uncomelyandbroken

The Core, and the Core, and the Core

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

This is the text of a talk I gave last year at the faculty retreat. It seems like ancient history now! (The title is a pun on General MacArthur’s final remarks at Westpoint in 1962)

“The Core, and The Core, and The Core,” or
Remarks on the Learning Objectives
of the Proposed New General Education Curriculum

University of the South Faculty Retreat
Dubose Conference Center
Monteagle, Tennessee
August 24, 2012

Good morning. In the next fifteen minutes or so, I want to go over the first part of our committee’s proposal to you about the new general education curriculum, in particular the learning objectives that are numbered 1 through 6 on the sheets I hope you all have there, and to give a few examples of how we see currently-offered courses fitting into those objectives.

Before I get to that, however, let me say just a little about how we have arrived to the proposal that we have before you. Many of you will remember the Convocation in the fall of 2010, when the Vice-Chancellor gave us the charge to revise the core curriculum. As a committee, we were encouraged to think broadly about general education, not to tweak here and there, but rather to start from scratch. The appearance shortly thereafter of Brown Patterson’s book, The Liberal Arts at Sewanee: A History of Teaching and Learning at the University of the South was fortuitous for us. Brown’s meticulous account details how the curriculum has always, every twenty years or so, been re-thought and re-deployed. The Sewanee faculty have, since the college’s inception, approached matters of curriculum in a dynamic spirit, giving students what they have needed for the world they were entering.

So, our committee got to work, and the first thing we did, quite rightly, was to ask you, the faculty, what principles ought to guide us in thinking about building a gen ed curriculum from the ground up. We met with you in small groups in Gailor Hall in the spring of 2011, benefited from further conversations with you over lunches in McClurg in the fall of 2011, brought a number of possible models to you for discussion in Convocation Hall in the spring of 2012, and now, as the fall of 2012 is about to begin, have brought you our proposal.

You were participants in the discussions, and so will not be surprised to discover that there are no sweeping proposals for reform here, no call for a raft of new classes or programs, no demands for re-structuring of academic units. The Sewanee general education curriculum is a strong one and our proposal builds on those strengths, while also introducing those elements we kept hearing from you would be desirable, in particular, a better articulation of the core curriculum’s coherence, and an increased flexibility in gen ed offerings as a whole.

So what was the right way to do that? Please believe me, when I say that we had many difficult and frustrating meetings over the last two years, and it is a testament to Bran Potter’s perseverance and boundless patience that we have all come through in one piece. The question before us was a simple one—“what does the generally well-educated person need to know in the twenty-first century?”—but not simple one to answer. In the end, we gave real thought to what is distinctive about an education dedicated to the liberal arts, as opposed to what a student might receive at a research or technical institution. In thinking through that fundamental difference, we were led to think about the differences between general education and the more focused, major field of study. We concluded that, while our majors are mostly housed in individual departments, that wasn’t true of general education, which instead belongs to the college overall. Our proposal reflects that idea, and as a consequence, faculty will find in our proposal that the courses they offer for general education might sensibly fit in to a number of different objectives. In doing this, we are acknowledging another fact, that disciplines are more permeable than they were when the core curriculum was last framed.

With that as prologue, then, let me turn to the learning objectives outlined in Section I (leaving the competencies in Roman numeral II for Scott Wilson to discuss presently). Again, we were guided by our sense that we could not imagine a person with a Sewanee education not having some acquaintance with these areas. To begin with, the generally well-educated person should be capable of thes things:

Reading Closely: Interpreting the Literary Arts
Making Something New: Invention, Analysis, and the Creative Process
Seeking Answers and Living the Questions: Morality, Ethics, and Citizenship
Developing Perspectives: Societies and Cultures, Past and Present
Observing and Experimenting: Quantitative and Scientific Thinking
Comprehending Cross-Culturally: Language and Global Studies

Now, as I said, there are a number of core courses that we currently offer that could reasonably be thought to fulfill more than one of these objectives, and because of this, we envision many courses having two designations (or “double-dipping,” as we have been calling it in the committee). In this, the nature of much of general education, its broadness and inherent interconnectedness, is something we are simply recognizing.

Let me note in passing that, as we want to encourage breadth, “triple-dipping” will not be recommended.

Okay, so we have these designations, you say. Can you put some flesh on these bones? Let me offer a few examples.

1. Reading Closely: Interpreting the Literary Arts. In this category, we of course will find English 101, as well as any other courses the English department chooses to designate. A literature course taught in English offered by another department would also make sense here, as for instance, an already well-established course like German fairytales or a course on Dostoevsky taught by the Russian department.

2. Under the rubric of Making Something New: Invention, Analysis, and the Creative Process, certainly classes offered in the visual and performing arts ought to be counted, as well as courses in the study of art or music history as in the old Fine Arts category. But in addition, we envision courses in Creative Writing or Computer Modeling also fulfilling this objective, and other places where creativity and imagination are at the heart of the course. Many of the courses here will pair readily with other learning objectives, we imagine. Documentary film-making in Haiti, for instance, would certainly seems to create a bridge between this category and “developing perspectives.”

3. Seeking Answers and Living the Questions: Morality, Ethics, and Citizenship. I have no doubt that there will be many Philosophy or Religion courses currently offered that will fall under this rubric, but I have to imagine that some classes in Environmental Studies or Anthropology will also fit here, or a course that I might want to develop about Socrates. As citizenship is component of this objective, many courses from Poli Sci are appropriate here, naturally.

4. Developing Perspectives: Societies and Cultures, Past and Present. There are a vast array of course in History and the Social Sciences that seem at home in this objective, as might some courses offered now by, say, Religion or Art History. The broad purpose of this category is to introduce students to the study of societies and cultures, although the interaction of individuals within societies or cultures seems to offer room for the the possibility of double-dipping with Seeking Answers or Making Something New.

5. Observing and Experimenting: Quantitative and Scientific Thinking. In this proposal, Quantitative will not be synonymous with something offered by Math, but could also encompass Statistics, some courses in Political Science as well as Economics. In the Sciences, we envision a continuing of the shift toward experiential learning; and we were heartened to hear some of our colleagues considering the idea of developing an interdepartmental sequence akin in structure to that of the Humanities program.

6. Comprehending Cross-Culturally: Language and Global Studies. Sewanee has always held language study and cross-cultural comprehension in high regard, and as you might expect, this area is already rich with possibility. It is easy to see, too, how courses now offered in foreign language departments might be paired with some of the other learning objectives, particularly Close Reading. But for students who choose to forego the 300-level language course, some offerings already offered in History or IGS, for instance, can help students fulfill this objective.

Now this final example brings us to a point that we will admit not to having a full-formed answer for. In short, who makes the call about which learning objective or objectives a course satisfies? Who is the decider? That is probably something we need to figure out together. One the one hand, we could expand the Curriculum and Academic Policy’s charge, or have a group of six sub-committees for each objective. That would be one way. Another idea is to simply let the professors of record determine this for themselves for their own courses. Or perhaps the professors make this determination in consultation with their departments, thus allowing the departments to keep some hand in the process. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these methods, and, as I say, we can work together to figure it out.

I think it’s easy to see, in what I have just outlined, how the matter of flexibility is achieved here. In addition, our proposal also allows students who have achieved a 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam or done IB coursework to exempt out of some of these categories, thus giving students credit for their successful work in high school. But to focus on the work of our own faculty: if a German or Classics professor can be contributing in Close Reading objective, or a Computer Scientist is helping students to make something new, you can see how choices open up for students in a way that our present curriculum does not allow.

We sometimes hear about “the empowering nature of choice,” and while it is a truism, there is still a certain amount of truth to it. Given greater choice, one of the things we imagine to be lost will be that uncooperative frame of mind that students occasionally exhibit in core classes. As one who has dragged students through four semesters of Latin, I will not miss that. The phrase “I’m doing this because I have to” is, by its nature, antithetical to the spirit of a liberal arts education, through which we hope to be training people to make their own choices.

Let me conclude by addressing briefly one last point, the one I am most happy with. In our conversations with faculty, we heard time and again that you wanted to see some more deliberate sense of coherence in our core. That’s a tall order, but it becomes less so when you think about how that idea of coherence has ever really been achieved. It comes about in conversation, of course. Sewanee can rightly pride itself on its close student-faculty relationships, and it makes all the sense in the world that our core curriculum needs to cease being a checklist to be gotten through and to start being a springboard for genuine dialogue about intellectual formation, so that as advisors, we can move away from being “registration buddies” (to use a phrase I recently heard from a colleague) to instead become faculty mentors as early as the August of the freshman year, when we first meet our advisees, as many of us will do tomorrow afternoon. Speaking for myself, I think that instead of talking to students about which History 100 section best fits their schedules, there will be far more productive conversations to arise from asking them things like, What perspectives would you like to develop? What answers are you seeking? Is there something new you would like to make? And how do you see it all fitting together?

And on that note of making new things and seeing how it all fits together, let me bring my remarks to an end.

Posted in Classics, Education, Military, Sewanee | 2 Comments

Gipson’s Switch to Midway Road (almost)

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

Such a pretty day for a bike ride today, so I decided to head down the Mountain Goat Trail beyond St. Andrew’s down into Monteagle. This part of the MGT will be paved in the next few months, I’m told, but I wanted to see it while it was still sort of rough.

Back when the train still ran, this spot was called Gipson’s Switch, as the (heavily-fortified) historical marker by the trailhead indicates.

You see the backs of houses as you ride along …

… as well as a basketball hoop set up at the end of a cul-de-sac.

There are some houses you peddle by a little faster. NO TRESPASSING, says the sign. Not to worry, I won’t!

Further down is a pile of junk, festooned with a DANGER KEEP OUT sign. It looks like some kind of post-modern art installation. Maybe it’s called “Danger/Keep/Out”? Is it meant to provoke questions about our relationship to the discarded past? Is the “danger ” in what we “keep,” or in what is “out”?

Other sights further along, however, are less intellectually challenging and more simply charming.

This gate leads to a pretty field, but I think I’ll just look into it from here.

I hadn’t realized that. on this path, I would arrive to the back entrance of Pearl’s. I’m tempted but decide not to stop in for some crème brûlée.

Another lovely farmhouse seen through the woods, and a reminder that this was in fact an old railroad bed.

This is the end of the Mountain Goat Trail, at least for now. Ahead you can see houses that are at the corner of 41A and Midway Road. I’m not going to try to go through the chiggery high grass, or over that fallen tree ahead. But in the coming months, it will be fun to see what comes of the rest of the trail.

Postscript, March 22, 2015. So, this part of the Mountain Goat Trail has been paved now and, though it is not officially open, I can tell you that it is a very pleasant ride. The “No Trespassing” shack is gone, as is the pile of junk. It was not possible for the trail to continue into Midway, so the very charming bridge below was built up around the Pearl’s parking-lot.

Postscript, June 28, 2015. Took a nice ride today along this part of the trail and, as always, enjoyed the view of the backs of the farmhouses along the way. Later in the afternoon, came across this passage from Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (chap. 17):

… as a general rule, that there is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness in the back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its front. The latter is always artificial; “it is meant for the world’s eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment. Realities keep in the rear, and put forward an advance guard of show and humbug. The posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life and individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him past the premises.

Posted in Sewanee, Sports & Games, Trees & Flowers | Leave a comment

The Way We Used to Roll

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

The Glidden Auto Tour was coming through town this week, I learned, “the largest premier antique automobile touring event in the world,” according to the press release which I forwarded to the principal of the local school, a friend of mine. He wasn’t sure what to do with it, exactly. Given the pressure of standardized tests and obligatory instruction, there was not much room for any unprescribed activities. “We’ve even had to cut out one recess and scale back on Art and Music,” he told me. What harm could it do, I asked, to go outside for half an hour and watch a motorcade of antique cars go by, right in front of the school? He said he’d think about it.

When the day came, I went out to see what was happening. The cars were due to pass through town, at 10 a.m. The weather was lovely. At the bookstore near my office I sipped on a cup of coffee, checked my phone, looked at a magazine, waited, and then becoming impatient, walked back to my office. Perhaps I had the day wrong? But then it occurred to me that the old cars were probably just running behind schedule, so I decided to give it one more try. I hopped into my Honda for an early lunch and took a back-road downtown.

When I got there, near the elementary school, sure enough, there they all were, car after classic car coming up the street–Model T’s, Packards, Model A’s, you name it, all in perfect condition, coming up the main street. And there sitting on the curb in the front of the school were the schoolkids with their teachers behind them. I parked and crossed the street to join them.

As each auto come up, the children would cheer, and the drivers would sound their horns in response. Some of the teachers were taking pictures of the cars, and some of the drivers were taking pictures of the kids. “Look, that car has a GPS,” someone pointed out, and we all laughed at the incongruity. One teacher was explaining to her young charges that this was what cars used to look like. What differences could they see between these and modern cars?

My friend, the principal, walked over. “I’m almost choking up,” he said. “Look at all of this. The kids, the teachers, everybody’s happy. I almost didn’t do this, but I looked out the window at this beautiful day, and just decided everybody should go outside.” He stopped and looked around. At one point, the fifth graders tried to start the wave, but by the time it got to the third graders, it petered out. Teachers were trying to explain to them what the wave was but they were too excited to listen.

“Pretty soon,” he continued, “we’ll have to go back in. Back to the mandatory curriculum. Back to teaching to the test.” We watched a red Bentley putter on by, in all its antique charm. “School used to be like this, full of spontaneous moments.” A few more minutes passed, and a few more vintage cars. “Things are different now.”

The old-fashioned parade began to subside, as did the beeps and cheers. “Well, I guess it’s all over,” the principal said. One more Model A passed by, but in silence. By that time, the teachers had gotten the children up from the curb and led them, single-file, back into the school.

Posted in Education, Music, Tennessee, Time | 2 Comments

The Daisy Hereabouts

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

Daisies at St. Mary’s, May 2014

A bit of floral folklore, previously unknown to me, has to do with the spread of daisies in the area during the Civil War. Perhaps some of my friends in the sciences could add some useful remarks on the matter? In any event, according to the remarks of a certain “C.G.”–whom I take to be Charlotte Gailor (a friend notes that she taught botany at Sewanee, in fact, during WWII)–recorded in the old book, Purple Sewanee,

The Northern troops, on one of their visits, must have come up the old Cowan Road, which used to branch off the Natural Bridge Road, as they camped at the Hayes Farm, later known as “The Sisters'”, until ut burned in 1912. Proof of this is the fact that it has always been the only place on the mountain where daisies grow wild and it is known the where ever there were Northern camps daisy field were left; since the war we had not daisy fields, and they say, Sherman’s march can be traced through Georgia, by the daisies. (Lily Baker, et al., eds, Purple Sewanee [Sewanee, TN: 1932, rep. 1961] p. 28)

“The Sisters” is, of course, the school and cloisters of the Sisters of St. Mary, who moved to the homestead formerly owned by the prominent sawmill owner, Jabez Hayes, off of what is now called Sherwood Road (TN State Route 56). There are wide, flower-filled meadows there still that no doubt include daisies, though I can’t recall precisely seeing them. I’ve certainly seen daisies in my own yard, only a few miles from St. Mary’s, which may or may not have a Yankee pedigree.

I’m not sure when C.G. made these remarks–Purple Sewanee is vague, as usual–but it must have been after 1912. In addition, I’m not sure what connection there is to the poem cited below, “The Daisy in the South,” written by either Andrew Downing or Frederick Niles (I’ve seen it attributed on-line to both; frankly it’s not a good enough poem to spend much time trying to track it down), dating maybe to the late 19th century. Still, as folklore, it’s quite touching, this tale of nature’s beautiful persistence in the wake of human misery.

There is a story told in Georgia, ’tis in everybody’s mouth,
That was old Tecumseh Sherman brought the daisy to the South;
Ne’er the little blossomed stranger in that land was known to be
‘Till he marched his blue coat columns from Atlanta to the sea.

Everywhere in field and valley and the murm’ring pines among
Where a gallant Union soldier pressed his foot, a daisy sprung,
And its coming seemed to many like a promise from on high,
Given there in benediction where Old Glory floated by.

Where the troopers fed their horses, where the bummers bivouacked,
Now with each recurring summer all that highway may be tracked
By the glory of the presence — so the stars the sky illume —
Of a million northern daisies in the beauty of their bloom.

Thus the kindly hand of nature hides the scars that war has made;
Vines have twined the grounded musket, blossoms wreathe the broken blade;
Tiny timid birds have nested safely in the cannons’ mouth
Ever since Tecumseh Sherman gave the daisy to the South.

Post-script, Sept. 21, 2013. On this topic of the daisy’s spread, I have heard back from folks far more knowledgeable on botanical matters than myself. David Haskell writes,

I assume that the poem and stories are referring to oxeye daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare. This is an invasive species, originally from Europe. It comes in after disturbance and does well in pasture and roadsides, so I can easily imagine that it would do quite well in the churned up fields and road edges that soldier encampments would leave. It might also have been tracked into new territory by the hay and other feed that the armies would have brought with them.

A quick text search through William Bartram’s travels (http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bartram/bartram.html) yielded no daisies, perhaps further evidence of their absence in the south pre-civil war?? His father, John Bartram, named it on his list of troublesome plants in PA in 1759 (see http://eattheinvaders.org/we-came-over-on-the-mayflower-too/).

On the other hand, the idea of the northerners leaving a nasty weed behind in their footsteps seems just a little too striking and poetically convenient, so I’m suspicious. There were plenty of other opportunities for the plant to spread before that. More data from early writings would be interesting.

Todd Crabtree, the Tennessee state botanist, had this to say:

This species has certainly seduced numerous generations of humans. John Bartram was a keen observer and his comments carry a lot of weight with me. If it was a problem in Philadelphia during the mid 1700’s I’m sure it quickly followed colonists to the west and south. One pretty necklace of daisies cast aside after it faded could start an invasion many miles from where it was gathered. As David said, the hay for animals is the most likely vector as well as what the hay becomes after it passes through the livestock. Livestock will avoid the living plants in a pasture thus aiding its spread. It was also planted in many gardens. The thousands of seeds produced per plant and the long viability of the seeds make it an elite and swift invader. I am sure that there have been multiple waves of invasion since Europeans arrived in North America.
Sometimes we botanists only mention the noteworthy plants. William Bartram may have seen it in his travels and relegated it to a kind of background noise in the flora. If he saw something continually from Philadelphia and at every populated area along the way I wouldn’t blame him for not mentioning it. Belamcanda chinensis (blackberry lily) is mentioned by Gattinger (1825-1901) as being present around Nashville in the cedar glades and he assumed it was native. The only invasive tendencies of that plant are that people and birds like it. If people like a plant then it can travel just as fast and far as they can.

In commenting on this post, Mary Priestley notes,

I had heard that Charlotte Gailor was quoted as saying that for decades after the Civil War you could see the route that Sherman’s army took through the South by following the daisies. She said they had grown from seeds that had hitched a ride in the hay or with grain that they transported for their horses. But I hadn’t seen that explicit reference or the poem!
I love daisies — enjoy picking those fresh-looking blossoms on roadsides in the summertime. They’re native to Europe, brought to North America purposefully as ornamentals and accidentally as contaminants with other seed and plants. Cattle won’t eat them, so a field full of daisies is not a pretty sight to a cattle or dairy farmer. And because the animals avoid them, they multiply. The same is true of Queen Anne’s lace, another pretty import. Daisies don’t have much of a way to distribute their seeds on their own — no way to fly or catch in animals’ fur or anything. So people, including the Union Army apparently, really have been the main instrument of their dispersal to and throughout North America.

So, can the spread of the oxeye daisy in the South be securely linked to Union troop movements in the Civil War? It’s hard to say yes or no. Do you love the story, or love it not?

Posted in Military, Poetry, Sewanee, The South, Trees & Flowers, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Biting Bishop

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

One of the principal founders of the University of the South, where I teach, was Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana as well as a Confederate Brigadier General. His occupation of both roles earned him the title “The Fighting Bishop” (as indeed a piece in the New York Times about him last year is entitled). For what it’s worth, though, I prefer another important cleric of the University’s past, Thomas Gailor. I work in the building named for him, where the portrait to the right now hangs. In the past few weeks, I have begun to think of him as “The Biting Bishop.”

Here’s why. As re-told in Purple Sewanee, Gailor’s first encounter with Sewanee took place not on the Domain but in “the Sewanee Tunnel” (i.e., the Cumberland Tunnel) in 1863, when he was six and a half years old. Gailor’s mother and he were in search of news about his father, who had died while fighting under Braxton Bragg’s command the previous year. As he recalls,

I remember eating raw sweet potatoes, given to me by Confederate soldiers on the train. Major Martin Walt, Quartermaster of Wood’s brigade, came to my mother and handed her a satchel, saying, “We are about to enter a long tunnel, and there are no lights. This satchel is full of money for the soldiers, who are to be paid in Chattanooga. There are rough people on this train, and they may attack me in the tunnel. Please keep the satchel and hold it tight until we get out of the darkness of the tunnel.”

The Cumberland Tunnel in Cowan, built 1849-1852 by Irish laborers

My mother took the satchel, and, just as we dashed into the tunnel, she said to me, “Catch hold of this satchel; somebody us trying to take it from me.” I, a small boy, remember grabbing the satchel, and biting hard on a hand that was trying to take it—so hard, that the hand let go—and when we emerged from the darkness of the tunnel, my mother called Major Walt and gave him his satchel, and told him the story; but there was no one we could accuse; tho I suspected a hard-faced woman in the seat in front of us, who kept her right hand in a muff. I hope that that hand had the marks of my bite. (Lily Baker, et al., eds, Purple Sewanee [Sewanee, TN: 1932, rep. 1961] pp. 25-26)

Postscript. Now, I would love to leave this blog-post at that, but there is another story about Bishop Gailor told by Sam Williamson a few years ago that deserves mention. Many years after the encounter in the Cumberland Tunnel, when he was in his late seventies, Gailor raised his powerful voice on the eve of another war. On March 28, 1933, he was the keynote speaker before a crowd of 1500+ in Memphis gathered in protest against Nazi treatment of the Jews. “It is impossible to believe that sane men would so indulge their madness. Their acts are sheer and brutal barbarism and a contradiction of the principles of civilization,” Gailor said on that occasion, then going on to warn against “a relapse into savagery.” According to the next day’s Memphis Commercial-Appeal, the bishop was greeted with “thunderous applause.” It sounds as though, even late in life, Thomas Gailor knew that sometimes direct confrontation was the correct ethical instinct.

Posted in Ireland, Military, Sewanee, The South, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

A Visit to Highlander Folk School

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

As part of Sewanee’s new “Finding Your Place” program for freshmen, my students and I today went to the nearby site of the Highlander Folk School, the populist educational facility founded by Myles Horton in 1932 that helped to midwife the Civil Rights movement. Highlander was chased out of Grundy County in the 60’s on what are apparently trumped-up charges, but not before luminaries such as Pete Seeger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been there. The school re-opened in the Knoxville area, and has since then continued to do significant work on the environment and voters’ rights issues. But what of the facility in Monteagle, only a few scant miles from my home?

Truth be told, this site so important in the battle for Civil Rights had been all but forgotten locally. While I knew the name of Highlander, it didn’t really ring any bells for me, a situation not all that uncommon among most of my friends in Sewanee. Some of the buildings in which Horton’s school had been located had burnt down, while others had been substantially re-modelled by subsequent owners. “There’s nothing worth seeing there anymore,” I had been told.

In putting together this new course about place, however, I began to realize what a critical role Highlander had played in an important chapter of Southern–indeed American–history, and my desire grew to see what was there, regardless of whether it was “worth” seeing. In order to prepare my students for the visit, I had them watch the filmmaker Lucy Massie Phenix’s documentary about Highlander, You Got to Move, which features marvelous footage of Horton and the children’s author May Justus defending the school from its bigoted detractors, as well as interviews with inspirational characters like the singer and protester, Bernice Johnson Reagon.

As it happens, an article by my friend Michael Cass entitled, “TN preservationists are out to save training ground of Rosa Parks, other activists” appeared in the Tennessean last week. The Tennessee Preservation Trust, it turns out, has been actively engaged in raising funds to purchase the property, not only to restore it to its former condition but also to turn it back into an education center. According to the article, David Currey, the Trust’s director,

believes returning Highlander to the way it looked in 1961 would be well worth the trouble.

“This place has the potential,” he said, “to tell a story that hasn’t been told.”

In the days following the article’s appearance, it came to pass that a deal had been successfully brokered that would allow the Trust and others to acquire the property, so long as funding could be secured. And so, through a friend, I got in touch with Ray Banks, the realtor whose agency had been involved in the proceedings, and when he heard that I wanted to bring a group of Sewanee students over to look at the Highlander property, he was eager to help us out. “When do you want to come? Monday at 1? I’ll meet you on the front steps of the old library.”

We showed up today, my students and I, and sat on the floor of the old library building. Ray explained its unique history to my students. It was in this very room that Rosa Parks had trained before refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery. We marveled to think that we were in the very spot where Martin Luther King heard “We Shall Overcome” for the very first time. “There’s something about that song that haunts you,” he told a friend as they left Monteagle, and from there, it became the anthem of the Civil Rights movement.

Ray told us that there were plans afoot for Bruce Springsteen to put on a benefit concert. The rain picked up outside, but some of us decided to walk around the grounds, while a few others stayed in to play on the ping-pong table. Most of the students took out their journals and spent time reflecting on the afternoon. Later, I took out my iPhone and, punching up Pete Seeger on Youtube, held it up for the students to hear. Later in the afternoon, a friend sent me a link to a recent article about two protesting firemen in Madison, Wisconsin, being arrested for singing “We Shall Overcome.” And I was reminded of what Myles Horton told the police who had come to close down the Highlander Folk School, over fifty years ago. “You can padlock a building,” he said, “but you can’t padlock an idea.”

Posted in Education, Music, Sewanee, The South | 23 Comments

Remarks for “Foundations of Place” Panel

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

My colleagues, John Willis and Jerry Smith, have given better talks than I ever could about the historical situation of the University’s founding a century and half or so ago, and of course I always tremble to follow Jim Peterman. I have nothing of substance to add to their remarks. But I wonder if it would be alright for me to dig a little deeper into the past, our past, to see what insight is to be found there. As a classicist, I know one thing for sure, which is that long after the University of the South is a distant memory and together with it, the United States, there will still be people reading Homer and the New Testament in Greek. But let our archeology not stop there. As Henry David Thoreau writes in the chapter of Walden from which you read, “My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.” So let me borrow his idea and burrow a little into these hills.

You will find, if you look into the etymology of the word foundation, that is related to the word profound. The Latin word from which they derive has to do with what lies deep beneath, and just how bottomless those depths very often seem to be. Yesterday my group went down into the caves just off Gate G7, and at one point Luke Padgett told me we were standing on a stratum of limestone about 400 millions old. If you’re courageous, you can burrow even further, but I think Solomon’s Temple was deep enough for me, and the wisdom that might be found in a system named for the Biblical king is sufficient, to my mind, at least for this weekend.

I hope it will be OK if, at an Episcopal school, beneath the images of all these bishops, on a Sunday, I quote from the Bible. You will maybe remember that Jesus, when asked what was required of us, said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” In that two-fold statement Jesus asks us to cast our glance vertically and horizontally, up to heaven and across to the people of our community; in doing so, we trace with our gaze the form of a cross. In fact, there is a long-standing Christian tradition distinguishing religious vocation into the active life and the contemplative life, the life dedicated to working with and for others, and the other dedication to introspection and prayer. These are inclinations seemingly at odds, but in actuality believed to inform and support one another, although at times it is hard to see how. They appear to be at cross purposes (I use the term advisedly).

Even if you are not particularly religious–as I am not–it is not such bad advice, to spend some time thinking of things that are eternal and transcendent, things which rise, as Plato would tell us, into one immortal Form of Truth and Beauty, with a capital T and a capital B. It is easy to believe that “truth is beauty, beauty truth” (to quote Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn) here in so lovely a location. The bishops who founded the University, in situating Sewanee where they did, knew what they were doing, offering us in this place so many exquisite vistas to look out upon, and thereby encouraging in us the contemplation of heaven. “It’s a long way away, even from Chattanooga, in the middle of woods, on top of a bastion of mountains crenelated with blue coves,” Will Percy writes in Lanterns on the Levee. “It is so beautiful that people who have once been there always, one way or another, come back. For such as can detect apple green in an evening sky, it is Arcadia—not the one that never used to be, but the one that many people always live in; only this one can be shared.”

I really love that passage, and I will admit that it brings an involuntary tear to my sappy Irish eyes. I worry, though, that it forms part of the “symbolic complex” that Walker Percy talks about in Loss of the Creature that prevents us from having an authentic experience of place. Sometimes this Arcadian vision of Sewanee is a bit much for me, particularly when I travel into the poverty-stricken areas of Grundy, Marion, or Franklin Counties. It’s so alarming when you read thing like I did in this week’s Winchester Herald-Chronicle that, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Franklin County (this county) had reported over 100 cases of human trafficking over a 24-month period. “It is not uncommon,” the paper reports, “to see cases of children being traded for sex in drug cases.” Facts like that make my heart heavy, and make me wonder whether I should quit my navel-gazing and all that “detecting of apple green in an evening sky,” and get up off my ass and do something to help out the least of my brothers and sisters.

This reaction is correct and human, I think, to want to reach out and to offer what help we can. Let me say that my colleagues Deb McGrath and Jim Peterman possess that deeply ethical impulse to a great degree, although they are too modest to talk about it. It is possible, however, in looking at human misery simply to become bitter and jaded about human nature. By losing hope in transcendent ideals like Truth, Beauty, or Justice, we might be tempted to make an escape into despair, self-indulgence, and cynicism. In this way, we really lose our way, and lose our selves.

The tension between the contemplative and active lives is a hard one to manage, and always has been. I thought of this tension yesterday afternoon, when some of us watched the documentary, You Got To Move, about Highlander. In the film, Bernice Johnson Reagon spoke of her work inspired by the Highlander group, saying, “Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, ‘What in the world came over us?’ you know. But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us we would be dead. … And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like… Sometimes you know what you’re supposed to be doing, and when you know what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s somebody else’s job to kill you.”

Bernice Johnson Reagon, later the winner of a MacArthur Genius grant, would go on to be the founder of the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, whose inspirational music I recommend to you, perhaps to be listened to in the wonderful Raulston Listening Room in duPont. “Music is the first thing to cross borders,” Richard Tillinghast writes in Sewanee When We Were Young. “What lucky dogs we were to be there when jazz / Crossed the mountains and reached the Cumberland / Plateau.” What lucky dogs we are to live in a place where a charming neo-Gothic building or a well-timed sunset can remind us of the things beyond us, or to have neighbors like Laura Willis whose book Finding God in a Bag of Groceries some of you will read, or one-time neighbors like the Highlander School, where the song “We Shall Overcome” was first heard by Martin Luther King. All such things offer sustenance to our minds and souls when they are run ragged by the things of this often cruel and awful world.

It’s important, then, to remember when our spirits are all but crushed, when our heads are too heavy to lift them, to draw strength from what we know to lie beneath us, for much is there. Beneath us are layers of sandstone and limestone, from which our splendid buildings have been wrought and awesome caves been formed. Beneath us are layers of history encompassing the Civil Rights movement and the Civil War both of which offer images of nobility to inspire us. Beneath us are the rich roots of musical traditions embracing Memphis and Nashville and the mountains of east Tennessee (as well as invasive species like jazz); beneath us are literary giants like Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, or Flannery O’Connor, whose work who was so often published in our Sewanee Review. Underlying us, too, are the traditions of liberal education that extend back through Oxford and Cambridge to the Christian Middle Ages and from there way back to the schools of Athens where Aristotle and Plato taught, those old Greeks whose statues you can see here in a courtyard in Woods Laboratory, not so far from another statue of Charles Darwin.

These then are the foundations of the University, our University, or to be more precise, your University. Remember, foundations are laid to be built upon, and cornerstones are set for capstones eventually to rest on. Let me be clear. This place was made for you students, for you to derive joy and strength from, knowledge and wisdom, foundation and profundity. All that remains now is the answer to the question, What is that you will build upon this rock? Here endeth the lesson.

Posted in Bible, Classics, Education, Emblems, Ireland, Language & Etymology, Oxford, Poetry, Sewanee, Tennessee | 5 Comments

Colonel Shaw and Some Anniversaries

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, Boston, from Wikipedia

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed during a desperate assault on South Carolina’s Fort Wagner while leading the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first all African-American volunteers corps. Perhaps you know about Shaw from the movie Glory, starring Matthew Broderick, or from Robert Lowell’s famous poem, For the Union Dead, about the equally famous monument on the Boston Common by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (pictured above). It is a story I have known for a longer time myself, at least since the time I attended the Robert Gould Shaw Middle School. My experience there, however, at the tumultuous start of Boston’s busing crisis in the mid-1970s, was about as far as one one could get from the high-minded ideals for which Colonel Shaw gave his life.

It has only been in recent years that I’ve come to realize how much the figure of Shaw surrounded my young life in West Roxbury. As a boy, I rode my bike through the streets that once made up the Shaw family estate, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I suppose, if I had been clever, I might have figured it out from the name of Shaw Street. The bulk of the former estate now comprises the grounds of the prestigious Roxbury Latin School. In the same neighborhood are streets named for John Alden and Myles Standish, which might give you some sense of the Shaws’ Puritan pedigree, and why it was Lowell wrote about him being as lean as a compass-needle and seeming to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy.

West Roxbury, Bellevue Hill area in 1874

… and today

From Anthony Mitchell Sammarco’s book, West Roxbury

Yet the Shaw family of the 19th century were not Puritans, but devout Unitarians and dedicated abolitionists. At the bottom of the hill from Shaw’s estate–in a spot now occupied by St. Theresa’s Catholic Church (where I went for years)–stood the home of the well-known Unitarian preacher, Theodore Parker. Not far away, there is a statue of Parker scowling away on Centre Street. In one of his more famous anti-slavery sermons, the preacher intoned, I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. It was a sentiment Shaw would certainly have shared. If Parker’s phrasing seems familiar, it is because it was famously adapted a century later by Martin Luther King (as NPR reported a few years ago).

In a powerful way, Robert Gould Shaw’s death is connected to Martin Luther King’s dream, and perhaps his death as well; the significance of both figures was very much at stake iwhen I went off to the middle school named after the Union colonel at the age of twelve. The experience of forced busing in the so-called Athens of America was a brutal one, captured well in the PBS miniseries, Eyes on the Prize (Episode 13), as well as in books like J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground and Alan Lupo’s more journalistic Liberty’s Chosen Home. Indeed, in one of his opening chapters, Lupo writes about a rally against busing in West Roxbury that some of my neighbors and probably my mother went to. “On this night in late August, 1974, white people who don’t want kids bused are filing into the auditorium of the Robert Gould Shaw School in West Roxbury. It is possible that they don’t see the irony.”

Although I was only a preteen at the time, I know for sure the crowd did not see the irony. The following autumn I would attend the Shaw School, when, after every last measure legal and illegal had been tried to stop them, buses full of black and Latino kids rolled into West Roxbury and an angry white mob met them there. Terrified, I made my way through the crowd on the first day of school, and walked up stairs where cops in riot gear occupied every other landing. I remember not knowing where my homeroom was and stopping to ask somebody who simply said, Keep moving. And so I kept moving, as we all did that year. Things proceeded, as they will, and if they didn’t exactly get much better, at least they seemed to stop being quite so awful. I remember that the teachers, by and large, were kind, and that all my fellow sixth graders, regardless of race, were mostly good kids. But the atmosphere was always tense, and we always seemed to be treading along a minefield. I was glad to leave for Boston Latin the next year.

Here in the South, the racial tension had been felt a full decade earlier, as is well-known. In Franklin County, Tennessee, which I now have the privilege to represent as a School Board member, the movement to desegregate was spearheaded in 1963-64 when a handful of Sewanee families, black and white, brought a civil rights lawsuit to force the matter. The objections of the School Board then–that there was not enough room in the school for more students, and that the black children were unprepared academically–were met with resolve and ingenuity, and people in Sewanee volunteered money for the construction of additional buildings, and donated time tutoring students. The fiftieth anniversary of their successful effort is soon upon us, and the Sewanee Community Council are arranging for a historical marker. This past weekend, the sesquicentennial of Shaw’s death, I spent a part of the morning with my friend Lizzie–herself the great grand-daughter of a Confederate general–looking around Sewanee Elementary School for just the right spot to place this marker, which will be unveiled this coming Martin Luther King Day.

Lowell’s poem about the Shaw memorial was published in 1964, though it had been written a few years earlier, and draws some connection between the issues of the Civil War and the those of the Civil Rights movement.

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his ‘niggers.’

…
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

It is not quite accurate, I must admit, to excerpt For the Union Dead as I have, giving the impression that Lowell ended on an optimistic note. Nor is it entirely accurate to smile with satisfaction about the end of segregation at Sewanee Elementary, when there are very few black families who can afford to live in town or make the drive up the mountain on a day-to-day basis. We live at a time when a black man has recently been re-elected President, and yet another has been shot down while innocently walking along the street. Sometimes it is hard to feel, in matters of race, the resolute forward progress of Colonel Shaw as he is depicted in the Saint-Gaudens monument. Things proceed, as they will, and if they don’t exactly get much better, at least they seem to stop being quite so awful.

Posted in Boston, Education, Family, Military, New England, Poetry, Race, Sewanee, Slavery, Statues & Monuments, The South, Time | 2 Comments

Gene’s Eulogy for Mark

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

Eulogy for Mark McDonough – for Funeral Service 1/13/12

We loved Mark and we are going to miss him a lot. We take comfort from knowing that he has completed his mission here on earth and returned to his Father in Heaven.

I would like to share with you some reminiscences about his life. I was Mark’s guardian for most of his life. He lived with me for 17 years, from the age of 7 until he was 24. He was there because he was wanted. He spent the last 10 years of his life at the Institute of Professional Practice. He was there because he was wanted.

In between those times, as he bounced around between different adult residential and day programs, because he could be difficult to care for, he was not always where he was wanted. He knew when he was wanted and when he wasn’t, and he had some dark years because of that. I am thankful for these last 10 years when Mark was again where he was wanted.

Mark was born with autism. His disability was actually a lot more complicated than that one word, and at times he had real difficulty controlling his emotions and behavior, and making contact with reality. The religious perspective in our Church is that people born with disabilities may have chosen them before they came to earth, because they were tough enough to complete their mission here with those disabilities. Mark shared that perspective, and he did complete his mission. He didn’t overcome all of his disabilities, no one could, but he overcame many of them, and by the end of his life, you could honestly say that he was really a nice guy.

Working with Mark successfully, relating to him, teaching him, forming a bond with him, was a lot like playing a musical instrument – a complicated one, not just a piano, but more like a harpsichord or maybe even a pipe organ. You had to be good at it. Some people could do it, and some couldn’t. But if you could, he was always a fascinating person, and he was a lot of fun to be with.

Mark never forgot anything. He could tell you the name of the cab driver who took him to school once when he was 5 years old. He grouped things in his memory by emotional impact rather than chronologically. If you realized that, he actually made a lot of sense when you talked with him.

He was a talented artist. When he was younger, he had an easel and a complete set of art supplies. Those went with him when he moved into the adult system, but were eventually lost. My wife and I were looking for another easel for him for his birthday next month.

To appreciate his art, you again had to know his style. Mark was very parsimonious with his drawing paper. He would make drawings one on top of the other, many of them, all on the same sheet. If you teased them apart, they were very good drawings. I am not sure why he started stacking them up that way; I don’t recall that we ever had a shortage of drawing paper when he lived with me, but he started doing that when he was very young. Occasionally, if you could get him to give you a sheet when it just had the first drawing on it, his art work was worth putting on display, and we often did that.

Mark appreciated music. When he was a child, we got him an autoharp on the recommendation of a music therapist, and he would sometimes play some of his own songs. He was a connoisseur of Barry Manilow and Jim Croce. I got him what I think was the last Barry Manilow album he didn’t already own for Christmas. He also liked Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash. He probably picked up his liking for Croce, Diamond, and Cash from me, but Barry Manilow was entirely his own choice.

When Mark came to live with me as a 7 year old, he could talk, but he was almost entirely echolalic. That means that he would echo back anything you said to him, but that was usually all he could say. He had almost no functional speech at all, no way to communicate his own thoughts or wants or needs. But our family included another young man who was non-verbal, who I was also guardian for, and whom I had taught American Sign Language. That was Patrick, who became Mark’s foster brother. They lived together for the 17 years Mark was with me, and they were very close. Patrick is here today to say goodbye to Mark.

Living with Patrick, Mark also became interested in signing, so I taught him American Sign Language too. Today, this is a standard method in the armamentarium of Special Education, but in the 1970’s, it was heresy. It was considered tantamount to abuse to use sign language with a hearing child with speech problems. Do people remember that? The orthodoxy in speech and language therapy at that time was that signing would retard children’s speech acquisition. It was not done. I am not much for orthodoxy, so I did it anyway. Mark learned signing quickly, and he was not echolalic at all in sign language! It was his breakthrough. Eventually, by pairing his signs with words, he learned functional speech. And as you know, he ultimately became quite articulate.

Orthodox methods didn’t work well with Mark in many ways. He was always his own man. The orthodox method in special needs for transitions, especially for big events, is to give lots and lots and lots of advance notice. That was always disastrous for Mark. He would become anxious about the pending event, be it a visit, a dance (by the way, he was a good dancer), a restaurant trip, whatever, obsess about how he was going to behave, and ultimately lose control. But if a big event just happened, without advance warning, he was fine. The folks at IPP learned that. Lots of people before them, who tried to work with Mark and who were not willing to accept that breach of orthodoxy, were not successful with him.

Mark, as a child, loved Mr. Rogers. Remember him? He was a children’s television guru, and he was pretty good. I think Mark learned most of his moral code from Mr. Rogers. He had all of the Mr. Rogers books, and never stopped asking for another one.

Mark wanted a digital watch this last Christmas. I got him an analog one. I always did that, because it took me almost a year to teach him to tell time on a round clock face, and I was always afraid he would lose that skill. I guess I should have gotten him what he really wanted.

I have other regrets for things undone, gifts ungiven, words unsaid, and. time that should have been spent with him. A lot of us probably do. That opportunity is gone for the time being. But we know Mark is in a good place, that he has been welcomed back by his Father in Heaven, and that we will eventually see him again. I bear my testimony to you that the Savior lives and is there for all of us, that the Atonement and the Plan of Salvation are real, and I leave this farewell to Mark with you in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Posted in Bible, Boston, Family, Music | 2 Comments

Protected: A Block Off Dinah Shore Boulevard

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Uncomely and Broken

Posted in Uncategorized | Enter your password to view comments.

	Uncomely and Broken on Pope Leo on cinema: “an…
	David Cronin on Pope Leo on cinema: “an…
	Uncomely and Broken on Ishi and the Algorithm
	Dennis Davenport on Ishi and the Algorithm
	Uncomely and Broken on Theodore Parker’s Grave,…