August 18, 2008

I knew I was healthy again when I was onstage Friday night, and everything was going like fire and air, and I was happy. I felt the disease long before it came to the surface. I was tired and heavy, and felt 1000 years old. Today I feel about 40, which if still off the mark, is so by not so far.

Meetings before the opening of school. The next decade will be dedicated to my quelling impatience at what seems not only beside the point but actually detrimental to the hard struggle of education. I don’t know whether I’m a true hearted classicist or only an old grump. Our latest curricular innovation, a thing called ILS, is devoutly hated by all students, and, though rich in flourishes and pitfalls and paperwork, seems to add nothing to the educational process but dilution and a sort of grand context-less euphoria which allows one to come out of college thinking that all details and theories and ideas are of exactly the same value and were thought of by somebody in Jamaica and then stolen by Europeans. Most of the concentrations are arbitrary, and the instances in which the program seems to have avoided pedagogical disaster involve those students who are so good anyway they’d learn if you gave them a shovel and a piece of charcoal. And yet, there were are, receiving adjustments to and working ourselves up into enthusiasms for a clanking, doomed machinery. Why? Most of us see the emperor is naked, but none of us wants to cry it out very loudly. This includes me. I don’t think I cry "wolf" unless there is a wolf, but that wears thin almost as quickly as crying wolf when there is no wolf at all.

Innovations in education which do not come from teachers are always wrong. Former teachers who have fallen in love with the image of themselves as administrators or, perhaps, educational theorists, do not count at all.

I am also unclear on the inescapable concept of "diversity." I know what it means when Admissions talks about it: trying to get more black, Asian, Hispanic kids on campus. This is hugely praiseworthy, but I don’t see why anybody thinks it can be forced, or have asked themselves why, after twenty years of trying, no actual progress has been made. Lunch counters and busses became integrated because black people wanted to use them, not because white people suddenly willed for them to come aboard. Our campus publications photoshop black faces onto athletic teams and into campus crowd scenes, to make it look like there is a fair representation of the races. I understand, but I think it is a waste of shame to be very blameful about it. The camel might as well weep itself to sleep because it can’t persuade the heron to come live with it in the desert. Of course you must try, but then you must take no for an answer.

In academic discussions "diversity" is more sinister. Colleague X uses it as an excuse to teach mean, temporary, unrepresentative literature, and then to teach good literature badly, grudging and judgmental because, whatever tests of time and criticism it has sustained, it is not by the right person. She drives men away from her classes and the department with her violently prejudicial behavior, but, so far as I know, it all goes unremarked and un-chastised. I suppose the boys are paying for the sins of their grandfathers. X expresses anger that some of our students could escape our clutches WITHOUT having studied Cambodian Menstrual Journals of the 17th Century, or whatever today’s flavor might be. I try to keep silent, assuming that all nonsense will pass, or, if it does not pass, it was not nonsense, and my retrograde opinions instead will wither into oblivion.

We all have resentment and envy at the greatness of the great. Only recent times have given us a way to transmogrify that into a virtue.

I’m going to try to make this first day of the semester the only one in which I stoop to satire.

I’m going to take the stairs instead of the elevator every day. See which makes me healthier.


August 17, 2008

Full moon night. Watched the Olympics at DJ’s, wondering what it would be like to be Michael Phelps.