‘The Last Glimmering’

I highly recommend the most recent Ricochet podcast. I don't always listen, but this morning I was involved in a particularly intricate farm maneuver, and I needed something to distract myself, so I put it on.

It's wide-ranging and discursive, and although I'm going to focus in this post only on two short bits of it, you should probably listen to the whole thing.

James, Rob, and Peter set up the nexus of my concern at the six or seven-minute mark, where they discuss the differences between the college protests of the 1960s and those of today. I think they make two salient points: 1) their contention that, irrespective of ideology or anything else, the students of the 1960s were far more literate and grounded in facts and history than those who have come along some sixty years later; and 2) their contention that--although the protests of the 1960s didn't actually end the Vietnam War--a "heroic myth" took hold in the minds of those who'd participated, and that that heroic myth has come down through the ages, imbuing the 1960s with a cachet as an idyllic age of campus protests that accomplished something revolutionary and progressive, and which took the world in a new and better direction, all thanks to the idealistic and non-judgmental young people who showed the rest of the world the way.

Someone (I think it was James) then launched into an entertaining and very relevant sidebar about how many of these people "attached themselves like lampreys" to respected institutions, and spent the next several decades hollowing them out from the inside, all the while enjoying the fruits of the society and culture they denigrated and despised, and raking in money, hand over fist. Also something about (paraphrasing): "Hypocrites all, intellectually, emotionally morally, socially, bankrupt little people wafting along on some cloud of self-regard they conjured up in the 60s and the 70s and which hasn't evaporated yet."

LOL.

I consider myself pretty able at 'conjuring up' word pictures, but this was really good. And really true. Bravo!

The fellas then moved on to a more specific discussion of Zionism, antisemitism, intersectionality and a few other topics, including what they think should be done with the Ivy Leagues, but they returned to anecdotal college stories at about 47:30.

This was when I started to cheer.

Rob began by talking about his own college experience (Yale) which (guessing) must have been from about 1984-1987. He talked about how almost all his teachers had experienced some seminal, adolescent, 1960's moment in their lives, and how this affected every aspect of their teaching, becoming something they couldn't really stop talking and proselytizing about, and that their "entire curriculum was going to be based on how great the 60's were. The generation that rioted in the streets in the 60s...went on to teach classes...they wrote their own myth."

Peter stepped in and said, "I'm just enough older than [Rob]," that when Peter was at Dartmouth (1975-1979 according to Wikipedia) "there were two layers of professors," the senior of whom had all trained in the 1950s. "They had standards, they spoke well," and they acted with dignity towards their peers and their students. But--Peter said--"the associate professors, the young guys, had trained during the 60s" and they were different. He mentioned a young man with long hair who came in at the start of class, sat on the desk, and said (paraphrasing), "Well, OK then, what did you all make of The Taming of the Shrew?"

Peter dropped that class, and signed up for a different one, forthwith.

He says, "I was there at the last glimmering, when you could avoid the jokers."

Me too, Peter. Me too.

Your reminiscence catapulted me back to my freshman year at Duquesne University three years earlier, in 1972. (Not guessing about that, and although it's not confirmed by Wikipedia, pretty sure I've got the date right.)

When you're an incoming freshman, you don't have a lot of context or perspective to judge either personnel or course content, so you pretty much take your schedule as it's given to you, and adjust as needed after the fact, if you can.

I remember specifically two classes, both requirements, over half-a century ago: Psychology 101, and Ethics.

The Psychology class was taught by a graduate student (Richard A). He was the long-haired, grubby dude in jeans who came in at the start, sat on the desk, and asked us how we felt about course requirements, and if we'd rather be doing something else, somewhere else.

Heroically, I kept schtum, and sat through what was one of the longest fifty minutes of my life. Immediately afterwards, I went to see my advisor, who was dismayed, and who told me that Richard was one of their most popular teachers (I bet he was), and who couldn't understand why I wanted to switch. But I did, to the tutelage of a Catholic Spiritan priest I don't think was a world-class scholar, but who at least wasn't a hairy, self-involved loon.

My Ethics class was taught by a young man, a very newly-appointed Assistant Professor, who gave us a day-one problem to solve, along the lines of if it would be "ethical" if we came across the aftermath of a car accident and discovered the car about to explode, and a woman trapped inside it by her hair (which had been caught in something, somehow), in which the only way to free her and save her life would be to cut her hair, something she was begging us not to do.

This--apparently--was supposed to be some sort of moral dilemma, worthy of a semester's worth of introspection and discussion.

I bailed on that one, too. Duquesne at the time had a rather impressive faculty, some of its members particularly noteworthy considering the institution's pretty traditional (back then) Catholic values. I signed up for a class taught by Reiner Schurmann. Again, my advisor shook his head. "He's one of the most difficult professors; students don't like him," he said. "Good," I replied. (What I didn't realize at the time was how brilliant, transgressive, and a bit weird he, and the class, would be. Still, I've never regretted my choice. He really was a kind and lovely man. And whoever knitted the multi-colored Scandinavian-style sweaters he often wore to class--Respect!)

Once I got past that first semester, I had a much better idea of what to do, where to go, and who to sign up with. So that--although I didn't attend Yale, or Dartmouth, or any other Ivy League institution (I was accepted at the one I really wanted to go to, but family circumstances didn't permit it, and I don't regret the step-down) I think I got an excellent education. And--since I spent almost four decades happily married to one of the professors I chose in my junior year--I really can't complain about any of it.

But I've never heard it put quite as succinctly as Peter Robinson put it yesterday:

"I was there at the last glimmering, when you could avoid the jokers."

In the early years of the 1970s, we all could.

I avoided the jokers, and my life has been much the better for it.

Pretty sure that's it's almost impossible to avoid the jokers these days, other than at a handful of very select institutions who've intentionally chosen another way.

What a shameful, deliberate, systematic, manipulative disservice has been done, across the board, to our young people.

Here's to a revivification of the Spirit!