F. D. Reeve

The spectacular intellectual as polyglot and bricoleur, Professor F. D. Reeve, passed away this summer. He was one of my favorite professors and personalities at Wesleyan University, and in the spring of 1991, I was fortunate enough to be enrolled in his 1909 class. Against the common catalog of course titles such as "classical philosophy," "modern poetry," and "Soviet literature," this was probably the most creative idea for a class I'd ever encountered.

The conceit of the seminar was that everything assigned, and there was too much good stuff to list here, was either written in 1909 or concerned that year or its neighbors, the turn of the century, etc. A main theme of the class was that despite American and French revolutions that had occurred over 100 years previously, the turn of the century was when class boundaries truly began to dissolve and the "Western world" moved into a distinctly more egalitarian period. Of course, Professor Reeve had a sense of humor about such sweeping period divisions, and his humor was partly why the once-a-week seminar was fun to attend.

So it's with some irony then, that for financial reasons, concerning money, if not class exactly, I had to graduate in seven semesters and shove almost seven course credits (equivalent to twenty-one credits at most schools) into that final season of Wes. For this reason, I certainly couldn't read every three- to five-hundred pager included on his book-a-week syllabus, but Professor Reeve did say all kind of unusual things when we'd meet, and a couple readings I enjoyed were Carl Schorske's Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture and Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years.

F. D. Reeve was indeed Superman's father, or I should say that the actor Christopher Reeve was his son. Reeve Sr. was a larger than life figure and the kind of prolific talent who wrote novels, poetry, criticism, and then did translation in his spare time. Yes, quantity and range of publication should not be seen as everything, but with all overworked adjunct issues aside, Dr. Reeve was the sort of fellow who could make the rest of us walking into classrooms and calling ourselves "professors" feel somewhat like we're merely pretending, and our ranks are no doubt full of folks too scared or dishonest to admit as much. (This is one reason I always tell students to call me "Alex" unless that makes them uncomfortable.)

Around the time I was in Reeve's class, most likely summer of 1990 or 1991, he appeared at the Borders Book Shop in Philadelphia, the old one at 1727 Walnut Street off Rittenhouse Square and gave on-the-spot translation of a famous Russian poet. That Borders would be where I first worked after college, and those bookselling years were when I did my most substantial drafting of Cartoon Bubbles from a City Underwater, at the time titled The Appendix on Spark Park Poops (indeed!). Although I was reading a lot of fiction by John Barth, T.C. Boyle, and Don Delillo, I'd also dabble in philosophy, "critical theory," history, and the rest of it, so I enjoyed the fact that the old Borders had a copy of Reeve's The White Monk: an essay on Dostoevsky and Melville on the shelf. The policy soon changed, but when I worked there in the early nineties, Borders would procure a single copy of thousands of academic books, not merely the Michel Foucaults as Vintage paperbacks or Simon Schamas with glossy pages and photos, and the store was its own incredible contemporary library.

Before I drift too far from Reeve, I wanted to mention that Professor Licht from The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity is not Professor Reeve (and the Ward campus is not Wesleyan), but if I'm not mistaken, Superman's dad did bring a bottle of white wine and Dixie cups to our last seminar meeting, and so he is in a way an inspiration for my fictional character although he didn't say or do anything that Herr Licht does or says in my story.

I took reading courses almost exclusively as an undergrad, mainly history, political philosophy, and literature, and I handed in fiction three times for assignments, and he is one of two professors to be quite encouraging with his comments (the third fellow regretted that I wasn't funny). Anyone who has had me as a teacher, read me as a blogger, or spoken to me on the phone might appreciate that although Reeve's comments were generally positive, he suggested I hold off on the "ramblin'" and also that I read The Sinking of The Odradek Stadium by Harry Matthews. For whatever reason, I never read the book, but in honor of Reeve's passing, I'll try to do so this school year.

I hope I return to this and clean it up, maybe make the words conform more to the mood or moment of obituary, but for now, here is more information about Professor Reeve's life and work, and here is a Wesleyan Connection notice and writing from Wesleyan's current king of the MOOC, I mean president. (Roth's course on "The Modern and the Postmodern" seemed to be a free, fantastic online course I toyed with enrolling in even as I wondered about its negative economic impact on the rest of us knowledge cogs.) I learned of Reeve's passing somewhere on the homepage of The New York Times, but at the time of this writing I was unable to find that obituary.

Thank you, F. D. Reeve.

Brian Glenn in Wes Government

I like this clip of Wesleyan classmate Brian Glenn, at the 39-minute mark in the video, exhorting current students to fight for need-blind admission. I didn't know Brian well at Wesleyan, but I enjoy his table-banging energy on this issue.

Ecrasez l'infame!

other campuses' children

If you read Inside Higher Ed or other sources that cover "higher education," you learn that there are scandals low and high surrounding America's colleges and universities--high-level appointments without the degrees their resumes state, scandalously low adjunct pay, college degrees that lead to nothing but unpaid student loans, and much more. So Penn State's Jerry Sandusky problem is certainly news in terms of the extent of the egregiousness, but it is not the first university to invoke a "conspiracy of silence" as part of its long-term strategic plan.

(The newly indited Graham Spanier, like Sandusky now in a Pennsylvania prison with death-row inmates, continues to deny everything and vigorously defend himself as an expert sociologist who was an abused child himself and thus would never allow such crimes to occur under his watch. It very much should be understood that he, like everyone else, is innocent until proven guilty, and yet the facts that can be verified along with the economic inequalities of the whole situation--from the most disadvantaged boys being the victims to the highest paid administrators and coaches as the accused-- reminds us of the inequalities and cruelties of the entire country, and how higher education, from at least one angle, can be seen to support and even exacerbate this economic status quo.)

Somewhat like Penn State, but perhaps so much more typical in that rapes of enrolled adults are known to occur on college campuses, is the news from Amherst College that while a traumatized young woman left school demoralized and without a degree, her rapist went on to graduate with honors.

And then, closer to home for me, at Wesleyan University, like Amherst, part of the "little three," rape wasn't in the news, but President Roth announced that the school was no longer offering need-blind admission. On the one hand, when I read this I had to chuckle because no matter what anyone has ever said, it was always beneficial if your parents could pay for college when it was time for the elite "need blind" schools to pluck kids off the waiting lists, and just by random chance, year after year, almost all of these schools have been enrolling about half a student body that can pay the entire nut outright. It's not until you graduate and see your peers driving off in brand-new SUVs that you see the full impact of economic inequality on American higher education as it's currently practiced.

But still, I should be grateful, and I am, because I certainly would not have attended Wesleyan if they had not generously recomputed my financial aid package after my father lost a "good job" after we had sent in the initial forms. And I had worked a lot in high school, and saved, and so I had a chance to pay for a huge chunk of my fourth choice's costs and go on to poison my brain with Marx, Melville, Nieztsche, and more. (I'm sure there'd be no Fight for Your Long Day or teaching life were it not for Wesleyan University and what I read and saw there.)

$80,000 for four years of a private liberal arts college seemed like an amazing sum back then, and I can only imagine what students and their parents are thinking about the $120,000 that they can pay for total costs for even in-state tuition, room, and board at our "flagship" public universities these days. An adult student I spoke with at Clemson told me his in-state, full-time tuition is $6,000 a semester, which would be under $50,000 for four years and a relatively fair, if not invariably affordable, amount to pay for what's supposed to be a Top-25 state school.

A lot of people seem so happy to have Sandusky in jail, but the scary thing is that those alleged criminals at Penn State likely kept silent not because of loyalty to Sandusky but because they felt the university would lose revenue, and they understood that it's revenue that can pay salaries for quality faculty, technology, group health insurance, and more while it also gives some nonwealthy Americans a better chance to earn an affordable college degree.

But tossing the pedophile in the pokey and throwing away the key doesn't resolve higher education's inaccessibity issues, and we're left in a world where Wesleyan could be setting a trend toward a "new normal," which of course is a return to the old model, of elite colleges not acting as democratic institutions but as exclusive clubs for the young and rich. As a country, we seem to be continuing an antidemocratic trend away from equal access and affordability.

To me, this is not America, at least not the country we were taught to believe in. Which quite possibly means this is America.

 

 

Steve Almond for POTUS

While one Wesleyan writer carts her son off to college, another brings the heavy metal back to the Oval Office. As usual, Steve Almond is passionate and funny, if in a somber way, but as for the former, I found her NYTimes Op-Ed to be interesting writing but also couldn't help contrast how her life experiences with her partner have differed so greatly from the women filmed in this CNN video on food insecurity and hunger. It seems as if Americans are still voting for lifestyle issues and between competing "moralities" and yet the issues of economic injustice remain, at least to me, so much more significant. Of course, the two sets of issues should not be forced to compete with each other.

And in other news, hundreds of thousands of jobs were reportedly added to the economy and the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared higher today, so to an extent, I'm drawn to doubt all this downer talk of downturns and economic despair. My students though, at least the ones who expressed a view, are under the impression it is extremely difficult to get a career-type position, and almost all the jobs we see advertised are the ones college students don't want.

So we did the whole "except for nursing and engineering" thing and then moved on to the stories.

idealism

If you're looking for some long, lost idealism to add to your working week, here's a healthy dollop served up by Queensborough Community College Professor Charles Neuman. Because he teaches physics and astronomy it is indeed tempting to suggest that this young man has his head stuck in the clouds.

But it's good to know he can at least temper his positive vibrations with a little departmental conflict, or at least tension:

"I am starting to see that idealism is a threat. My colleagues’ simple expressions of idealism invoke disproportionate responses of vitriol. There’s something primal about this hatred. I posit that idealism represents youth, and those who feel they have lost it, or never had it, are so pained they can only respond with fury. It’s sad, really."

To continue Charles's thought, I've noticed that sometimes my collegues' simple expressions of vitriol invoke disproportionate responses of idealism. It's probably just all the headache and disagreement associated with any kind of faculty, and yet another reason to avoid extensive communication with teachers--they always have a minor quibble, ancillary thought, competing notion, neurotic twist, or other intriguing consideration that can make discourse among them positively exhausting. I've heard that lecturers can be the worst.

Educators of the World Disagree!

But may you stay forever young, Charles, Clark Hall, and teaching, that most noble and paradoxical of all the professions.

Charles and I shared an old building during our "frosh" year of college, and reading his words and being reminded of Clark Hall have successfully "youthened" my own working day.

And now, alas, it's back to grading.

alexander writing on annie

I enjoyed skimming Alexander Chee's personal essay on writing classes at Wesleyan University. I did not take creative writing classes at Wesleyan as an undergrad, but I did know the names of the somewhat famous writers he speaks of--Annie Dillard, Kit Reed, Phyllis Rose, et al. Follow this link for the essay in full: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personal_essays/annie_dillard_and_the_writing_life.php

The closest I ever got to Annie Dillard, discounting selling her books after college while working in a Borders Bookshop, was seven years after graduation, where on a whim, I drove up to Middletown, CT for the Nietzsch Factor Alumni Ultimate Frisbee game. As it turned out, Annie Dillard had become a fan of Ultimate and in fact was the lone fan in attendance at the game. We gave the current undergrad team our best player and then played to fifteen. It was early spring, I had a common cold and was out of shape, but somehow I managed to leap into the air to snag the game-winning goal. If I'm not mistaken, the extra strength sudafed had gotten to my head, and I yelped at the extended defender whose dive had just missed blocking this catch, "Just another a scrub." I think that guy became a star, maybe even a captain, of New York club ultimate, and I more or less retired any dreams I had of playing serious disc. Because Annie was the only fan, and the only woman's voice, I know that her final words on this alumni game were, "At least it was exciting until the end," or something to that effect. I hope Professor Dillard has a chance to one day witness Nietzsch's return to glory and a trip to College Nationals.

As for the writing, it looks like Alexander Chee, Annie's writing student, has done very well. He is a visiting writer in Emily Dickinson land, at none other than Amherst College, and his novels are published or forthcoming.