Cinema,Classical Antiquity,Early Modernity,Education,Middle Ages,Universities

College Daze

posted on : July 26, 2021 posted by : The Bourbon Progressive 0 Comment

April 2009.

     This is another preliminary dispatch from the weltanschauung desk.  It doesn’t require a lengthy preamble.

     Early in 2009, the University of Richmond’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa needed a speaker for its annual banquet and induction of new members and its preference was for someone who holds a key and knows the secret handshake.  The organization went first to Abner Linwood Holton, who wasn’t interested, then to The Better Half, who absolutely wasn’t interested and who referred the organizers to me, who was untroubled by being the third choice.

     The call was for a thirty-minute after-dinner talk extolling the virtues of liberal arts education and that was what I cobbled together.  Though it’s heavy on academic boilerplate, there’s not much in it that I, reading it now, find, “cringe,” as the kids say.

     For the purposes of blogtown, the relevant part is near the end, the section addressing “the ‘consumer’ paradigm in education.”  It delves into what might be called the neoliberal takeover of higher education, Mont Pelerin’s besieging of the final bastion of the humanistic ideal.  Context here is useful.  The inductees were part of the first graduating class in the wake of 2008’s economic meltdown.  They were being thrust into an ugly, uncertain circumstance.  My worry was that the financial crisis would lend impetus to a trend I’d already discerned for a decade or more:  mounting pressure on students, especially from parents, to make immediate postgraduate employment not just the top but the only priority, to make the pay envelope the lone metric for judging an education’s worth.  Any unremunerative academic requirement was deemed inherently extraneous and should be excised from the mandated curriculum.  And any surviving remnant of the superfluities damned well better not be intellectually rigorous or taxing.  That would take the eye off the prize.

     I would like to say that my misgivings were unwarranted or maybe just exaggerated.  I can’t.  Many universities have wandered into the neoliberal glue trap and have made pandering to the “customers” the governing ethos.  This has manifested itself in the reduction, sometimes dismantling, of general education requirements and the dilution of whatever might be left.  The situation is indeed worse than this.  The siege metaphor works here.  As the ramparts are being breeched, the besieged clamber over one another to snatch bits from dwindling stores of food and water inside.

     An anecdote perhaps best illustrates the direness of the circumstance.  Several years ago, before the plague descended, I was party to a conversation at a social event on a downtown rooftop bar.  A woman representing some foundation – probably a right-libertarian outfit bent upon bring academia to heel once and for all – was flogging snake oil.  Her proposition:  Higher education’s overarching goal is to make students the best possible entrepreneurs of themselves.  The obvious corollary to this is that humanistic study must accommodate itself to this end or lose all relevance.  Somewhere Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises cackle.

     On that cheery note, here’s the thing. . .

Annual Dinner of the Richmond Association and the Epsilon Chapter of Virginia of Phi Beta Kappa

Robins Pavilion, Jepson Alumni Center

University of Richmond

3 April 2009

“The Liberal Arts Education in a Bottom-Line World”

     I would like to thank Lois Badey and Ellen Massie for allowing me to participate in this evening’s happy event.  The invitation compelled me to pay my Phi Beta Kappa dues and to purchase a pin, something precluded by student poverty at my own initiation.  Your ceremony returns me to spring 1982, when my graduation was imminent and all the possibilities attendant with youth and a liberal arts degree were ahead of me.  Now, many years later, I can assert categorically that virtually everything I value, all the good things in my life, find their roots in my undergraduate liberal arts education.  As an unabashed and joyfully biased partisan of the liberal arts, it seems best to remark on two things:  first, my own tiny bailiwick in the vast realm of the liberal arts – my research and teaching – and then the value of the liberal arts education.

     The genesis of my interests – I am a medievalist who focuses on the social and economic history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England – is a typical liberal arts tale.  A first-generation university student attends a western civilization survey in a large lecture hall with 250 of his closest friends and an inspirational instructor, an Italian medievalist by trade, kindles and, as the student’s academic advisor, nurtures an interest in medieval England.  The student leaves the Bluegrass for the Buckeye State to complete his education and is influenced by two more medievalists and many other professors and his interests ultimately bear the imprint of all these people.  The initial curiosity about the impact of ninth- and tenth-century Viking raids on Anglo-Saxon England gives way to a focus on how the eleventh-century Norman Conquest shaped English rural society which in turn surrenders to a fascination with the socioeconomic institutions of late medieval England.

     My research is admittedly arcane.  The late Middle Ages have, however, impinged upon popular imagination through cinematic images, for example Braveheart’s depiction of Anglo-Scottish conflict, Bergman’s exploration of the medieval understanding of death in The Seventh Seal, Olivier’s and Branaugh’s portrayals of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and, recently, A Knight’s Tale, a rethinking of chivalrous knightly combat for the MTV- and post-MTV generations.  For me, the best popular evocation of the late Middle Ages is not cinematic but literary.  For her 1978 study of the fourteenth century, the popular historian Barbara Tuchman offered the defining image of A Distant Mirror.  For Tuchman, late medieval Europe darkly reflected the concerns of her own twentieth century – political conflict and endemic and large-scale warfare, deprivation and famine alongside conspicuous consumption, epidemic disease on a mind-boggling scale, religious controversy and spiritual unease, and popular resistance to the established order – concerns I’m confident that Ms. Tuchman, were she alive, would deem equally relevant to our young twenty-first century.

     The era has inherent interest and I have observed it through the prism of a major ecclesiastical official, the abbot of the monastery at Bury St. Edmunds.  This wealthy abbey held property in more than 150 villages scattered across southeastern England.  I’ve focused on the villages where the abbot was sole landlord and managed his property personally.  In this profoundly agrarian society, land was the lion’s share of the abbot’s material wealth.  He received all produce from the acres he tilled.  The labor that brought the crops forth was performed by the abbot’s dependent tenants, their effort a condition of holding their own small plots from the abbot’s land.  Copious records produced by the abbot and his staff as they managed his property provide a window for viewing the layers of English society – a vast hierarchy stretching upward from the landless peasant who toiled as a day-laborer in order to eat to the abbot himself, who was a vassal to the king and an attendee of Parliament.

     At the eve of the fourteenth century, life was relatively placid in the abbot’s villages, at least on the surface.  Population growth during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had kept wages low and rents high, and, as a result, the abbot’s tenants were in no position to request reduced obligations and the abbot’s property was profitable.

     The abbots and his tenants, however, soon faced a series of transformative events.  Exceptionally cold and wet weather in 1315 – the so-called year without summer – triggered crop failure across northern Europe.  An ensuing Great Famine over several years carried away as much as fifteen percent of the population.  Speculation regarding the toll of a changing climate and a population possibly outgrowing its capacity to feed itself has been irresistible for some scholars.

     If England was overpopulated, that ceased a generation later when the Black Death entered England in 1348 and reached the abbot’s lands in 1349.  In short order perhaps half of the island’s inhabitants suffered a painful and dehumanizing death.  Subsequent national and local outbreaks ensured that England’s population was at best stagnant if not depressed for the balance of the Middle Ages.

     A generation yet further on, the social tensions arising from these profound demographic changes manifested themselves in England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the largest popular uprising of the European Middle Ages.  Perhaps one-hundred thousand rebels, inflamed by firebrand preachers and charismatic leaders to question the justice of the prevailing social order, left their villages and demanded freedom from demeaning labor services and dues.  The main peasant band struck London while another plundered some of the abbot’s villages, entered Bury St. Edmunds, stormed the abbey, executed the monastery’s prior and a local royal official, and paraded their heads on pikes before the authorities suppressed the rebellion.  While achieving little, the uprising underscored that transformative change was afoot in England.

Famine, plague, and rebellion were far from the only reasons the late Middle Ages have been called the “age of adversity.”  England and France engaged in a trans-channel military contest from 1337 to 1453 – the Hundred Years War – that closed the coffin on the chivalrous armored knight and introduced rank-and-file national armies and the use of gunpowder-fueled firearms and artillery.  The papacy departed Rome for Avignon in southern France for seven decades and across four more decades competing popes sat at both Avignon and Rome and a third pope briefly wandered northern Italy.  Consternation and spiritual unease fostered charges of a church grown too preoccupied with worldly power and property and too little engaged in the moral improvement and salvation of Latin Christendom.  The abbot and his tenants felt directly and indirectly these eddies in the stream of the late medieval experience.

     As is doubtless evident, the late medieval era can be painted in dark colors.  When I asked students this past autumn in my seminar on the late Middle Ages whether they would visit late medieval Europe if afforded the opportunity, their refusal was unhesitating and unanimous.  Study of the abbot, his property, and his tenants has, however, clarified for me some of the lessons to be gleaned from this turbulent era.

     Sometimes the most cataclysmic events become catalysts for ultimately productive changes.  For peasants who survived famine and pestilence, their labor became a scarce and valued commodity and a newfound ability to bargain with the abbot progressively reduced their servile obligations until they virtually vanished.  Their wages rose, their material standard of living improved, and, their persons became less bound to land and lord.  Put another way, the so-called manorial institutions that had for centuries subjected the vast majority of people to servility unraveled and energies were liberated that helped to push England into early modernity and modernity.  Viewed from another perspective, the abortive popular uprisings were perhaps not the product of oppression as much as of socioeconomic changes advancing too slowly to satisfy all.

     Another lesson is more universal:  the indomitability of the individual human spirit and the strength of the bonds of community.  These peasants witnessed crises in human mortality that rival if not surpass modernity’s industrialized destruction of human life.  Perhaps twenty-five million Europeans perished in a mere five years from plague alone.  In these English villages, society for a time was disordered, but by the next year survivors were taking up the land of the deceased, fields were plowed, crops sown and harvested, manorial courts convened, religious festivals held, young couples married, and infants born.  While Voltaire was several centuries in the future, his injunction at the close of Candide seems quite literally relevant:  “We must cultivate our garden. . .”  In uncertain times, this has been for me a source of comfort.  People invariably, having sustained a blow, rise and move forward.

     These research and teaching interests reflect the impact of the liberal arts on my professional life; now a few brief comments about the personal impact of the liberal arts.

     The value of the liberal arts education has been much on my mind recently.  My teaching obligations include regular involvement in the University of Richmond’s Core course.  In Core, an instructor and a group of first-year students for a year read, discuss, and write about an impressive array of books:  scientific and philosophical works, classic and modern novels, poetry and spiritual texts, in sum a chronologically and culturally ecumenical corpus of materials.  Near the year’s close, when the students are reasonably comfortable with me, I solicit their opinions regarding the core-course experience and I have been gratified by their seriousness of mind and forthrightness.  Grievances about the course’s mechanics inevitably arise, the brand of criticism that materializes in reference to any inherently imperfect human endeavor, complaints that I duly note.

     Of greater concern is an opinion expressed more commonly and forcefully with each passing year.  Students acknowledge that the course exposes them to works they never would have read of their own volition and concede that some of them are enjoyable; however, they question the fundamental usefulness of the project.  Many do not see how any course beyond the confines of a chosen field of endeavor – yes, many of them have a first and even a second major determined before setting foot on campus – will be of value in their future pursuits.  Put colloquially, these students do not see how the experience contributes to their bottom line.

     This notion does not arise from a vacuum and seems to reflect a broader shift in attitudes toward education.  Pressures have emerged recently to curtail or even eliminate depth and breadth requirements from university curricula – the requirements that encourage students to take humanities and science courses outside a major – in order to accommodate multiple majors and minors.  This pressure has materialized hand-in-hand with the waxing of a “consumer” paradigm in education, the notion that the “consumer” should have precisely nothing more or less than what the “consumer” desires.

     I have embraced the students’ expression of this view as an opportunity in my poor fashion to defend the liberal arts education.  The present profound economic uncertainty, shrinking university endowments, state budgets in crisis, and the inevitability of difficult decisions looming for every educational institution make the matter seem vastly more urgent tonight.

     I concede to my students readily and with utter sincerity the significance of their career paths.  Every type of work has dignity; every type of work has value; every type of work has its personal satisfactions.  For the fortunate few – and I expect all of you will be among this lucky elect – career becomes vocation, a calling, and its satisfactions become immense.  The career ceases to be just a path to material sustenance and feeds the soul.

     The liberal arts education, however, aspires to considerably more than remunerative and satisfying employment.  It aims not merely to create the working person but the whole person.  While our universities find their institutional roots in the Middle Ages, the liberal arts curriculum owes much to the Renaissance.  For the Italian umanisti, the humanitates forged the complete individual, a person adept in any endeavor and comfortable in any venue, public or private.  For me, however, the content of the Italian humanist education is less significant than the process of education espoused by the humanists.  For them, institutional education had a terminal point.  Those of you not pursuing another degree will soon conclude your institutional education with diploma in hand.  For the Italian humanists, however, education never ended.  Their goal, a goal shared with the modern liberal arts educator, was to inculcate the student with the knowledge, values, habits of mind, and tools to remain a student for a lifetime.  Stated more simply, the liberal arts education, better than any other, teaches one how to learn.

     With this, everything becomes possible.  It’s an education not intended to confirm one’s presuppositions but to test them through the examination of the manifold variety of human experience.  As you weather personal and professional conflicts in your future – such conflicts are inevitable – your ability to view the world through the eyes of others may not foster sympathy but perhaps just enough empathy to locate a patch of common ground and possibly then even resolution and reconciliation.  Moreover, what you’ve learned and what you are yet to learn will guarantee a life with richness, a life with texture, a life with depth, a life with context.  Most directly expressed, your liberal arts education is not just about your job; it’s about your life.

     Each of you now embarks on a grand adventure.  You’ll doubtless spend your twenties and thirties ascending the professional ladder.  I have absolute confidence that your UR liberal arts education will bring you professional success.  These years will also be filled with wonderful interpersonal experiences; your heart will be broken a time or three; you might as well be ready for it.

     It’s my expectation, however, that the value of your liberal arts education will become most evident to you as you pass through your forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and hopefully even beyond this.

     In this regard, I conclude with a personal example, my father-in-law.  He’s a retired physics professor who received an arts-and-sciences education at Princeton during the early 1940s and then did graduate work at the University of Illinois.  While at Urbana-Champaign, he met his future wife, who was completing master’s work in German language.  He was hired by Stanford University and there they settled and there they remain.  His career has been enviably successful both as a pure researcher and as a public scientist who has advised policy-makers across the political spectrum on arms control.  His marriage produced a great family and I’ve had the privilege to be part of it for nearly two decades.  In the view of many, I not only married “up” but I married well.  A fact about my father-in-law:  among his valued possessions is a book of poetry from his student days.  Now dog-eared, brittle, and on the verge of physical disintegration, it contains verses that he’s added as he’s encountered them over the decades.  An even more relevant fact:  in his eighties he has become a devotee of the classical Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides.  With the affable Herodotus, he has traveled the length and breadth of the vast Persian Empire and has mused along with Herodotus about why the Persians and the upstart Greeks came into conflict and how the Greeks against all odds prevailed.  With the complex, sophisticated Thucydides, he has analyzed an internecine conflict among Greeks – Athenians and Spartans – examined the nature of power and empire, and seen how both folly and achievement mark every phase of the human experience.

     In sum, because of your choice of a liberal arts education, you have much to look forward to.  At every age of your life, the world will remain a marvel.  On a good day, each of you will feel, to paraphrase a great writer, that you contain multitudes.  And, for me, that’s the ultimate bottom line.  Thank you.

Coda.

     The talk went about as well as it could have.  A colleague who attended afterward said, “I thought I was going to cry.”  The Better Half did her publicist routine, so the text of the speech made the rounds.

     And then there was the other guy.  An older gentleman, presumably a member of the Richmond Association, a club for the city’s Phi Beta Kappas, buttonholed me after most of the crowd had scattered.  He was vaguely, maybe begrudgingly complimentary, but he had a critique:  my failure to place reading of the Bible at the core of my characterization of the liberal arts.  I told him that the Core syllabus included Genesis and one of the gospels and that the university offers courses in religious studies.  I also mentioned that many students come from other religious traditions.  He wasn’t having it.  To him, a curriculum eschewing scriptural indoctrination is defective.  As he turned to leave, he said, “Be sure to get the Bible into your next talk.”  Between partisans of neoliberalism and those who envision the university as a Christian madrasa, higher education faces formidable challenges, to say nothing of the peculiar convergence of these groups politically, especially under the Trump regime.

Coda, coda.

     And then there’s the damage in public perception that higher education inflicts on itself.  The following year I was on the dais as a passive spectator of the Phi Beta Kappa induction.  The speaker was a high university administrator.  His address was problematic.  He essentially blew a clarion call for the inductees to take up the rhetorical weapons given them by the liberal arts and with them smite the head of every conservative they encounter.  The gentleman seemed not to realize that he wasn’t at a political rally, that no assumptions should be made about any student’s political leanings, or that many students had invited their parents because Phi Beta Kappa remains a signal honor and a source of parental pride.  The induction is a happy event, a celebration, and no one should leave it with a bad taste in their mouth.  I have no qualms – obviously – with using education to support one’s values and to persuade others but it’s nonsense like this that feeds the charge of universities as left-wing indoctrination camps.  The man’s deficit in self-awareness was breathtaking.

     I attended another Phi Beta Kappa banquet a few years later because several of my former students from the Core course were inductees.  The address fell to another university administrator.  The speech struck me as an act of industrial-grade projection.  Its gist:  The world is pain, Pain, PAIN with the odd soupçon of despair and your liberal arts education may help to understand and cope with PAIN, PAIN, PAIN, DESPAIR.  It fell well short of celebratory.  To borrow Bush the Younger’s reaction upon hearing The Prevaricator in Chief’s inaugural address:  “That was some weird shit.”  Other attendees confirmed my impression.  The address also underscored the perceived strangeness of academics.  Had I been a parent, I too might have wondered about the use of my money.

Education,Journalism

A Path Not Taken. . .?

posted on : July 26, 2021 posted by : The Bourbon Progressive 0 Comment

Summer 1986.

     Before descending into the recent political morass, some preliminary posts may offer clues about my worldview and contextualize what follows.  In 1986 I was taking my time completing an MA at the University of Kentucky and needed a summer job.  I answered a newspaper ad and was hired as a copyeditor and news-of-record reporter at The LaRue County Herald News, a weekly based in Hodgenville, Kentucky.

     It wasn’t an overly taxing job.  Once a story had been typeset, I took the proof to comb it for typos, poor orthography, grammatical errors, and transgressions of format.

     The other task entailed walking to the courthouse and summarizing the week’s transfers of property and civil and criminal court proceedings.  This was educational.  “Do not publish” sticky notes pasted on pages in the deed books revealed how desperately some local worthies wanted their machinations in real estate to be kept under wraps.  David Lynch’s characterization of small-town life rings true.  I ignored the sticky notes.  Reporting on the courts, I was threatened with a lawsuit for the first time in my life by a father convinced that I had persecuted his son by publishing the boy’s arrest, arraignment, and assignment of a court date on a marijuana charge.  At least the threat was leveled with “Christian love,” or so the gentleman insisted.

     The paper’s editor realized these responsibilities were not enough to occupy my time.  She handed me a newspaper style guide – I think it was the one for the Associated Press, maybe The New York Times – and told me to peruse it at my leisure.  By summer’s end, it was nearly memorized, time well spent.

     I was still intermittently idle, so I was given a story to report.  Mary Lowe – a Hodgenville resident and a schoolteacher at Fort Knox – was lobbying in Washington to halt a plan to shutter base schools at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell and scatter their students across nearby county systems.  A gracious and elegant lady, she invited me into her home and sat for a lengthy interview.  The remaining information for the story was gathered over the phone.  One call was a chat with the local congressman, William Natcher, a Democrat who eschewed campaign contributions and never missed a vote across four decades in the House (1953-94).  That’s old school.

     The finished product was lengthier than the editor had anticipated. She grumbled about the Herald News’ inability to compete with The (Louisville) Courier Journal in human interest stories, but she ran it as it was.  It was gratifying that my grandfather, not given to praise, told me he liked it, since he had inspired my reading of newspapers.  Even better, Ms. Lowe was overjoyed.  She came to The Herald News office to thank me and paid me a sterling compliment:  “You earned your degree!”  The unconcealed chagrin of The Herald News‘s main reporter, an inveterate eavesdropper, was a bonus.

     As I read the thing now, some of it is cringeworthy; nonetheless, it’s difficult not to muse about a path not taken.  My regard for journalists, especially print ones, has always been high.  As a teenager, I watched the Watergate hearings and read Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men.  I still screen the book’s film treatment occasionally to remind myself of the power of good journalism.  The summer at the newspaper was a scant year before the Reagan administration dismantled the Fairness Doctrine and cleared the way for the adoption by the electronic news media of its infotainment, ratings-driven model, a pox on American political life.  My arc, however, was already set.  I was bound for more graduate study.  Nonetheless, working at a newspaper still seems like a decent way to live.

     A couple of years ago I took photographs of the article from the bound copies of The Herald News in the LaRue County Public Library.  I noticed that it shared the front page with a photo of Wallace Wilkinson, who was pressing the flesh in Hodgenville shortly before announcing his candidacy for governor.  I doubt that this image and accompanying article made much of an impression on me in the moment; however, it illustrates how smaller, nearly sub rosa events, both personal and public, can have profound implications.

     I needed summer employment a year later and took a job at Wallace’s Books in Lexington, the college textbook company that Mr. Wilkinson founded after dropping out of the University of Kentucky.  It became the linchpin of his substantial fortune.  We summer warehouse inmates referred to the operation, not so affectionately, as “Wally World.”  It certainly was no amusement park.  Perhaps more about that at another time.

     Mr. Wilkinson had indeed declared his candidacy and the Democratic primary fell during my term of employment.  I suppose Mr. Wilkinson deserves thanks for enabling me to make a political statement through inaction.  As the primary approached, the warehouse’s toiling masses were summoned and told by a supervisor that there would be a march and rally downtown in support of the boss’s candidacy.  We were invited to participate, in effect to be paid partisans for a day, though we were under no obligation.  The supervisor said, “I hope y’all come.  I think Mr. Wilkerson is a pretty good guy.”  I didn’t.  His barebones platform emphasized a pledge to impose no new taxes and to inaugurate a state lottery.  Seven years into the Reagan presidency, my view of tax policy and especially of supply-side economics was already formed.  I had read David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics.  I, moreover, considered state lotteries appalling.  I stayed at the warehouse.  Virtually every other worker headed downtown.  Unstaffed, the place ground to a halt, so I passed the afternoon examining piles of incoming used books and preparing a book order.  An employee discount was the lone fringe benefit at Wally World.  I ordered a rack of Penguin paperbacks over the summer, so many that an observant supervisor expressed appreciation for an employee who valued books since they were his vocation.

     Unbeknownst to me at the time, Mr. Wilkinson’s ultimately successful bid was managed by a relative unknown, a man named James Carville.  This is where Mr. Carville made his bones.  It is fair to wonder whether he would have helmed Bill Clinton’s presidential run in 1992 had this earlier campaign gone sideways.  This throws into relief the mercenary impulses of the political consulting class:  Mr. Carville’s first success was shepherding a candidate who, as a Democrat, was a Ronald Reagan fanboy.

     Mr. Wilkinson’s career epitomizes the maladies that have metastasized in American politics:  As a businessman, he refused to pay sales taxes for his bookstores throughout the 1960s (a prefiguration of Jeff Bezos and Amazon?).  He acknowledged his use of deceptive advertising.  His businesses in 2001 were found to have been under water since 1992 and kept alive only through a marshalling of loans analogous to check kiting on herculean scale.  He invoked Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination more than seven score times when deposed on the matter.  He died bankrupt in 2002.  As a politician, he inspired campaign reform legislation through his lavish spending.  His Republican gubernatorial opponent characterized his lottery scheme as “Alice in Wonderland” economics.  His nephew – his appointment secretary – was convicted of extortion.  His wife mounted a failed run for governor in an unsubtle scheme to circumvent term limits.  His memoir boasted of his contempt for political norms.  He was a poster child for Democrats who sidled away from the party’s New Deal and Great Society values, who animated the Democratic Leadership Council (once chaired by Bill Clinton), and who narrowed the Overton window.  Beyond this, Mr. Wilkinson today might be called “Trumpy.”

     This has run longer than intended, but perhaps it offers some tiny wisdom:  Attend closely to the thin end of the political wedge while the ax head’s downward arc can still be pushed aside.

     Anyway, here’s the bit from The LaRue County Herald News —

“Local Woman Shows Lobbying Skills; Fights Plan to Close Military Schools,” The LaRue County Herald News, 17 July 1986, 1-2, 18.

     A LaRue County resident heads a lobbying delegation to the United States Congress.  Mary Lowe, of Hodgenville, a veteran teacher in the Fort Knox schools, has led a group of five other teachers to Washington on three separate occasions in an attempt to persuade the House Armed Services Subcommittee not to eliminate funding for the Fort Knox School system.

     Lowe first became aware of plans to close all schools on the nation’s military bases last December.  On December 3, Public Law 874, the proposal which would close these schools, was approved by President Reagan.

     According to William Natcher, Kentucky’s Second District congressman, “last year, in 1985, there was no objection (to changes in these schools) from any source.  It was moving right along because the date was 1990. . .When it began to look as if they were going to move as quickly as possible, the local districts became alarmed.”

     On May 9, the General Accounting Office issued a draft of the proposal by which these schools would be switched to other jurisdictions.  Copies were sent to all concerned parties, including the superintendents of the school systems that would be affected.

     In late August, a final vote upon the recommendations contained in the Government Accounting Office proposal will be taken in the House Armed Services Subcommittee for Facilities chaired by Rep. Ron Dellums of California.  It is toward that vote that Lowe has directed her lobbying efforts.

     Lowe believes that closing these schools, especially those at Fort Knox, would create a no-win situation for the three entities that would be most affected, the teachers and staff, the students, and the regions in which the schools are located.

     The proposal to close the schools stems from a jurisdictional change in Washington.  From their inception, the schools had been financed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which later became the Department of Health and Human Services.  The funding for this department comes from the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations, currently chaired by Rep. Natcher.

     In 1981, jurisdiction over these schools was transferred to the Department of Defense.  Lowe says that “the Department of Defense decided that it was in the business of defense, not education, so they decided that they wanted to transfer the operation of these section 6 (military base) schools to the state in which each school was located.”  If the DoD proposal is approved, the school systems at both Fort Knox and Fort Campbell, as well as 15 others, could be under different operation by July 1, 1990.

     According to Lowe, there are three possible outcomes for the Fort Knox schools.  The schools could be closed and the students bused to the nearest state facility.  In the case of Fort Knox, the majority of the students would be placed in the Hardin County system and the remainder would be bused to Meade County.  Fort Campbell students would be sent to schools in Christian County, Ky., and in Tennessee.

     Another option would be to permit the local school districts to utilize facilities already located on military reservations.  In the case of Fort Knox, the land in the military reservation was ceded by the state to the federal government and federal law prohibits any local agency from working on federal property.  Lowe said that the constitutional issues involved probably would prevent the use of that alternative.

     Lowe thought that the best solution would be to restore the control of these schools to Rep. Natcher’s subcommittee.  Rep. Natcher agreed.  Natcher said that, “If the schools were in our committee there would be no problem. . .Some of the schools want to be transferred to local school districts.  I’m against this in Kentucky. . .Those that don’t want to go to the local districts should go into the Department of Education for funding.”

     Should Lowe’s worst fears be realized and the schools are actually closed, the alternatives for Fort Knox’s 250 teachers and 213 other staff members would not be promising.  Only a very small percentage of these people could opt for early retirement and the rest could stand to lose significant retirement benefits.

     Teachers in the Fort Knox system are treated as out-of-state teachers.  They would be allowed to purchase 10 years of retirement benefits, but, Lowe said, “the cost would likely be between 20 and 30 thousand dollars, which we would have to pay in a lump sum to the Teacher Retirement System.”

     Cuts in salary are also not out of the question for these teachers.  Currently, their pay is comparable to that of teachers in the Louisville-Jefferson County metro area.  If they are transferred to the Hardin or Meade districts, some would be paid approximately $2,000 less per year.

     Also, the teachers would be allowed to transfer only 10 years of teaching experience into a Kentucky school district.  Sixteen percent of Fort Knox’s teachers have over 20 years of experience.  In the case of Lowe herself, she would lose 10 of her 20 years as a Fort Knox teacher and her pay would be comparable to that of a Hardin County teacher with only 10 years of experience.

     Also, Lowe noted, there is no guarantee that the local districts would hire these teachers.  In fact, there is a strong disincentive to hire many of them.  Seventy-three percent of Fort Knox teachers have a master’s degree or some other higher degree, demanding higher pay, which would effectively price them out of the local market.  It would be far less costly for the local school systems to hire teachers as they graduate from college and allow them to finish their master’s degrees as they teach.

     Nor is Lowe the only LaRue County resident who could be affected by a change in the Fort Knox schools.  A number of LaRue Countians either teach at Fort Knox or are members of the school system’s staff.  These Fort Knox employees have expressed varying degrees of concern.

     Laura Underwood, a 33-year teaching veteran at Fort Knox, said that she is not personally affected because she has the necessary number of years to retire, but that teachers with 20 or 25 years in the system stand to be significantly hurt by loss in benefits.

     Peggy Rice, a high school librarian, was greatly taken aback by the possibility of the schools closing, but said that “you can’t continue and work staying upset.”  She said that “Kentucky stands to be the big loser in all of this. . .because of the influx of 8000 more students.”  According to Rice, military families living on post at Fort Knox are not considered Kentucky residents; therefore, they do not pay Kentucky taxes.  If the students at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell are placed in local systems, they will receive educations for which their parents provide no support with their tax dollars.  She is also concerned with the possibility of being required to interview for jobs in the local system as any prospective employee.

     Other LaRue County residents employed by the Fort Knox system are Edwin Lobb, Ann Miles, Sherilyn Bell, Danny Flanders and Don Ford.  Louise Rosen, a recent retiree, would not be affected.

     Lowe says that “Kentucky has taken some excellent steps in education reform by making some changes that are progressive. . .and what the federal government is proposing is giving Kentucky 8,000 more students (4,000 from Fort Knox and 4,000 from Fort Campbell) whose education the state must now finance.”

     According to Lowe, another problem that the Department of Defense is ignoring is the special needs of students from military families.  Most of them are transient.  Students who spend their entire high school career at Fort Knox are rare.  And many of them have pronounced emotional problems resulting from frequent absence of a parent.  Teachers in such cases often become surrogate parents, and these emotional problems, not dealt with correctly, can seriously affect academic performance.

     Lowe believes that the local school systems do not have the facilities or the funds to deal with these problems.  Fort Knox has 12 full-time guidance counselors, more than the entire Hardin County system, a system that serves many more students.  There are special teachers for gifted students, 11 reading improvement teachers, and a full-time nurse in each building of the school system.

     Many students from military families come from bilingual families and Fort Knox provides courses in English as a second language to aid them.  Full-time aides are now on staff to provide day-long care for children with severe handicaps.

     Lowe does not believe that these needs could be met by the local school systems, especially in light of the fiscal problems they all now are experiencing.  Even without an influx of students from Fort Knox, the Hardin County system grows by 350 to 400 students per year and the system needs around 12 million dollars to come up to standards for classroom space.  Only one to two million is expected from the legislature.

     Even officials of the Hardin County public schools admit that the system could not easily receive these students.  Kay Sharon, Coordinator of Community Relations for the Hardin County schools, says that if Fort Knox students are transferred to her system, she “would hope that the federal government would make some provision because we don’t have enough funding as a county-wide system.”

     Such funding, however, would not likely be made available, according to Rep. Natcher.  He says that, within the General Accounting Office proposal, the students would be treated as any other student and the local systems would receive only the money that federal education funding formulas presently allow for each student.

     “Any reasonable person would conclude that the result could be a steep erosion of educational quality and sharp decline or even disappearance of needed school services not only for the Fort Knox pupils but also for those pupils located in the surrounding school districts,” Lowe said.

     Lowe took her first trip to Washington on Feb. 6 of this year.  She met with Rep. Ron Dellums of California, chairman of the house committee that will make the final recommendation on the Section 6 schools.  She also met with Rep. Natcher and almost every other member of the Kentucky Congressional delegation.  Lowe said that on the whole they were well received, with Sen. Wendell Ford and Rep. Carroll Hubbard being especially helpful.

     In March, Lowe and her colleagues returned to Washington to deliver personally a progress report to Rep. Natcher and to Sen. Ford’s staff.

     After the March meeting, Lowe coordinated a large letter writing campaign in support of the keeping the Fort Knox schools open.  Teachers, students, and local residents enthusiastically made their opinions known to the Kentucky congressional delegation.  Many of the transient residents of Fort Knox and their relatives sent letters to their congressmen in their home districts.  Lowe believes that this letter writing helped to increase awareness of the issue.

     Lowe made her most recent trip to Washington in April when she testified before Rep. Natcher’s subcommittee.

     As a lobbyist, Lowe has received high marks.  Rep. Natcher said that “Mary Lowe is making every effort to represent her schools and teachers in an excellent manner.”

     No final decisions will be made until Rep. Dellums’ subcommittee opens hearings in August.  Lowe said she hopes to be asked to Washington then to testify once more.

     Since April, Lowe has continued her lobbying efforts in other quarters.  In an attempt to increase grass-roots support, she has contacted, by her own count, between 150 and 200 local civic groups throughout the area, including a number in LaRue County.  She says that there is much interest in any changes occurring at Fort Knox because they usually have consequences for the entire region.

     Lowe has also directed her efforts at certain key state officials.  She said that Gov. Martha Layne Collins, State Supt. of Education Alice McDonald and State Sen. Joe Prather have all pledged their support.  Lowe has also contacted a number of candidates for office and they have promised to aid her if they are elected.

     Lowe has also been invited to attend a meeting of representatives from all the military base school systems across the nation in August at Fort Bragg, N.C.  Deputy Assistant Sec. of Defense Barbara Pope will also be there.

     In all respects, Lowe appears to be an excellent choice for a spokesman.  A native of Simpson County, she is one of five children, several of whom are active in the teaching profession.  She began her college education at Kentucky State University with the intention of eventually attending law school, but she finally settled upon a degree in elementary education.

     She began her teaching career at Georgetown Elementary in Hodgenville in 1960.  Soon thereafter, she married her husband William.  When the LaRue County schools completed their consolidation and Georgetown Elementary was closed in 1966, Lowe moved to the Fort Knox school system, where she has taught since.  During her 26-year teaching career, she has completed a master’s degree at Western Kentucky University and has served for seven years as the president of the Fort Knox Teachers Association.

     She is member of the First Baptist Church, the League of Women Voters and the Hodgenville Women’s Club.  She said she hopes to become involved more actively with these groups once the Fort Knox matter is resolved.

A Coda.

     As I was putting the finishing touches on the materials for this post, I went to the online version of the The LaRue County Herald News to see whether its archives were digitized.  No luck there; The Herald News has a light digital footprint.  However, a search turned up two newer stories about Mary Lowe.

     The first was an appreciation of her to commemorate Black History Month in February 2013.  It detailed her serendipitous path to her first teaching job at Georgetown Elementary, also known as the Georgetown Colored School, in Hodgenville in 1960.  By all accounts, she was a wonderful instructor who had to contend with the remnants of the separate and decidedly unequal accommodations that Black students and teachers endured.  She left for the Fort Knox school system when the Georgetown school was closed in 1966 as the final step in fulfilling the requirements of Brown v. Board of Education and the completion of the consolidation of the LaRue County school system.

     The second story appeared in August 2013.  Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes namechecked Ms. Lowe in the kickoff speech for her unsuccessful campaign to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell.  In 1988, Ms. Lowe became president of the National Association of Section Six Educators, the organization for teachers on military posts.  She traveled to Washington that year to lobby for the right of teachers in military schools to bargain collectively.  And therein lay an instructive anecdote.  She took her case to Senator McConnell.  According to Ms. Lowe, he said, “I can’t do that.  I do what the President tells me to do when it comes to a vote in the Senate.  I can’t do that.”  As she turned to exit, the senator “came from around the desk and put his hand out to shake my hand.  Somebody came out to snap my picture. . . .There it was in the paper – an example of how the senator works for his constituents.  I never felt so insulted.”  Mr. McConnell’s shabby treatment of constituents was evident during his first term and has never flagged, as underscored by Matt Jones in Mitch, Please!  How Mitch McConnell Sold Out Kentucky (and America Too).  No voter unable to brandish a corporate campaign contribution need apply.  Ms. Lowe was more warmly received by Representative Natcher, who for her “ranks among the best.”

     In 2012, Mr. Lowe became the vice president of the LaRue County Democratic Women’s Club.  In every respect, she’s a person after my heart.

     The 2013 stories are found at www.laruecountyherald.com/content/teacher-learned-along-her-students-georgetown-school and www.laruecountyherald.com/content/grimes-mentions-hodgenville-woman-campaign-speech.

     The Bourbon Progressive feels compelled to have a slash of Elijah Craig in honor of this great lady.  Wherever you are, here’s to you, Mary Lowe!

A Coda to the Coda.

     One more thing:  The story about Alison Lundergan Grimes, Mitch McConnell, and Mary Lowe was written by Linda Ireland, a past editor of The LaRue County Herald News.  For me, she’ll always be Linda Powell, the girl who sat behind me in junior American History and senior English.  If you by happenstance see this, Linda, kudos on the story.  I hope you are well and prosperous.

Greetings

Why the Bourbon Progressive?

posted on : July 26, 2021 posted by : The Bourbon Progressive 0 Comment

April 2021.

This existential question begs to be the first matter addressed on this blog because, by all rights, this blog should not exist.  I’ve been called a Luddite and that’s fair enough, if the charge targets my insistence that neither the laptop nor the cyber realm become master rather than servant.  My low regard for social media is the corollary to this.

     A decade or so ago, My Better Half and I shared a pleasant lunch with a pair of marketing consultants at Facebook who were ultimately hired by the tech behemoth and prospered there.  They made the case for our opening accounts by emphasizing the value of “connection.”  I told them that the project struck me as narcissistic.  They were taken aback and offered no good riposte.  This “connection” they lauded seemed to me ersatz, cold, sterile, quasi-anonymous.  My assessment of the medium has not wavered in the interim.  I have never been on MySpace, let alone Facebook or Twitter, and suffer no feeling of deprivation.  Blogging, likewise, has held no allure for me.  The master-servant thing makes the compulsion to post materials frequently a dire prospect to contemplate.  So, I’m a reluctant, nearly accidental blogger.

     What changed my mind?  The country’s disconcerting, disquieting, disorienting politics has much to do with it.  To whatever degree someone whose formative years were passed in the Bluegrass can be considered Southern, I’m a Southerner whose political leanings tend toward progressive populism.  For me, as for many, the ascent of the Orange One to the White House in 2016 was a watershed.  His term in office, if nothing else, was clarifying.  The rot in the American political system, already evident to any thinking person, was made manifest for anyone caring to look.  One of its political parties has descended into an intellectual void, its leadership bordering on collective sociopathy, its contempt for one-person, one-vote democracy undeniable and even flaunted, and its raison d’être stripped to bald retention of power.  Then there is the other party.  It long ago lost its way.  It strayed from its roots and compromised its values.  It forgot whose interests it was supposed to serve.  It became paralyzingly feckless, fearful of its own shadow.  His Orangeness’s reign revealed just how long overdue is the day of reckoning for the neoliberal consensus that has shaped American political life for a half century and has benefited the few while immiserating the many.

     With The New and Now Former Occupant came the deluge:  trampling of democratic norms, bullhorn bigotry, open and seemingly joyful corruption, brazen nepotism, clownish authoritarianism.  Like many, I was “activated,” determined to do my small part, whatever was within my scope, to push back against the depredations of the Trump regime.  I attended marches and protests, such as the Tax March in Washington, DC, in April 2017; a counterprotest here in Richmond in September 2017 when the “New Confederate States of America,” a sad, ragtag band of neo-Confederates, made an appearance at the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue and just as quickly cravenly decamped; a protest in Richmond’s Capitol Square in June 2018 against The Xenophobe-in-Chief’s immigration atrocities; or a rally in front of the Richmond’s federal courthouse in November 2018 to demand the continuation of the Mueller investigation after the jettisoning of the vile Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.  Had I accepted an invitation from the Richmond Peace Education Center to jump on the bus, I would have been in Charlottesville in August 2017 when Heather Heyer was murdered by a neo-Nazi loon.  And I began to write letters to the editors of some newspapers and magazines and put together a handful of opinion pieces.

     When these odds and ends began to reach print, The Better Half commenced a full-court press for me to start a blog.  She has always been my unquestioning and unflagging supporter – the exaggerator of my virtues and the minimizer of my defects.  She has also been my self-appointed publicist and forwards whatever I write to friends and acquaintances.  She claimed from the outset that people wanted to read this stuff; I had and still have doubts about this.  The rationale for my deafness to her pleas was that blogging would be tantamount to preaching to the choir, that the readers would be people predisposed to agree with me.  The only reason to write was to reach those who disagreed.  Print newspapers and magazines were the best media for this.

     Then She Who Must Be Obeyed – thanks Rumpole – made a compelling argument.  She reminded me about my submissions that never saw the light of day.  Truth be told, some of these “misses” are more interesting than the “hits.”  A blog can be a place for any genuinely interested people to have a look at them, a repository, an archive.  For someone by nature and education archivally minded, this has an appeal.  I also discovered that creating a blog is neither difficult nor expensive.  So, Joanna darlin’, you wore me down.  You win on this one and, whatever becomes of it, it is largely for you.

July 2021.

     A season has passed since my original drafting of the remarks above.  In the interim – in the interstices scattered through the requirements of quotidian existence – letters to the editor and old essays were resurrected from the bowels of my laptop, introductions were written, photos and images were scavenged, and blogposts were assembled.  During this final week of July, the website will be coming to life and initially will contain more than seventy posts, a small mountain of content.  This is probably not how these things typically begin, though I’m no aficionado of the form and am happy to be corrected on this.

     As the blog – ugh, what a wretched neologism – is becoming public, the pangs of hypocrisy I’m feeling are perhaps unavoidable.  The finished product seems narcissistic and it’s fair to ask how deeply I’ve become mired in the navel-gazing tarpit that is cyber realm.  Then again, how could the endeavor not assume narcissistic contours when the task was to revisit, organize, and comment upon what I’ve thought and written about over the past few years?  Be that as it may, the project was a spur to introspection, so it couldn’t have been devoid of value.  Whatever the case, it’s time to push the launch button.

A Word Regarding Copyright and Paywalls.

     Reluctant to offend the gods of copyright, I haven’t included the texts of letters and essays that were published and instead have given links for their online versions.  Some items may be hidden behind paywalls, though most should be accessible.  Since I’m bibliographically minded, full library citation has been included for the locations of letters and editorials that have appeared on the printed page.