Peter Wood

The idea that Western civilization ushered in an age of oppression, cultural destruction, environmental degradation and all manner of human exploitation, is bittersweet. I don’t mean that it tastes like coffee or dark chocolate. I mean bittersweet the vine, Celastrus orbiculatus, with the colorful orange-red berries. This kind of bittersweet grows at a phenomenal rate, ascending into the canopy and strangling trees. If you drive north out of New York City, you will pass endless miles of arboreal carnage. Tens of thousands of roadside trees are draped in the deadly vine. It is an invasive Asian species that, once established, is impossible to eradicate. And while its fall berries are attractive and make for good floral arrays, they are inedible.

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s troubling history of appropriating other people’s idea and words and passing them off as her own has a well-worn name: plagiarism. Every college and university in the United States prohibits plagiarism. Most present students with explicit rules against it and lay out the possibility of drastic punishments, such as failing a course and, depending on the severity of the offense, expulsion from the college. Typically, instructors in freshman English include lessons on the proper ways to quote, paraphrase and cite sources.  Why? What is so wrong with plagiarism? We don’t punish actors for reciting their lines and failing to add, “Mr. William Shakespeare wrote that.

History sometimes rhymes. You can’t expect things to work out the same way every time. But sometimes events are so nearly opposite each other it is as though they rhyme, like hired and fired, acclaim and blame, or adore and deplore. The names “Claudine Gay” and “Scott Gerber” don’t have that phonetic somersault, but they rhyme the other way: nearly simultaneous events that are perfect opposites.  Before I get to that, let me return to, “History sometimes rhymes.” Many readers will recognize that as a paltry paraphrase of Mark Twain’s comment, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” Those readers would be wrong because Twain never said this.

“Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath,” opens Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. The goddess Homer summoned isn’t named, but it is usually assumed he meant Calliope, the muse of epic poetry —and much later, circus music. But Homer might have meant Lyssa, the Greek goddess of mad rage and frenzy. She was well known to the ancients. The Romans called her Furor or Rabies — which gets the idea across fairly well. The Norse had two versions: Odr, who represented fury and frenzy, and Fenrir, a giant wolf who represents uncontrollable savagery.    By whatever name she may have been called, Lyssa appears to have been active in human affairs for a very long time.

Twenty-five years ago I published an essay titled “Dogfish.” It was not about the little sharks that skim along the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and only rarely end up on the American dinner table. It was rather a fanciful way to draw attention to the brevity of the average tenure of the college president. Back then the average president served 6.7 years. The spotted dogfish, by contrast, was believed to live almost three times as long. A lot has changed in the intervening quarter century. For one thing, it is now believed that the natural lifespan of the dogfish is thirty-five to forty years, though some say eighty.  Meanwhile the average term of a college president has shrunk to 5.9 years.

To start a fire, you need a match, something that burns and air. So to speak. If you don’t have a match, you can use flint, but that takes patience and skill. What you burn should have a low combustion point. And the air should have sufficient oxygen. Starting a fire, like starting anything, has predicates: the things you need before you can truly started. But when it comes to education, some people believe we can go directly to the steak sizzling on the grill, never mind the preliminaries. This hastiness never works out very well. The latest example is the slow death of “balanced literacy.” That’s the approach to teaching children how to read that was championed by Professor Lucy Calkins, from her perch at Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

Early on the morning of September 27, 2021, Middlebury College president Laurie Patton had a stone bearing the name of the campus chapel removed from the building. It was done deftly. I don’t imagine she showed up with her own hammer and chisel, but the campus groundsmen executed her orders. Later that day, Patton and the chairman of the board of trustees sent out a message to the community announcing that they had de-named Mead Memorial Chapel, which henceforth would be known simply as Middlebury Chapel. The de-naming was a stealth operation. Outside of a small circle, no one knew it was coming.  Picture a small liberal arts college tucked away in the American hinterland. Picture on the crest of a hill a white marble church with an impressive spire flanked by academic halls.

Next to the Harvard Club in Boston’s Back Bay stands the old Eliot Hotel, named after Harvard’s most famous and probably most influential president, Charles William Eliot. The hotel was built in 1925 as a genteel way of easing aging Harvard professors into semi-retirement. In 1939 it was purchased by a private family and became one of the city’s finer hotels, with many amenities including a top-of-the-line Uneeda Shine-O-Mat.  Any well-dressed gentleman striding out onto Commonwealth Avenue would be embarrassed to show a scuffed wingtip, and shoeshine boys were not exactly welcome in that part of town. The Shine-O-Mat, installed in about 1947, solved the problem.  The Eliot Hotel had its ups and downs over the years.

Thanks to a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, firing faculty members for “lack of collegiality” is suddenly a bright prospect for college administrators eager to rid themselves of gadflies, diversiphobes, conservatives and other riffraff. The case involved Stephen Porter, a tenured professor in the school of education at North Carolina State University, who had had the bad grace to object to various forms of mandatory diversity saluting. Some details to follow, but let’s first roll around in the hay of “collegiality.”  The two members (out of three) on the Fourth Circuit who invoked the term were not entirely breaking new ground. The woker sort of faculty and college administrators have been fondling the idea for a while.

The president of Stanford University, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, has resigned in the shadow of an investigation that revealed that some scientific papers he had overseen contained “manipulated data” or evidence of other kinds of scientific malpractice.    His resignation may well be warranted — but before he disappears into ignominy, it would be wise to consider the situation.  In the now dimly remembered past, a scientist devised experiments and, working alone or with the help of a loyal assistant or two, carried them out. Or he sat in a room, as Einstein did, and thought through deep problems, eventually penning an article in which he said forth a bold new hypothesis.

I just caught the news that four pages in a notebook dated 2014 and stuffed into a couch cushion have been accepted as a valid will for the late singer Aretha Franklin. The jury that decided this enriched two of her sons and disappointed a third son, who was favored in an earlier will. This is what I call a legacy. But America is all worked up about another kind of legacy. I refer, of course, to the endearing habit of colleges and universities to give a leg up to the kinder of their alumni. Why do they do this? And why are so many people worked up over it?  These aren’t hard questions. Colleges have two reasons for their legacy programs.

I have been pondering ways to rescue young Americans from the trouble and often the waste of the four-year undergraduate college education. Many young people as I recently pointed out are looking for alternatives. But there aren’t very many good ones. In what follows, I propose we put some of these discontented souls in a ship and sail them around the world. It is not entirely a new idea, and before I turn my rudder in that direction, I’d like to survey the horizon. Once, long ago, I was asked by the senior administration of my university to look after the playboy son of a wealthy European family who had decided to enroll in an undergraduate degree program. He was handsome, smooth, reckless and not very bright.