We are leaving today for Madrid and Toledo, Spain. That’s pure vacation. Next Thursday, I will be in Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin, for a mix of business and fun. I am looking forward to a rest from the Internet and its constant flow of news and information, so I won’t be writing or reading blogs for a week.
Monthly Archives: February 2010
be true to your school
I spent this morning at a training/discussion for administrators at Tufts. One topic was the need to strengthen collaborations within our university, especially ones that combine several departments or schools. Collaboration has evident value, whether for research, social impact, or teaching. But often the best collaborators are not colleagues within your own institution. Tufts happens to be a relatively small research university in a metropolitan area with a remarkable array of other universities. Even on a direct journey from our own medical school to our own school of arts and sciences, one must pass by or under Harvard, MIT, Lesley, Emerson, and Suffolk universities. This means that collaborating with colleagues at other institutions is especially tempting for Tufts faculty. But the same opportunities are really available to scholars anywhere. Even if you teach at a relatively large and remote university (like Penn State), you can easily collaborate with colleagues around the world.
Collaboration across a single university is good for the institution. Collaboration among several universities is sometimes better for the actual research or service, because it allows the strongest and most coherent group to form.
I think we should care about our own universities. They pay us, after all. And Tufts is a good community, worthy of loyalty. The world is better off when Tufts is stronger as an institution.
That does not mean that collaborating within a university is better than working across institutions. The tradeoff is undeniable. I simply believe that there is value to intra-university collaborations, and they deserve deliberate attention and resources.
Super Bowl Sunday at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum
Half an hour before the concert starts, I watch the audience file in. The average age is well above seventy; the husbands look slight and bleached beside their wives. A few grandchildren wearing bows and shiny shoes sit between the couples. In the hangings of the Tapestry Room, Renaissance grandees display their courtly manners. Behind me, someone says, “We used to see Archie Cox there all the time.”
I try to read Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, her farm-girl narrator describing a commuter flight to Green Bay: “Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble.” It’s her first time in an airplane. Near me, a voice asks, “Did you go to any concerts in Paris?” Answer: “We heard the St. John’s Passion, of which we are very fond.” Apparently, we are not so fond of dangling prepositions.
Moore’s leisurely, descriptive style encourages observation. I remember the tiled floor in this very room from when I first saw it, on a trip with my Dad, at age 17. The Bach-lover behind me is recommending the “film version of Cyrano with Depardieu.” Each French noun is perfectly pronounced, like an excerpt from a language tape. His mouth is capable of switching from Boston Brahmin to gallic r’s and back without slowing appreciably.
My misanthropy now covers the whole audience except maybe the grandchildren. The first piece of music is supposed to rebuke such attitudes. It is a Masonic cantata by Mozart, with German lyrics that recommend: “Love thyselves and thy brothers! Bodily strength and beauty be thy ornament!” I find this advice hard to take, even with Mozart’s sugar-coating.
It’s the Bartok that snaps me out of it, the string quartet exchanging spiky, stochastic phrases, snatches of folk melody, tragic outbursts. The musicians are young, diverse, and intent, interacting with their bodies and faces as well as the sounds they make. The music was new when the audience first heard it and feels new still. It puts up green shoots.
upcoming talks
Please consider marking your calendars for the following:
“From Freedom Summer to Teach for America: Understanding the Impact of
Youth Activism”
A conversation with Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize winner Professor Doug McAdam (and me).
March 17, 2010, 3:30-5:30 pm
Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Hall, Tufts University
“Reforming the Humanities”
Lunchtime talk (by me)
Tufts University’s Center for the Humanities, 48 Professors Row
Tuesday, February 23, 12pm
“The Obama Administration’s Civic Agenda”
University of Wisconsin Philosophy and Education Lecture (by me)
Feb. 19, 2010, noon
267 Teacher Education Building, Madison
in defense of Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin’s letters from the years 1946-1960 have been published, and A.N. Wilson reads them as the record of a man who was smoothly diplomatic and glitteringly successful in public, but malicious behind people’s backs and never a profound author. I haven’t yet read these letters, but Wilson’s judgment that Berlin was “nothing but a witty talker” seems flatly wrong on the evidence of his great political essays.
Here is an example from Wilson’s review: “The 800 pages [of Berlin’s letters] are peppered with malice about poor A. L. Rowse (a more interesting man than Berlin and ultimately more intellectually distinguished).” While Berlin was writing his “tedious, infelicitous, prolix letters”– Wilson writes–Rowse was “producing those readable, well-researched volumes The England of Elizabeth, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, The Early Churchills, The Later Churchills, etc.”
I happen to have read The England of Elizabeth recently (well, most of its 592 dense pages). It contains a lot of interesting information, some vivid imaginative prose, and strong, idiosyncratic opinions. It is worth something, but it is far from profound or reliable. The author is so strongly committed to his politics (secular, mercantile, hierarchical, nationalist) that he makes all kinds of implausible claims–for instance, that Elizabeth I was privately not religious.
Christopher Haigh’s introduction to Rowse’s book (the text chosen to accompany and advertise the 2003 edition) says:
- Rowse was bitter and vindictive, nurturing hatreds and maintaining grievances for decades, but he could be generous, loyal, and sensitive to the needs and misfortunes of others. He was a homosexual misogynist, who would turn his back on female guests at his college, but some of his closest confidants were women. … From the start he was insufferably arrogant: as a little boy he shouted to his family, “Everyone’s a fool in this house but me!”–and he kept saying it to the end of his life, with irrepressible self-congratulation.
Imagine that you were trapped with this person in the tiny, static community of an Oxford college, where all the inmates have life tenure. You are diplomatic to him in person but complain about him behind his back, writing (for example) that he “grows more and more impossible and awful daily.” Should anyone blame you?
Berlin never wrote a magnum opus. His historical work was not deeply sourced enough for professional historians, and he gave up the rigors of analytic philosophy. Most of his ideas were unoriginal; he hastened to show that he had found them in previous authors. But he had the huge gift of being right (something that one can hardly say of A.L. Rowse). I think he was right because his thought was grounded in worldly experience.
A.N. Wilson writes: Berlin “settled down to be a ‘historian of ideas’, but the great book never got written. He accepted the role of being a sort of Samgrass from Brideshead Revisited, the don at the rich man’s table, the brilliant chatterer, who moved among bright worldly people who had not read as much as he had, so were impressed by the idea of someone who had heard of, let alone read, Maistre:
- The dinner party consisted of the Queen Mother, the diva [Maria Callas], Lady Fermoy (in waiting), Lady Rosebery, Mr Anthony Gishford (late of Boosey and Hawkes, who used to edit Isis when I was an undergraduate, slightly disreputable and quite nice), Mr David Webster, and the Harewoods. I sat between the QM and Lady Rosebery and enjoyed myself.
That quotation from Berlin’s letters makes him seem too social and glamorous to be taken seriously. In fact, I wouldn’t enjoy reading a lot of pages about dinners with H.R.H. the Queen Mum. But Berlin’s gift was to learn about politics–and life–from diverse people. He could enjoy an evening with royalty, but he could also seek out the tragically persecuted Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad, or guide an American student though her dissertation. He talked incredibly fast and with great self-assurance, but he also listened. For him, sociability was a form of research. Since his topic was people, his method was apt, and he was superb at it.