicago

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Flowers Bloom."

[a] Mingled hope, confusion  RF

 During the summer, I will be posting segments of a memoir project I have begun that discusses teaching, learning, scholarship, reading...and the venerable, odd University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose bestseller The Closing of the American Mind rocked American education almost twenty-five years ago. I have already written a little bit about Bloom on this blog, and had promised to start posting more pieces starting in June. Read the introduction to the series if you want the full context, but the individual posts are meant to be read on their own (with hints throughout of the larger context).

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6 

Flowers Bloom—A Teaching Memoir

Letter from Chicago

I opened the letter from Chicago. It was a cool, rainy morning in March 1987, and I sat in my small, third floor apartment on the northern outskirts of Taipei, sipping hot tea as I tried to stay warm amidst cold, cement walls dripping with icy moisture. I had been waiting for this letter for years—for all of my life, or so it felt. This was not just about graduate school, or about where I might spend the coming years getting the credentials I would need to be a college professor. It was about a persistent longing that I could not extinguish—to be a part of a serious, ongoing conversation about life and what we are doing in it. I didn’t just want to train to be a professor. That was just a job. I didn’t want a job.

I had a vision, and wanted to be a part of a genuine intellectual conversation—really an overlapping, complex web of conversations through history and across cultures—that had been going on since Homer, or the Duke of Zhou, or Herodotus, or Sima Qian, or Plato, or Xunzi. I hungered for something beyond even the excellent teaching I had found all around me in the snowy southlands of Minnesota. I wanted something along the lines of education as a calling—something that thought of the 3Rs as worthwhile foundations, but nowhere near why we spend our lives teaching ourselves and others. Something drove me that cannot be accounted for in potential for employment or lifetime salary possibilities. That meant little. I wanted to “talk” to writers and thinkers from all over the world and across the centuries—in their own languages and idioms.

That is why I had traveled to Taiwan with a stack of great Western classics. It was why I studied classical Chinese philosophy and literature every day, even as I scoured the back alleys and marketplaces to understand a lively, growing, and changing culture. When I carefully packed my bags for my two-year trip to Taiwan, I made sure that I balanced peanut butter and narrow lined notebooks with Herodotus, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. I was going to do history and anthropology and philosophy and literature and everything else—heaven (天) help me. I hated academic boundaries with a passion that has eased a bit over time but of which I remain powerfully wary. I had a plan, and it was (after living and learning in Taiwan) to be in Chicago in a few years. I had heard great things about the place.

***  ***

Putting the envelope on my lap, I took a long sip of hot, tannic mountain green tea and thought back to the first time I had heard of the Committee on Social Thought, the University of Chicago’s body of idiosyncratic scholars studying a strange array of oddly connected subjects—shamanism, Greek historiography, Indian poetry, the French revolution, Chinese lyric poetry, German idealist philosophy, and so many other corners of the great Enlightenment chart of knowledge that I could scarcely describe it to myself, much less others who expected far “neater” categories in the world of education.

The Committee on Social Thought? The what on what? The name itself posed questions I still have not thoroughly disentangled, even today.

Just a few years earlier, as a junior at Carleton College, I had made my way to a third floor office in Laird Hall, where I had expected to have a conversation about South Asian history with a visiting professor from the University of Chicago. A.K. Ramanujan taught at Carleton College for winter term that year, and he told me of the pipeline of students every autumn going from Carleton to Chicago, from their undergraduate work to specialized studies leading toward the doctoral degree. “Not everyone is specialized, though—at least not in the usual sense.”  He accentuated the last phrase. He went on to describe a strange and intellectually vibrant body of scholars founded by a group of pioneering thinkers in the 1940s that included an economist, an anthropologist, and the president of the University. Some of the most interesting intellectuals (he used the word in a neutral sense that my egalitarian Midwestern ear could not then interpret) in the last half-century had taught there.

T.S. Eliot and Marc Chagall had been there in the early years. Right now (this was 1981) the faculty included the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, the Greek historian Arnoldo Momigliano, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the scholar who had produced the definitive translation (we still talked that way back then) of Plato’s Republic, Allan Bloom. By chance, I knew a little something of most of these people in my history, literature, and anthropology courses. Eliot? Check. Chagall? Check, check. Eliade and Momigliano? Good teaching had acquainted me. Bellow had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature a few years before. I was old enough to remember…vaguely.

Bloom? Definitive translation? Huh? I had heard of Plato and The Republic, although I had not read much of the first or any of the latter. Bloom? Who was that?

In the course of the next hour, Ramanujan went on to describe this “Committee on Social Thought,” and to tell me of a seminar he had recently taught on the beginnings of great works of literature, as well as the larger concept of “beginnings” in historical, philosophical, and literary discourse. He explained that it was a place where students and professors embraced the ideals of liberal education, where they lived it through a steady stream of reading groups, seminars, lectures, and tutorials. Just a month before, he had finished ten weeks carefully reading Titus and Andronicus with half a dozen students, and he was looking forward to another small group studying Plato’s Theatetus in the spring. He described the Committee on Social Thought as a kind of liberal education for the graduate student, a place where aspiring doctoral students studied great works from the Western tradition, even as they pursued the particular scholarly paths that would lead to a place in academia.

This was it—what I had hoped existed even though I never could have articulated it for myself before that time. From that moment, I wanted to be nowhere else, and I was consumed by my desire to pursue my graduate studies in Chicago, in that peculiar and exhilarating program. I had been studying history, anthropology, and Chinese studies for several years by then, and was oblivious to the polite questions from my professors about the feasibility of combining the study of Western classics with Chinese culture. One of my anthropology professors, who had gotten his doctorate at the University of Chicago, said “You certainly are quixotic, Rob…isn’t that the place where people never finish?” I heard a great deal of that over the next few months, but I didn’t care. I knew that some people finished. The number was not hefty over forty years, I learned, but some did finish, including that strange figure named “Bloom,” who wrote a dissertation on Isocrates in 1955. People finished and started working. I wanted to be a part of the mix.

And “mixing” disciplines and readings in ways that “traditional” academia frowned upon was precisely what I desired. In the course of a patchwork education—the holes of which I was beginning to feel painfully the more I studied—I had managed to avoid almost every serious book that had bonded readers together in earlier eras. I was aware that some people bemoaned this condition, and had just read a book review noting that “fifty years ago, the publication of the revised Cambridge Ancient History would have been greeted by a wide and enthusiastic readership.”  Now it was only specialists who cared. I had heard a bit of this kind of complaint because it was vaguely “in the water,” running like a small stream through my classes and my discussions with professors.

Until that day, I was mostly oblivious to it. I had “discovered” first the idea that I could learn anything at all at a reasonable level of accomplishment. No sooner had that sunk in than I found Africa, then China, in the course of my double major in history and anthropology. I had just enough acquaintance with what some called “the great books” to know that I knew absolutely nothing, and that most of my compatriots in Asian Studies and my other fields were not terribly interested in them. I knew just enough of my own ignorance to be enchanted, and to want to fill the prodigious gaps in my education. I had already begun this with great seriousness by initiating a program of memorization focusing on Western poetry. I started with T.S. Eliot and “The Wasteland” as my initial text. That done, and—for better or worse—coursing through my consciousness since that time, I went on to the Selected Poems, the Four Quartets, and, eventually to other writers and even other genres and languages. It was a clumsy but ever-so-serious attempt to begin repairing the dike of my ignorance. Just several years before, I had no idea that it was even a problem.

Leaving Professor Ramanujan’s office that day was freeing. I now had a plan to go with the memory work I had begun. Combining specialized study of Chinese culture with Western classics was precisely what I desired. I was a student from a Western country, and was beginning to see myself even then as part of a long and alternately problematic and illustrious Western tradition—from Herodotus studying the Persians onward—that took seriously the study of phenomena beyond cultural and political borders. I was going to get my doctoral degree from the Committee on Social Thought—a place I never even thought possible an hour earlier.

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6 

 
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Opening Mind and Letter
Hoping, planning, and crafting.