When I Become Rich, I Will Endow a Chair at Reed College in Trivial Synthetica Studies
Exploring stuff. From me, quoting the Yale Alumni Magazine:
But even the fact that [Donald Kagan] would resign the deanship in protest during a bitter fight between professors and administrators over then-President Benno Schmidt's plan to restructure the faculty did not prove as wrenching as the controversy that came to a head in 1995, when Yale decided to return the $20-million gift that had been given to the University in 1991 by Lee Bass '79 to set up an interdisciplinary program for the study of Western civilization.
The program's centerpiece was to have been a four-credit sequence modeled on Directed Studies and on a course called "Periclean Athens," both of which Kagan had a role in shaping and teaching. The professor, whose multivolume text, The Western Heritage, is considered definitive, and at least six of his senior colleagues planned to assemble "a comprehensive, intensive, interdisciplinary program to examine the length and breadth of Western civ" for a select group of undergraduates.
While left-of-center critics pointed out that Yale hardly needed any new offerings in the area, Kagan contends that they missed the point. "It was never a matter of not having enough courses in the subject," he says. "But in the humanities at Yale, there's a cafeteria-style approach to learning in which individuals take a bunch of courses and put information together as best as they can. We wanted to provide an alternative, which we thought would have been an extraordinary and unusual learning experience -- we weren't planning to be uncritical cheerleaders."
The motivation for Bass's $20-million gift was a speech Kagan had given to freshmen in 1991 in which the then-dean called for putting Western civ "at the center of our studies."
It is a viewpoint he continues to hold. "We are the product of Western civilization, so it's necessary to understand yourself before you can understand anyone else," says Kagan.
But in the early 1990s, a "culture war" was raging, and, following the departure of Schmidt and Kagan from the administration, the Bass program no longer had a strong advocate. It went dormant, resurfacing with a vengeance late in 1994 when allegations -- first in the conservative campus publication Light and Truth, and later, in the Wall Street Journal -- appeared that accused the University of attempting to use the gift for something other than its intended purposes. Although President Levin denied the charge and attempted to engage in some behind-the-scenes fence-mending, the damage was done. In March 1995, Lee Bass asked for, and later received, his money back.
Kagan still regrets the loss of the Bass program, for it would have afforded him and his fellow professors a chance to work together. And it would have given undergraduates the opportunity to watch their teachers do intellectual battle. "Students rarely get to observe an important truth firsthand: that learned people can and do disagree," he says. "But when that happens, they can explore their differences in a civilized manner."...
From the Yale Daily News:
The Kramer affair is not the first time the University has fumbled a major gift from a prominent alumnus. In 1995, the University returned a $20 million gift from Texas billionaire Lee Bass '79 that was earmarked to start a program in Western Civilization. Bass said he rescinded his offer because Yale did not act quickly enough on his request to create the program, but the University said Bass had attached too many conditions for the gift's use.
The Kramer affair is explained earlier in the article:
After years of negotiations, Yale may finally secure a substantial gift from Larry Kramer '57, a prominent gay alumnus whose gift the University turned down just four years ago, said Provost Alison Richard, Yale's chief academic and financial officer.
Kramer's donation will likely be directed toward expanding gay and lesbian studies at Yale, but is not likely to include an endowed professorship or a new gay and lesbian student center, said Marianne LaFrance, chair of the Funds for Lesbian and Gay Studies committee.
In July 1997, the University turned down Kramer's offer to endow a professorship in gay and lesbian studies and to build a gay student center. The national media seized on the story and widely decried Yale's lack of progressiveness in academia.
Texans for Public Justice says this about Lee Bass:
Lee Bass manages the inherited oil assets of this now-diversified billionaire family, which is Bush’s fifth largest career patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity. When Bush’s ailing Harken Oil suspiciously won exclusive offshore drilling rights in Bahrain in ’90, the Basses bankrolled the venture. Two of Texas’ wealthiest Pioneer families, the Basses and the Wylys (see Charles Wyly, Jr.), mobilized their lobbyists to kill a ’97 bill that would have taxed investment partnerships in Texas, with the Basses threatening to move their operations to another state. Bush appointed Lee Bass chair of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), which is in hot water for selling alcohol and tobacco ads for brochures distributed to park visitors. In a controversial ’98 move, the agency privatized wildlife by granting permits that allow landowners to trap and breed “wild” deer that they can sell on the hoof to hunters who lease their land. Yale returned the $20 million that Lee Bass gave it in ’95 for a Western Civilization program. Bass wanted to control related faculty appointments; critics said he would use this power to exclusively promote ideas of “dead white European males.”
Meanwhile, the University of Kansas is afflicted with reactionary fascist baby seal clubbers:
The union of the Humanities and Western Civilization Programs in 1997 brought together the College's oldest interdisciplinary degree program, Humanities, and one of the oldest and most widely recognized "great books" programs in the U.S., Western Civilization....
Western Civilization is a two-semester interdisciplinary humanities program centering in selected influential writings of the Western world from ancient times to the present. For some years the program has been committed to including, in our readings and pedagogy, attention to the issues of gender, race, the Jewish experience in the West, and the interaction between Western and non-Western cultures....
Founded in 1947, Humanities has over the years been a catalyst and a forum for faculty who want to develop innovative courses that transcend disciplinary boundaries, and an individualized interdisciplinary major for students who want to explore and integrate a variety of areas of study. Among its popular courses have been the "Masterpieces of World Literature" series, the "Interrelations of the Humanities and the Arts" course, the "Biography of a City" series, and the "Science, Technology, and Society" course....
Millennium year 2000 was a Regent's-mandated Program Review year for Humanities and Western Civilization. Of the College undergraduate programs reviewed in 2000, only HWC and Classics received evaluations of "exceptional" for their undergraduate programs. Naturally we're proud of that recognition of the high quality of our major, our Humanities courses and our Western Civilization program....
But the University of Chicago is not constrained by right wing orthodoxy:
The gutting of the University of Chicago's core sequence in Western Civilization is one of the most important higher-education stories of [2002]. Once the gem of Chicago's vaunted core program, the Western Civilization sequence has been virtually phased out — cut from ten sections to two. Separate shorter sequences in ancient civilization and European history have replaced the old year-long program in Western Civ. Critics from Saul Bellow to Gertrude Himmelfarb to the National Association of Scholars have decried the changes....
Something important is at stake here. The main point of the Western Civilization sequence is to convey the idea of Western history as a whole — to draw the connections, and note the differences, between the ancients and the moderns. To understand how Machiavelli drew on, but also broke with, the ancients, or to understand the difference between Cicero's virtue and Tocqueville's "self-interest rightly understood," one has to study the sweep of Western history in sequence. This is important to us, because it was of profound importance to our forebears. The leading figures of the Renaissance, like the Founders of the United States, saw themselves as acting within a living tradition that connected them to the Ancients. The balance of power framework built into our constitution, for example, was drawn from Roman precedents by the Founders, who were intimately familiar with Cicero, Livy, and a whole range of Roman writers. It's no coincidence that our upper house is called the Senate, or that our monumental architecture harks back to Greece and Rome.
The point of the Western Civilization sequence is to nurture this sense of a living and continuous tradition of the West. That cannot be accomplished by a classicist assigning extra Cicero in a specialized course on ancient history. It can only be accomplished by a sequence of courses that connect Cicero, Machiavelli, and Tocqueville, a sequence taken in common by sufficient numbers of students to spark real discussion and debate, even outside of class. It is this sense of shared tradition that is being lost here, and that is what this debate over Chicago's curriculum changes is really about....
Count on the naturists to join the fray:
I think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The New Deal, you ask? What does the New Deal have to do with nudism? Well there is a significant connection between nudism and the New Deal, as came to mind when I read that another great university is dumbing down its curriculum, the University of Chicago -- more on that anon. Nudism has its place in contemporary times. The various sexual liberation movements of recent decades have unfortunately overshadowed nudism, but its place remains whether one be conservative or liberal. Conservative nudists, such as myself, heartily approve of and even advocate nudism in the shower; or, if one is daring, the bath. Liberals, when they think of nudism (which is to say if they can get their minds off necrophilia or whatever their latest sexual liberation movement might be), approve of nudism everywhere else. They approve of it on public beaches, in national forests, and probably at the suburban supermarket. As you know, liberals approve of anything that disturbs conventional people....
One of the leading nudists in the New Deal, as erudite readers will recall, was Dr. Maurice Parmelee, a very learned man, draped or undraped. He was a Ph.D., a member of the Institute International de Sociologie, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Anthropological Society. He was also in the early 1940s an employee of Vice President Henry Wallace's Board of Economic Warfare, where he advocated "universal nudism" both at work and at play, until, at the behest of Congress, Wallace's right-hand man, Milo Perkins, fired him....
All of which brings us to the University of Chicago's dumbing down of its curriculum. It proposes to replace most of its illuminating and demanding Western civilization core classes with European civilization courses. These courses will begin Western civilization at the Middle Ages. The foundations of our civilization among the Greeks, the Jews, and the early Christians, will be obscured. The development of Western reason and spirituality, law and human rights, will get short shrift. What generations of civilized Americans have found laughable will become a mystery to growing numbers of supposedly educated Americans.
It is well known that American universities are becoming sanctuaries for grimly earnest disseminators of the dubious: women's studies programs, ethnic studies, sex studies -- most of which are not far removed from the silliness of Dr. Parmelee. All of these propaganda courses arrive in the curriculum at the expense of serious studies in history, literature, and philosophy that are at once intellectually stimulating and that inform students of the origins of the way we live. They also have for generations developed discriminating minds. That is the mark of an educated person, the ability to analyze right from wrong, seriousness from absurdity, good sense from nudism. Wherever Dr. Parmelee is today, who doubts that he sides with those university officials now driving core courses in Western civilization out?
Not that Donald Kagan was a naturist. A professor without a robe just isn't a professor, you know.
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