- Facebook236
- Threads
- Bluesky
- Total 236
(Hanover, NH) It’s amusing to be at Dartmouth, talking earnestly with high school civics teachers–after a week of thinking about the civic mission of higher education–while nearby stand the forbidding professors of “Gods of the Modern World,” a pertinent panel from Jose Clemente Orozco’s “Epic of American Civilization” (1932-4):
While behind them the world burns, the skeletal academics in full regalia bring into being a new skeletal graduate or colleague. The skeletal fetuses of other students are embalmed in display cases over piles of musty volumes.
On the other hand … Dartmouth paid Orozco to paint this critique, the college preserved his work despite the resulting controversy, and now they proudly display and assiduously study this exemplary Mexican mural. One could conclude that academia is a haven of free inquiry, that elite institutions can profit from even the most radical assaults, that art is immortal, that art is toothless … Pick your lesson.
The skeletal imagery evokes for me, as a resident of Wisconsin, the imminent sense of doom I feel regarding the slated budgetary “starvation” of an already emmatiated University of Wisconsin system. The bold “in your face” poetics of the painting are likewise reminscent of the rude stronghold with which Scott Walker’s Act 10 (which in the very first breath of Walker’s term he simultaneously chastized educators as overpaid and overvalued, while simultaneously (not unlike the terror and gloom of said artwork) rendering the lot of all who hold stae of Wisconsin teacher certification tantamount to servitude. Not unlike the style of said painting, doom and gloom, vulnerability at the hands of questionable doctor, and yet business as usual, faculty go about their usual semester and few complain beyond closed doors. Meanwhile, even the PBS NewsHour gleefully banter (if you recall last Friday’s show) about Walker as someone to look out for, with a presidental spark. Burning, needlessly, the farm to cash in on the trappings of corporate insurance payoffs. Poetics aside, take a look at the WI state budget document to witness scandalous back-door tactics for quietly dissecting and dismantling major state instiutions whithout due democratic process. Peter, we urgently need your wise and judicious voice in a serious national conversation about the resussitation of American democratic process and civic participation before we all find ourselves in medieval serfdom to the likes of the Koch brothers.