» Benedict's Defense of Reason with Faith at the University
Peter Lawler at No Left Turns points out a lecture Pope Benedict gave the other day, titled "The Best of Greek Thought Is “An Integral Part of Christian Faith". Says Lawler on it:
At any rate, on another note, here is a snippet from Benedict's beginning regarding what a university used to be:
Here is a link to the speech at the Holy See's website. Evidently a more academic version, with footnotes, is forthcoming.
UPDATE: I see that Lawler's posting has prompted some very interesting comments and bed analogies....
Here is Pope Benedict XVI’s (Joseph Ratzinger’s) account of the integral place of Greek philosophy in Christian faith, including an account of the disastrous effects "the process of dehellenization" has had on that faith. His conclusion: "The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur--this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time....It is to this great ’logos,’ to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university."It looks good. If Lawler is correct, Benedict appears to be challenging people like N.T. Wright, whose project is, in part, peeling back the Hellenization of Judiasm so as to have a more Jewish understanding of Christ and Paul.
At any rate, on another note, here is a snippet from Benedict's beginning regarding what a university used to be:
There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a “dies academicus,” when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas: the reality that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason – this reality became a lived experience.
Here is a link to the speech at the Holy See's website. Evidently a more academic version, with footnotes, is forthcoming.
UPDATE: I see that Lawler's posting has prompted some very interesting comments and bed analogies....
» Waugh's Black Mischief
Mark Falcoff at AEI reviews ("Waugh's Postcolonial Studies") a hard-to-find Waugh novel, Black Mischief (1932). It is a fable set in the make-believe African island of Azania, concerned with the attempt of certain western idealists trying to modernize a backward country. As Falcoff says, it is a lot funnier seeing how closely recent history has followed Waugh's fable.An excerpt from its beginning:
We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford. . . .An excerpt from Falcoff's review:
Most Americans know of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)--if they know him at all--from the television series based on his Brideshead Revisited, a country house fantasy which held public television viewers in the United States in deep thrall for weeks on end two decades ago. Although Waugh intended Brideshead to be a deeply serious novel with a religious theme, its film version resembled nothing so much as an opulent advertisement for the British Tourist Authority. Indeed, if the Brideshead series were all one knew of Waugh, one would never suspect that he was one of the least provincial of English writers. In fact, much of his work deals with the point at which European civilization and colonial or semi-colonial societies met head on--usually to their mutual incomprehension.ht: Scott at Powerline)
» John D. Nesbitt's Dissertation on the Classic Western
I want to dedicate some space and spend some time on a dissertation on the American western novels that, through a friend, I discovered and have since procured a copy. The writer, John D. Nesbitt, who lives in the west, Torrington, Wyoming as a matter of fact and also writes his own westerns, wrote this at University of California, Davis in 1980. It is called "Literary Convention in the Classic Western Novel." Here is the table of contents:
I'll share more as I get to read more.
Chapter 1: A Critical Perspective of the Western
Chapter 2: Early Writers of the Classic WesternOwen WisterChapter 3: Popular Writers of the Classic Western Since Zane Grey
Andy Adams
Emerson Hough
Zane Grey
Eugene Manlove RhodesErnest HaycoxChapter 4: Good Westerns and Good Novels
Luke Short
Louis L'AmourThe Trek: The Trail to Ogallala and The Way WestChapter 5: Conclusion
The Range War: The Sea of Grass, Shane, and Riders of Judgment
The Town Problem: The Ox-Bow Incident and Welcome to Hard Times
I'll share more as I get to read more.
» Original Beginning of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle
John Miller at the Corner just discovered The New Yorker's publication of the original beginning of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. Here is the lead-in.
Read the rest here.
Although the complete text of Solzhenitsyn’s first full-length novel, “The First Circle,” has been published in Russia, the only version available in English so far is an abbreviated text that Solzhenitsyn “lightened” in the vain hope of getting it past Soviet censors. The “lightened” version opens in December, 1949, as Innokentii Volodin, a Soviet diplomat, tries to caution a doctor he knows against sharing an experimental drug with Westerners. In Solzhenitsyn’s original opening, which follows in its first English translation, Volodin has learned that a Soviet spy in New York is about to be given classified information on atomic-bomb technology. An insider, no longer able to deny that he operates within a totalitarian regime, Volodin faces a moral dilemma: should he warn the U.S. Ambassador?
Read the rest here.
» New Whit Stillman Site
Phil has finally put together an up-to-date website dedicated to Stillman and his works. Check it out here. I'll take this as an opportunity to quote some of his dialog. From Last Days of Disco:
More from LDOD:
Tom Platt: The environmental movement of our times was sparked by the rerelease of Bambi in the 1950s.
More from LDOD:
[Josh describes Lady and the Tramp]
Josh Neff: There is something depressing about it and it's not really about dogs. Except for some superficial bow-wow stuff at the start, the dogs all represent human types which is where it gets into real trouble. Lady, the ostensible protagonist, is a fluffy blond cocker spaniel with absolutely nothing on the brain. She's great looking but, let's be honest, incredibly insipid. Tramp, the love interest is a smarmy braggart of the most obnoxious kind, an oily jail bird out for a piece of tail or whatever he can get.
----
Josh Neff: No, he's a self confessed chicken thief; an all around sleaze ball. What's the function of a film of this kind? Essentially it's a primer about love and marriage directed at very young people, imprinting on their little psyches that smooth talking delinquents recently escaped from the local pound are a good match for nice girls in sheltered homes. When in ten years the icky human version of Tramp shows up around the house their hormones will be racing and no one will understand why. Films like this program women to adore jerks.
» Elmer Kelton: Greatest Western Writer of All Time
This from Bill Kaufman's article over at The American Enterprise Online, "Stubborn Cowboys":
Also note John D. Nesbitt has website now. I'll be commenting on his dissertation on the western here.
Elmer Kelton was voted "Great Western Writer of All Time" by the Western Writers of America, a daunting title to work under, though he bears it modestly. There is, after all, that modifying adjective: Western.
Kelton, who turned 80 in April, has his academic champions, but he acknowledges that "the Western field is a literary ghetto. Critics don't read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter. If you write out of love for your subject matter they'll dismiss you."
Elmer Kelton loves his subject matter. He was born to it, after all. And if the Western is a ghetto, it is a remarkably rich ghetto populated by the likes of Edward Abbey (The Brave Cowboy), Jack Schaefer (Shane), Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), and other novelists whose mortal sin, it seems, is setting their tales in open spaces rather than in the confines of the faculty lounge or city tenement. Elmer Kelton has an utter mastery of his subject; a distinctive, even arresting, point of view; and a narrative talent honed by writing for the Western pulps. His best work, The Time It Never Rained (1973), can be read as character study, regional literature, and philosophical novel: find me a navel-gazing New Yorker writer who has squeezed out a single book as rich, layered, and unsettling.
Also note John D. Nesbitt has website now. I'll be commenting on his dissertation on the western here.
» What will stick to them like burrs....
From Robert Frost's “The Figure a Poem Makes”:
Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A school boy maybe defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.
» Gary Shapiro's Tribute to Hilton Kramer
An article by Gary Shapiro in the NY Sun abut the honoring of Hilton Kramer, the founder of the New Criterion,
Norman Podhoretz honored Kramer this way:
(ht: John Miller at the Corner)
a magazine that recalls a time - according to the editor's note in its first issue - "when criticism was more strictly concerned to distinguish achievement from failure, to identify and uphold a standard of quality." It has sought to "speak plainly and vigorously about the problems that beset the life of the arts and the life of the mind in our society."
Norman Podhoretz honored Kramer this way:
"More than any other critic of our time - more energetically, more relentlessly, more brilliantly, more courageously - Hilton has stood out against the degradation of modernism in the arts and the symbiotic degradation of liberalism in politics and culture," Commentary magazine editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz said at the dinner.
(ht: John Miller at the Corner)
» In One Era and Out the Other....
From Terry Teachout's "In one era and out the other"
Overheard yesterday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival:
• Middle-aged woman in socks and sandals: “Have you seen The Diary of Anne Frank yet? I decided to go, even though I don’t like seeing depressing shows—George Bush already has me depressed enough.”
• Older woman: “It says here in the program that William Inge—he’s the man who wrote this play, honey—was ‘ashamed at being homosexual.’ What do you think of that?”
Older man: “Huh.”
Older woman: “Well, what I want to know is, if he was so ashamed, why didn’t he just stop?”
posted by terryteachout @ Friday, June 2, 2006
» Narration
Found this Discussion on voice and narration in poetry. It is part of a larger publication on poetics, prose, poetry, and drama. Very interesting and helpful. I'll have to sift through it.
» Robert Frost's "Directive"
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail. . . .
The rest.
Be sure to check out recent additions to the Robert Frost entry under American in the sidebar below.
» John Zuern -- What's Philosophically At Stake In Literature?
Came across John Zuern's CriticaLink through Denis Dutton's website. (Don't know who that is? You probably know the site he founded and edits, Arts and Letters Daily.) John Zuern put CriticaLink together to help people come to see and to understand their philosophical presuppositions in reading literature.
I haven't looked through his Reading Guides thoroughly yet, to see just how good they are, but he does treat some good and important texts--Aristotle's Poetics, Heidegger’s' The Question Concerning Technology, Plato's Phaedrus, among others. Zuern's guides seem helpful resources.
I'll have to look more closely. Having said that, I must say that if learning the "variety of responses" truly is desired, Zuern might want to reconsider some of his translations, some are questionably limited translations--Butcher’s Poetics is one. And, while I don't know anything about Nehamas/Woodruff's Phaedrus, I do know that James H. Nichols' translation has a high reputation--as does Seth Benardete/Michael Davis' and the new Joe Sachs' translation of the Poetics--with the authorities I trust.
What's at Stake?
One of the fundamental convictions guiding this project is that any position we take about literature is shaped by a theory of literature, although we may not be fully conscious of what that theory is. Even positions we might characterize as naive, reactionary, and anti-intellectual are theoretical insofar as they are based on conceptions about what literature is (and should be) and how literary art functions in the world. In order to make viable arguments about literature--to participate in the ongoing "defense of poetry" as writers and as literary and cultural critics--we must come to terms with the basic assumptions that shape our beliefs, our opinions, and our passions about literature. Something is always philosophically at stake whenever we think seriously about what literature means for us. I've tried to design CriticaLink as a resource for people who want to explore the philosophical stakes of their own relationship with literature.
I haven't looked through his Reading Guides thoroughly yet, to see just how good they are, but he does treat some good and important texts--Aristotle's Poetics, Heidegger’s' The Question Concerning Technology, Plato's Phaedrus, among others. Zuern's guides seem helpful resources.
By assembling a linked set of reading guides to important texts in philosophy and literary theory, glossaries, discussion questions, biographical sketches, timelines, and lists of resources, CriticaLink aims at assisting visitors in learning and thinking about a variety of responses to the question of what literature is and what it means to be "creative" in the domain of the literary. By involving students and faculty in the development of this online resource, the CriticaLink project also seeks to foster a lively intellectual community in which these questions can be explored.
I'll have to look more closely. Having said that, I must say that if learning the "variety of responses" truly is desired, Zuern might want to reconsider some of his translations, some are questionably limited translations--Butcher’s Poetics is one. And, while I don't know anything about Nehamas/Woodruff's Phaedrus, I do know that James H. Nichols' translation has a high reputation--as does Seth Benardete/Michael Davis' and the new Joe Sachs' translation of the Poetics--with the authorities I trust.
» Stillman Speaks!
After years of silence and elusiveness, Whit Stillman shows his hand.... He begins:
UPDATE: News of his next film here.
I have a happy novelist friend who operates on the principle "first thought, best thought". My own experience has been "first thought, unbelievably stupid thought". If a producer wants something cliched, forced and unfunny that's also weird and meandering ... yes, I can turn that in within the contractually mandated 12 weeks.
UPDATE: News of his next film here.
» Robert Duvall's New Western -- "Broken Trails"
Caught a brief interview of Duvall claiming this American Movie Classics original (broadcast this June) is the final in a trilogy of westerns for him, the first being Lonesome Dove (1989), the second, Open Range (2003). He mentioned that he thought the American western is our contribution to literature: Russia have Checkov, England have Shakespeare, America the western. I would love to hear him say more on the why, the what and the how.
But, you can read my thoughts here.
Maybe it's that Duvall is one of my favorite actors, but I think he is the greatest living actor of westerns.
UPDATE: Showtimes on AMC are June 25 & 26, 8:00 ET and 7:00 CT.
But, you can read my thoughts here.
Maybe it's that Duvall is one of my favorite actors, but I think he is the greatest living actor of westerns.
UPDATE: Showtimes on AMC are June 25 & 26, 8:00 ET and 7:00 CT.
» Richard Zinman Awarded & Muses on Teachings
Honors College Faculty Award Announced
Honor Connections, 2005 in Review, pp. 22-27.
M. Richard Zinman, University Distinguished Professor in James Madison College and the Department of Political Science, was selected as the 2005 recipient of the Honors College Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honors Students. Three current or former Honors College students (John Rood, David Brumbaugh and Sherman Garnett, who is currently professor and Dean of James Madison) nominated Professor Zinman for the Award.
This Award was established in cooperation with the Honors College Student Advisory Committee and the Alumni Association to recognize exceptional contributions to Honors College students through teaching, advising, or mentoring. The Award is presented once each year during the spring semester, and this is the seventh year the Award has been offered.
“We are very pleased to recognize a faculty member who has affected so many students so positively,” noted Ronald Fisher, Dean of the Honors College. The Award was presented at the University Undergraduate Scholarship Recognition Dinner in the spring of 2005. In addition to a certificate, the Award recipient receives an honorarium of $1,000, and all the recipients of this Award are identified on a permanent display located at the Honors College in Eustace-Cole Hall.
---------------
Richard Zinman is a University Distinguished Professor in James Madison College at Michigan State University and executive director of the LeFrak Forum/Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy, a research center in the Department of Political Science. At James Madison, he also serves as Chair of its program in Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy. Professor Zinman specializes in political philosophy and American political thought, with special interest in the intersection of philosophy and public policy.
For some 36 years, Professor Zinman has been an acclaimed adviser, dedicated and honored teacher, and encouraging mentor to Honors College students in James Madison. A variety of students easily recall his “powerful” classes, which have introduced classical political philosophy to generations of unsuspecting— and subsequently exceedingly appreciative—students. Professor Zinman has also provided superb guidance and support to countless Honors and Madison students seeking the most appropriate graduate or law schools or competing for major national and international scholarships. In doing so he has contributed greatly to the career successes of so many MSU students. One former student summed up these contributions in noting that Dick Zinman “…helped us understand that political philosophizing does not happen in a vacuum, that it can powerfully influence public affairs—and ourselves.”
-------------------------
IN THE SHADOW OF CONGRESSMAN JUSTIN MORRILL...
...TEACHING HONORS SPARTANS
By Professor M. Richard Zinman
I began teaching at James Madison College in 1969. I was twenty-six years old. I had grown up in New York City and been educated at minor outposts of eastern civilization, Cornell (in central New York) and the Claremont Colleges (in southern California). Before coming to East Lansing for an interview, I had spent one day in the Midwest (in Chicago, emphatically “the Second City”) and had never set foot in Michigan. My knowledge of Michigan was largely confined to an entry in Tocqueville’s journal, dated 1831 and titled “A Fortnight in the Wilds.” So I was a typical Woody Allen academic: a New York snob. When I accepted a job at MSU, I planned to stay for two years and then return to civilization. I am now sixty-two and beginning my thirty-eighth year as a Spartan. I have spent my entire academic life teaching undergraduates at Madison. Aside from my relationships with my closest friends and colleagues, the highlight of that life has been teaching serious students. Many of those students have been members of the Honors College. All have been a challenge. Almost all have been a delight.
Why did I come to MSU? Why did I stay? Three things attracted me to MSU: the opportunity to participate in the founding of James Madison College, the mission of the Honors College, and the land-grant tradition. At the time, I only vaguely sensed that these things were somehow related. Looking back, I see that the thread connecting them guided my teaching of honors students from the beginning. Let me try to explain.
In Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1860, John Stuart Mill made the following claims:
Mill did not despair in the face of this diagnosis. Rather, he argued that the natural tendency of modern democracy—indeed, modern civilization— toward mediocrity and vulgarity could be countered by an electoral system that included proportional representation for the most highly—i.e., liberally—educated. But this proposal did not go to the root: it did not attempt to transform the nature of modern democracy by transforming the majority of its citizens.
Two years later, in the midst of the Civil War, Representative Justin Morrill (Republican, Vermont) sponsored, the United States Congress passed, and President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the first Morrill Act. This act, which became the foundation of the American system of public, statesupported, land-grant universities, could be said to have had as one of its principal aims the practical refutation of Mills’s claims. Morrill’s proposal was bolder than Mill’s. His did attempt to go to the root.
Michigan State was founded in 1855 as “The Agricultural College of the State of Michigan.” It came under the first Morrill Act soon after its passage. As such, it has a claim to be the “pioneer land-grant College.” Cornell, my alma mater, also has such a claim. Founded in 1865, it was the first university established under the provisions of the act. Both MSU and Cornell—indeed, all the land-grant institutions— are defined, in large part, by the tensions embodied in the land-grant mission: the tensions between excellence and access, between liberal and practical education. I suspect that the challenge of living with those tensions helps to explain the distinctive spirit and vitality that are hallmarks of the land-grant universities. But that challenge has also been a burden; and it is perhaps the principal source of their characteristic anxieties and frustrations.
In my experience, MSU, much more than Cornell, is the living embodiment of those tensions. MSU began as a college devoted almost exclusively to agriculture and the mechanical arts; Cornell began as a university equally devoted to the liberal and practical arts. MSU has always been wholly public; Cornell was from the first partly public and partly private. From its beginning, MSU coexisted uneasily with the older and more exclusive (“elitist”) University of Michigan; for almost a century, Cornell had no serious in-state, publicsupported rival.
The Honors College was founded in 1956. If it wasn’t the first, it was one of the first such programs established in the United States. While there were many reasons for its founding, its defining charge was “to provide a distinctive educational experience for students of high ability.” Looked at in the light of the first Morrill Act, the founding of the HC marks an era in the history of MSU as a land-grant institution. The Morrill Act held out the promise of combining excellence and access as well as liberal and practical education. With the founding of the HC, MSU established a unit explicitly committed to the fulfillment of that promise. Perhaps just as important, it explicitly recognized that “students of high ability” have distinctive needs and special claims on the resources of the university and the energies of its faculty. To put this another way: MSU explicitly recognized that a first-rate land-grant university must be able to attract a critical mass of first-rate students and give them the attention they need in order to flourish. And it implicitly recognized that a first-rate land-grant university must be able to transcend, resolve, mitigate, embrace, or—at the least—learn to live with the tensions between excellence and access and between liberal and practical education.
James Madison College was founded in 1967. It was one of three residential liberal arts units—along with Justin Morrill and Lyman Briggs—established by MSU in a time of booming budgets and quasi-revolutionary ferment. In my judgment, the founding of Madison marks another epoch in the history of MSU as a land-grant institution. Among other things, Madison was an attempt to combine the strengths of a small, intimate, liberal arts college with those of a vast, complex, diverse research university. Many universities had become (or were fast becoming) gigantic, bureaucratized, professionalized, impersonal, alienating, dehumanizing “multiversities.” If this was a danger for American universities in general, it was a special danger for its public, state-supported universities, which had opened their doors to tens of thousands of students who were the first in their families to attend college. To speak plainly, the multiversity was, in part, the product of the successful democratization of American higher education— and thus, in part, the result of the attempt to live up to the goals enshrined in the Morrill Act. By establishing Madison, MSU acknowledged that the conditions for excellence in undergraduate education in general and liberal education in particular are not “luxuries” but necessities. Madison sought to establish those conditions while attempting to address the tensions built into the land-grant tradition. For example, although it had (and has) no special admission requirements, it quickly became a kind of de facto honors college. (In recent years, to take only one example, about 35% of MSU’s Phi Beta Kappa inductees have been Madison students.)
As a teacher (and adviser) of large numbers of honors students, I have lived with the tensions inherent in the intertwined missions of Michigan State, the Honors College, and James Madison. In attempting to transcend, overcome, resolve, or mitigate those tensions, I have tried to keep in mind key moments in my own education.
I began my freshman year at Cornell expecting—even longing—to be transformed by my college experience. By the end of my first year, I was both disappointed and disoriented. I was not intellectually mature enough to find my own way and none of my teachers (almost all of whom were renowned scholars) seemed even to be aware that there were lost souls like me in their classrooms. During the first semester of my sophomore year, I wandered into an introductory course in American Government (of all things) taught by Walter Berns. I immediately sensed that Professor Berns was different. I had never encountered anyone who was so thoughtful about serious matters. In particular, he was thoughtful about the question of the meaning of life. He began from and lingered over seemingly elementary questions: Why was what we were studying important to us as human beings and citizens? He asked us to read, write, and argue about old, strange, and difficult books. He was extraordinarily demanding. He somehow brought us to the realization that the most important questions for each of us were “Who am I?” and “What is a good human being?” Above all, in a class of more than two hundred, he seemed to speak to each of us as individuals. For me (and many others), the effect was electric: I felt as if I had been released from a kind of bondage, turned around, opened up, and set on an exhilarating path of self-discovery that would require the most rigorous self-questioning. Professor Berns’ class was a hoped for but unexpected gift. And, suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do with my education and my life: I wanted to do for undergraduates what Professor Berns had done for me. I soon discovered that Professor Berns was not alone. There were other Cornell professors who were exemplary scholars and masterly teachers: men like Allan Bloom, David Brion Davis, Donald Kagan, and Walter LaFeber.
It would be many years before I was able to persuade myself that I had the ability to teach well enough to justify living the life of a teacher. As I was about to leave graduate school at Claremont for MSU, I sought out Leo Strauss, one of my mentors, for advice about teaching as a vocation. Professor Strauss was one of the most influential thinkers and teachers of the last century. When I knew him, he was quite old and very frail. Yet he still approached every class as if his students’ lives depended upon it. Professor Strauss’s advice was simple (and, I subsequently learned, the same he had given to generations of graduate students): “Always assume there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.” He meant by that at least two things. First, “Aim high.” Second, “Do not have too high an opinion of your importance, and have the highest opinion of your responsibility.”
His advice reinforced my humility. But it also conformed to the practice of my best teachers. All of them had invited their students to attempt to discover and overcome themselves.
In my time teaching honors Spartans, I have tried to live up to the demanding goals of the first Morrill Act and the humbling examples of my best teachers. In my experience, we teachers often ask too little of our students. James Madison and the Honors College have given me the freedom to ask much of my students (and myself). When I make good use of that freedom, I find that my honors students are ready, able, and eager to the rise to the challenge. Helping set them on the path of self-discovery and self-overcoming has been the peak of my academic life. Watching many succeed has sustained my modest hope that Justin Morrill caught a bit more of the truth than did John Stuart Mill.
Honor Connections, 2005 in Review, pp. 22-27.
M. Richard Zinman, University Distinguished Professor in James Madison College and the Department of Political Science, was selected as the 2005 recipient of the Honors College Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honors Students. Three current or former Honors College students (John Rood, David Brumbaugh and Sherman Garnett, who is currently professor and Dean of James Madison) nominated Professor Zinman for the Award.
This Award was established in cooperation with the Honors College Student Advisory Committee and the Alumni Association to recognize exceptional contributions to Honors College students through teaching, advising, or mentoring. The Award is presented once each year during the spring semester, and this is the seventh year the Award has been offered.
“We are very pleased to recognize a faculty member who has affected so many students so positively,” noted Ronald Fisher, Dean of the Honors College. The Award was presented at the University Undergraduate Scholarship Recognition Dinner in the spring of 2005. In addition to a certificate, the Award recipient receives an honorarium of $1,000, and all the recipients of this Award are identified on a permanent display located at the Honors College in Eustace-Cole Hall.
---------------
Richard Zinman is a University Distinguished Professor in James Madison College at Michigan State University and executive director of the LeFrak Forum/Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy, a research center in the Department of Political Science. At James Madison, he also serves as Chair of its program in Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy. Professor Zinman specializes in political philosophy and American political thought, with special interest in the intersection of philosophy and public policy.
For some 36 years, Professor Zinman has been an acclaimed adviser, dedicated and honored teacher, and encouraging mentor to Honors College students in James Madison. A variety of students easily recall his “powerful” classes, which have introduced classical political philosophy to generations of unsuspecting— and subsequently exceedingly appreciative—students. Professor Zinman has also provided superb guidance and support to countless Honors and Madison students seeking the most appropriate graduate or law schools or competing for major national and international scholarships. In doing so he has contributed greatly to the career successes of so many MSU students. One former student summed up these contributions in noting that Dick Zinman “…helped us understand that political philosophizing does not happen in a vacuum, that it can powerfully influence public affairs—and ourselves.”
-------------------------
IN THE SHADOW OF CONGRESSMAN JUSTIN MORRILL...
...TEACHING HONORS SPARTANS
By Professor M. Richard Zinman
I began teaching at James Madison College in 1969. I was twenty-six years old. I had grown up in New York City and been educated at minor outposts of eastern civilization, Cornell (in central New York) and the Claremont Colleges (in southern California). Before coming to East Lansing for an interview, I had spent one day in the Midwest (in Chicago, emphatically “the Second City”) and had never set foot in Michigan. My knowledge of Michigan was largely confined to an entry in Tocqueville’s journal, dated 1831 and titled “A Fortnight in the Wilds.” So I was a typical Woody Allen academic: a New York snob. When I accepted a job at MSU, I planned to stay for two years and then return to civilization. I am now sixty-two and beginning my thirty-eighth year as a Spartan. I have spent my entire academic life teaching undergraduates at Madison. Aside from my relationships with my closest friends and colleagues, the highlight of that life has been teaching serious students. Many of those students have been members of the Honors College. All have been a challenge. Almost all have been a delight.
Why did I come to MSU? Why did I stay? Three things attracted me to MSU: the opportunity to participate in the founding of James Madison College, the mission of the Honors College, and the land-grant tradition. At the time, I only vaguely sensed that these things were somehow related. Looking back, I see that the thread connecting them guided my teaching of honors students from the beginning. Let me try to explain.
In Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1860, John Stuart Mill made the following claims:
The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilization, is toward collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.... It is an admitted fact that...the American democracy...is constructed on this faulty model.While striking (and even demeaning) to us, Mill’s claims were commonplace to his sophisticated readers. First, Mill could appeal to a well-established tradition stretching back to antiquity that maintained that democracy was, by nature, the rule of the ignorant and vulgar. Democracy, after all, is the rule of the majority. But (it was thought) in every society the poor are the majority. Since the poor lack the wealth and leisure needed to acquire a liberal education and since such an education is necessary in order to acquire the wisdom and cultivation needed to rule well, democracy is the rule of the unwise and uncultivated. Second, Mill could appeal to a new set of arguments according to which the problem of democracy had been exacerbated in modern times. In modernity, democracy and the commercial way of life go hand in hand. In our time, the tendency of democracy to homogenize society in the direction of the lowest common denominator is married to the commercialization of opinions, passions, and interests. As a result, the souls of citizens of modern democracy tend to be dominated by the desire for material comforts and their minds narrowed to a strictly utilitarian understanding of the sciences and the arts. Modern democracy tends to be even more uncultivated and more vulgar than its pre-modern predecessors.
Mill did not despair in the face of this diagnosis. Rather, he argued that the natural tendency of modern democracy—indeed, modern civilization— toward mediocrity and vulgarity could be countered by an electoral system that included proportional representation for the most highly—i.e., liberally—educated. But this proposal did not go to the root: it did not attempt to transform the nature of modern democracy by transforming the majority of its citizens.
Two years later, in the midst of the Civil War, Representative Justin Morrill (Republican, Vermont) sponsored, the United States Congress passed, and President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the first Morrill Act. This act, which became the foundation of the American system of public, statesupported, land-grant universities, could be said to have had as one of its principal aims the practical refutation of Mills’s claims. Morrill’s proposal was bolder than Mill’s. His did attempt to go to the root.
The Morrill Act of 1862 aimed to establish in each state “at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanical arts...in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes on the several pursuits and professions in life” [my emphasis].These aims were noble but daunting. On the one hand, the “industrial classes”—that is, working men and women—were for the first time to be given access to higher education. On the other hand, those classes were to receive both a liberal and a practical education. These twin ends were unprecedented. Hitherto, higher education had been the preserve of the leisured few: the rich, even the very rich. Moreover, the core of such an education had been liberal education—an education especially in classical studies and the natural sciences, an education that was meant to be theoretical, beautiful, and useless rather than practical, banausic, and utilitarian. In other words, the Morrill Act aimed to combine things that for ages had been thought to be incompatible: aristocracy and democracy; beauty and utility.
Michigan State was founded in 1855 as “The Agricultural College of the State of Michigan.” It came under the first Morrill Act soon after its passage. As such, it has a claim to be the “pioneer land-grant College.” Cornell, my alma mater, also has such a claim. Founded in 1865, it was the first university established under the provisions of the act. Both MSU and Cornell—indeed, all the land-grant institutions— are defined, in large part, by the tensions embodied in the land-grant mission: the tensions between excellence and access, between liberal and practical education. I suspect that the challenge of living with those tensions helps to explain the distinctive spirit and vitality that are hallmarks of the land-grant universities. But that challenge has also been a burden; and it is perhaps the principal source of their characteristic anxieties and frustrations.
In my experience, MSU, much more than Cornell, is the living embodiment of those tensions. MSU began as a college devoted almost exclusively to agriculture and the mechanical arts; Cornell began as a university equally devoted to the liberal and practical arts. MSU has always been wholly public; Cornell was from the first partly public and partly private. From its beginning, MSU coexisted uneasily with the older and more exclusive (“elitist”) University of Michigan; for almost a century, Cornell had no serious in-state, publicsupported rival.
The Honors College was founded in 1956. If it wasn’t the first, it was one of the first such programs established in the United States. While there were many reasons for its founding, its defining charge was “to provide a distinctive educational experience for students of high ability.” Looked at in the light of the first Morrill Act, the founding of the HC marks an era in the history of MSU as a land-grant institution. The Morrill Act held out the promise of combining excellence and access as well as liberal and practical education. With the founding of the HC, MSU established a unit explicitly committed to the fulfillment of that promise. Perhaps just as important, it explicitly recognized that “students of high ability” have distinctive needs and special claims on the resources of the university and the energies of its faculty. To put this another way: MSU explicitly recognized that a first-rate land-grant university must be able to attract a critical mass of first-rate students and give them the attention they need in order to flourish. And it implicitly recognized that a first-rate land-grant university must be able to transcend, resolve, mitigate, embrace, or—at the least—learn to live with the tensions between excellence and access and between liberal and practical education.
James Madison College was founded in 1967. It was one of three residential liberal arts units—along with Justin Morrill and Lyman Briggs—established by MSU in a time of booming budgets and quasi-revolutionary ferment. In my judgment, the founding of Madison marks another epoch in the history of MSU as a land-grant institution. Among other things, Madison was an attempt to combine the strengths of a small, intimate, liberal arts college with those of a vast, complex, diverse research university. Many universities had become (or were fast becoming) gigantic, bureaucratized, professionalized, impersonal, alienating, dehumanizing “multiversities.” If this was a danger for American universities in general, it was a special danger for its public, state-supported universities, which had opened their doors to tens of thousands of students who were the first in their families to attend college. To speak plainly, the multiversity was, in part, the product of the successful democratization of American higher education— and thus, in part, the result of the attempt to live up to the goals enshrined in the Morrill Act. By establishing Madison, MSU acknowledged that the conditions for excellence in undergraduate education in general and liberal education in particular are not “luxuries” but necessities. Madison sought to establish those conditions while attempting to address the tensions built into the land-grant tradition. For example, although it had (and has) no special admission requirements, it quickly became a kind of de facto honors college. (In recent years, to take only one example, about 35% of MSU’s Phi Beta Kappa inductees have been Madison students.)
As a teacher (and adviser) of large numbers of honors students, I have lived with the tensions inherent in the intertwined missions of Michigan State, the Honors College, and James Madison. In attempting to transcend, overcome, resolve, or mitigate those tensions, I have tried to keep in mind key moments in my own education.
I began my freshman year at Cornell expecting—even longing—to be transformed by my college experience. By the end of my first year, I was both disappointed and disoriented. I was not intellectually mature enough to find my own way and none of my teachers (almost all of whom were renowned scholars) seemed even to be aware that there were lost souls like me in their classrooms. During the first semester of my sophomore year, I wandered into an introductory course in American Government (of all things) taught by Walter Berns. I immediately sensed that Professor Berns was different. I had never encountered anyone who was so thoughtful about serious matters. In particular, he was thoughtful about the question of the meaning of life. He began from and lingered over seemingly elementary questions: Why was what we were studying important to us as human beings and citizens? He asked us to read, write, and argue about old, strange, and difficult books. He was extraordinarily demanding. He somehow brought us to the realization that the most important questions for each of us were “Who am I?” and “What is a good human being?” Above all, in a class of more than two hundred, he seemed to speak to each of us as individuals. For me (and many others), the effect was electric: I felt as if I had been released from a kind of bondage, turned around, opened up, and set on an exhilarating path of self-discovery that would require the most rigorous self-questioning. Professor Berns’ class was a hoped for but unexpected gift. And, suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do with my education and my life: I wanted to do for undergraduates what Professor Berns had done for me. I soon discovered that Professor Berns was not alone. There were other Cornell professors who were exemplary scholars and masterly teachers: men like Allan Bloom, David Brion Davis, Donald Kagan, and Walter LaFeber.
It would be many years before I was able to persuade myself that I had the ability to teach well enough to justify living the life of a teacher. As I was about to leave graduate school at Claremont for MSU, I sought out Leo Strauss, one of my mentors, for advice about teaching as a vocation. Professor Strauss was one of the most influential thinkers and teachers of the last century. When I knew him, he was quite old and very frail. Yet he still approached every class as if his students’ lives depended upon it. Professor Strauss’s advice was simple (and, I subsequently learned, the same he had given to generations of graduate students): “Always assume there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.” He meant by that at least two things. First, “Aim high.” Second, “Do not have too high an opinion of your importance, and have the highest opinion of your responsibility.”
His advice reinforced my humility. But it also conformed to the practice of my best teachers. All of them had invited their students to attempt to discover and overcome themselves.
In my time teaching honors Spartans, I have tried to live up to the demanding goals of the first Morrill Act and the humbling examples of my best teachers. In my experience, we teachers often ask too little of our students. James Madison and the Honors College have given me the freedom to ask much of my students (and myself). When I make good use of that freedom, I find that my honors students are ready, able, and eager to the rise to the challenge. Helping set them on the path of self-discovery and self-overcoming has been the peak of my academic life. Watching many succeed has sustained my modest hope that Justin Morrill caught a bit more of the truth than did John Stuart Mill.
» Geoffrey Chaucer Got Blog
Chaucer lovers everywhere, he now has a blog for observations and advice. He has been busy:
Lordynges, by Goddes grace ich yow biseche that ye forgyven me myn tardinesse yn updatinge myn blogge. In this droughty march, the customes house is unusualie bisy.
Ther ys one of the demaundes for myn advyce column that I am looth to lette passen unanswerede, yet also looth to answeren, so hevy are the paynes it driveth thurgh myn herte.
» Adam Kirsch: A Rebirth of the Renaissance
My interest in the study of the humanities was first awakened with a study of Petrarch and Dante on a summer exchange at Oxford years ago. So I was intrigued when I saw this title, "Rereading the Renaissance Texts" by Adam Kirsch in the Harvard Magazine (courtesy Arts and Letters Daily). Turns out that Harvard Press is adding--indeed has been adding since 2001--to this new library of texts of the "Neo-Latinists", better known as the Italian writers (Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, etc.) of the Renaissance whose vernacular works we humanities students continue to value and love.
This new series of pale-blue volumes (as the Loeb Classical Library Greek are green, and the Roman, red) is timely; it reappraises us of the origins of our liberal education. Because, if you haven't noticed, things have been changing. As the writer, aptly begins:
And in relating this story about Petrarch, Kirsch does us a service, by reminding us of the significance of books, that is, the reading of books in the liberal education. This too we, in an age dominated by the flickering screen, an age superior to its forebears, more heedful to a quick return than to wisdom, could profit from.
This new series of pale-blue volumes (as the Loeb Classical Library Greek are green, and the Roman, red) is timely; it reappraises us of the origins of our liberal education. Because, if you haven't noticed, things have been changing. As the writer, aptly begins:
The only thing most teachers and students of the humanities agree on, it often seems, is that these are troubled times for their field. For a whole variety of reasons—social, intellectual, and technological—the humanities have been losing their confident position at the core of the university’s mission. This represents an important turning-point, not just for education, but for our culture as a whole. Ever since the Renaissance, the humanities have defined what it means to be an educated person. The very word comes from the Latin name of the first modern, secular curriculum, the studia humanitatis, invented in fourteenth-century Italy as a rival to traditional university subjects like theology, medicine, and law.Kirsch's article is good and worthy if only for pointing out these significant books and writers long forgotten--for example, Leon Battista Alberti, a "Renaissance man", developer of the mathematical understanding of perspective; Kirsch reports Jacob Burckhardt's opinion:
According to Princeton historian Anthony Grafton, one of today’s leading scholars of the Renaissance, “the studia humanitatis, the humanities....encompassed quite a specific range of subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, the arts that gave a command of Latin, the language of learning, and oratory, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.” For centuries after, these disciplines were considered indispensable for any well-educated person. Still more important, they helped to define an ethical ideal: they were “forms of thought and writing,” Grafton explains, “that improved the character of the student.” To study the humanities was to grow more independent and intrepid, both intellectually and morally; it was the royal road to becoming a complete human being. In the words of the critic George Steiner, A.M. ’50, modern education has been defined by the principle “that the humanities humanize.”
Even today, most members of institutions like Harvard would instinctively endorse, in some form, the proposition advanced six centuries ago by the Italian Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio: “We call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free [liber] man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” But today, every part of Vergerio’s confident creed is coming under increased attack. For one thing, “liberal studies” can appear less useful, to the student and to society as a whole, than concrete scientific and technical knowledge. Better to emerge from college as a budding biologist or financier, our practical-minded culture incessantly tells us, than as a mere reader of books. Meanwhile, the humanities themselves have become infinitely more self-critical in recent decades, so that “virtue” and “wisdom,” unproblematic terms for Vergerio, are now contested battlegrounds. Reading canonical texts, many people now believe, is not the road to freedom, but a subtle kind of indoctrination.
"In all by which praise is won,” he wrote, “Leon Battista was from his childhood the first.But Kirsch has also a couple of fine things to relate about Petrarch and his love of books. In a day when books were quite limited, copies made tediously and at great expense (Gutenberg was still a 100 years off), Petrarch, having mastered all the available Latin writers, tried and failed to learn Greek in order to read something new.
"I am possessed by one insatiable passion, which I cannot restrain—nor would I if I could...I cannot get enough books,” he wrote to a relative in 1346.
And in relating this story about Petrarch, Kirsch does us a service, by reminding us of the significance of books, that is, the reading of books in the liberal education. This too we, in an age dominated by the flickering screen, an age superior to its forebears, more heedful to a quick return than to wisdom, could profit from.
Petrarch’s paean to his books still defines the humanities’ most elevated ideal of reading as a communion of souls: “Gold, silver, gems, fine raiment, a marble palace, well-cultivated fields, paintings, a splendidly caparisoned horse—such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and lively companions to us.”A particularly fine thing to say, I think you will agree, "reading as a communion of souls."
