I taught how people think about success, and he asked about self-satisfaction; perhaps the only thing which lasts, which serves the psyche more, the outside judges less (or damn them!).

Ooh-h-h! I breathed deeply, the breath expanding, invading all the areas of my body where the edges of hurt reside. Self, I thought, where are you so I can feed you, so I can satisfy you?

My self answered back, that place-in-me which ranges from a rather bitchy aesthetic which prefers the whipping of birch bark on frozen days, on sauna-ed flesh’s excesses, to a gluttonous obesity of countenance whose satiety is reached only at near collapse, that self answered back with some sort of sardonic grin which blinded me and turned-off thinking.

I worried. It worried me. It pushed, bent, I wanted to run into the mirror so its silvered surface would dissolve and welcome me into Lewis Carroll’s domains behind; so I could look out, protected, and glance at my self glancing at its self looking for some satisfaction, pleased…

The mother of the fledgling organist – the student of my partner in music – exclaimed in some musing wonderment: did Bach compose much for the violin, too…she supposed. I giggled, the awed knot inside my deepest self giggled too, and I said, simply, “yes, quite a bit.”

Details, she didn’t want. I supposed she had realized, finally, that in her son’s playing of Bach, something of import might be happening; finally, after many years of experiencing Bach, but not within any realization.

Right now, preparing to perform a Bach Trio (D minor) with flute and organ, I am struggling to discover the whole of the music written-in to that composition. This trio, like the violin-keyboard sonatas, a sort of aberration from what is ordinarily Bach. Each change of string a new voice written in counterpoint to the flute: this sonata, of-a-piece in many ways.

Some 18 years ago a friend wondered if I could play the unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas, and I responded that I thought (was certain: lolling in my unpracticed, pre-humbled days) I could play any Baroque pieces.

What surprise, what ignorance, what pleasure to discover these masterpieces inspired my beginning to restudy the violin. Now, imagining my competency to play some of them (!?); imagining at last performing a few movements, Bach is at once thrilling and tough. The strength, the memory, the knowledge and confidence necessary to play them, makes them good practice for so many other techniques, for hearing chords, for…everything musical.

Maybe that mother will learn, too, to study Bach, to study with Bach, to hear, to feel all the sounds and voices and timbres resonating on this earth, calling out the spirits of our gods of music so we may hear them and they us…

(Currently playing-at the unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas – far, far to go…!)

The search for, the wondering of asking Why, always imposes its power over the quest for Where I Am, pushing out, nudging the stay-in-this-day backwards into all-of-times. ‘Why?’

Away, go away silly question. You do me no good. Why do you impinge? Why do you ask, ‘Why?’

Today, house-cleaning, my intellectual vacuum cleaner running at high speed, sucking the dust of my memorized questions, trying to free my mind for what is today, and what I have to do; need to do. ‘Why?’

This was about (my book) Next Places, the study of oneself as necessary to being in the world.

The event was organized by Solutions Twin Cities a group of fairly young architects, trying to make/expand the Twin Cities as the cultural/social center it’s been becoming, and keep it all going. Thanks to Troy Gallas and Colin Kloecker for creating this type of forum.

[Download the PDF version or read the full text below. Updated from previously published version in Organization, May 2001; vol. 8: pp. 403 - 415.]

Abstract. My vision for the future university acknowledges the facts of rapid change in the world. It attempts to conserve the idea of the university as structures and process by centering the university on a study of changes as they are redefining knowledge. As vision, it asks that faculties join in Centers for the Study of the Present Age to discuss, teach and attempt to shape the futures of Science and Technology and their ramifications. Key words. future university; new vision; re-center the university; study of present age

The vision: when I speak and think of the university, I have in mind the largest institution, the greatest number of students at all levels, professional as much as academic; graduate and postgraduate, as well as undergraduate.

The curriculum is at its maximum: some 150 subjects/disciplines in which one can garner a PhD. I have in mind, then, the largest public research universities, especially those which (also) educate their students to serve their states in the traditions of Land Grant: including agriculture and the mechanical arts.

While there are ample reasons to describe a private (research) university of fame or privilege as the descriptor of the university – say, the top of the pyramid of American universities, an Oxbridge or a Berlin – I think it important for our understanding of the present toward the future to consider the university serving the interests of the widest public or publics. In this setting, I intend to focus on the structure-processes of the institution, but particularly on how the idea of a university will intersect with, even help to define, the nature of the future.

I will therefore use the institution I know best – the University of Minnesota located in that urban cultural oasis of Minneapolis and St Paul (the Twin Cities) – as example and metaphor. I will propose a new vision in the development of a truly important University of Minnesota: The Study of the Present Age (Kierkegaard, 1940).[1]

Whether this vision might apply to privately endowed universities – we shall see. Whether more than one university will survive? – this we shall also see. Whether Minnesota is metaphor or reality? – time will tell.  We all find ourselves afloat in a sea of market-driven forces in this moment of hype and reality of an online Phoenix University and the recently globalized university where the very idea of a university is constructed as new products for whatever its markets will turn out to be. I oppose the idea that the market alone will determine the nature of the university.

This vision is simple in its statement. The present University of Minnesota will expand to include and center itself about the Study of the Present Age. A number of Centers will be created which will literally study, discuss, publish in the contexts of the most important issues of these times. Minnesota will be the place where the changing and continuing world is studied, criticized, shaped.

Primary will be the Center of the Study of Science and Technology as they are developing and changing the very ways in which we operate and think about being: new products, new ideas, even moving our ideas of reality from the world or from texts to whatever virtual will mean: media…and. Other Centers will include the Study of a Sustainable World; Life in the World’s Cities; the Changing Nature of Work; Curing and Teaching; Globalization; the Crisis in Meaning; Ageing and Sageing; Integrative Studies. There may be other suggestions.

There will be a Provost or Vice-President who leads this Center for the Study of the Present Age; and there will be an intellectual leader or coordinator as well. All the present faculty of the university will be included within it for perhaps 10–20 percent of their time; to join it at different points, and for varying lengths of time.[2]

The curriculum of the university as it exists at present – especially in the Liberal Arts and Sciences – will (thus) be preserved. The undergraduate students will be educated broadly in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. But they will also be educated to be able to join in discussions in various of the Centers for the Study of the Present Age, at a high critical and intellectual level. To enable this, I propose a pedagogical-dialogic interactive approach to critical thinking.[3]

Centering the university round the Center for the Study of the Present Age, the central and current ideas and disciplines of the university will be preserved, essentially. Otherwise the idea of a university will drift with the winds and currents of monies, politics and, possibly, religion: the worries of permeability of integrity and academic freedom so carefully pondered by Hofstadter and Metzger (1955).

Our students – or, as they now say, consumers or products – will be quite capable in the context of (what I call) an unscripted time,[4] as they will be broadly educated, with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking; able to think-out the world as it happens, and to perform within it at fairly advanced levels. Otherwise, the temptation in a time of great change is to derogate the history of the idea of the university, and to train rather than to educate students for a changing and clamoring market. The Study of the Present Age can both preserve the sense of the larger curriculum and provide for futurity and, to the extent that we develop an important University of Minnesota, it will also do much to shape that futurity.

I think that the Idea of a University in the Present Age likely will occur in an urban context, which can accommodate and attract the kinds of enterprises and businesses which these Centers will spawn; more than, say, Amherst, Madison, or Ithaca.

The moment seems ripe for the development of this vision. There is a large pool of older faculty-thinkers-wise-persons from around the world who could contribute to such an idea: many of the more creative minds have been forced to be quite narrow in their work, and would welcome the challenges of broad and critical thinking.[5] Many of them have fairly nice pensions, would require less compensation, and could contract to develop, lead, and contribute to such a global enterprise. They also would be attracted to a cultural center such as the Twin Cities. Many of them could also attract funding and followings in the context of an important University of Minnesota.

Similarly, a number of commercial enterprises would find it important to partake in these critical discussions with us. As we will attract many of the best critics, say, of biotechnology and virtual reality, so various businesses will find it most advantageous to discuss developing and changing issues in the areas of our Centers’ concentrations; more reasons to be located in an urban setting.

Early Brief Courses could be presented to entering students: An Introduction to the University; Culture and Technology; a Brief Course on America in company with entering International Students (a speciality of mine).[6]

Education would be directly, perhaps primarily, toward the students being able to enter into discussion in the various Centers at a thoughtful level. As the Centers both reflect and intersect the changing world, the criterion of students entering the conversations would be a good measure of educational quality and utility, enhancing their ability to enter the world as educated and critically thoughtful persons.

The University of Minnesota is sufficiently large to accommodate the Study of the Present Age, and is quite possibly geared for a large change as it seems to find itself at a moment of declining resources and reputation, a sense that the future is also likely to decline from a formerly great university, to a pretty good one, to…

So: the Vision!

Context and Setting: Gradual Changes Since the 1950s

As the world is enmeshed in torrents of change, the very idea of the university is also much in flux. Newman’s ‘winds from the North’ (Newman, 1976) – from industrial England of the 19^th century – invade both our thinking and the funding of the institutions which until fairly recently seemed somewhat removed from the currents of ordinary life: the Ivory Tower now overgrown with weeds, hanging vines; exposed to the elements.

But it is not only money which offers – or threatens – to alter the university. There is a much larger set of changes which challenge the very idea of a university as it has endured with some centrality and continuity of purpose from Plato’s Academy to these times. I am thus cautious about the ideas of the university which we all bring to this discussion.

Some of these changes have occurred fairly gradually, if profoundly. As example, I take it for granted that the university is primarily its faculties and curricula. But most people seem to locate the idea of the university in its organization or administration. And many of the changes of the past generation seem to remain outside our thinking as they characterize the university as most of us have actually experienced it. Which/whose idea of the university are we attempting to preserve or reinvent?

So this section will be a brief analysis of changes that have already occurred by the time most of us got to experience the university.

The very nature of work is undergoing a change – literally – as great as the Industrial Revolution and the technological developments of the 19^th century. The rising power of the sciences and engineering – more recently biology – the decline of the liberal arts, as well as the sense of the importance of a university degree in order to find mostly monetary success in the working world . . . all this has backgrounded ideas of a good, contemplative, educated life, or of the education of the good citizen (almost gone from the modern secular university). Perhaps this is driven much by the fading of the very idea of the nation-state with such vast sums of money passing across the world each day (Readings, 1996).

In the context of work and education, numbers of students who attend the university increased radically during the moment of the maturing baby boomers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Minnesota, for example, increased its student population from about 17,000 to 35,000 in just four years: 1958–62. The idea of leadership of the university was radically altered in that moment of necessity in managing such multitudes.

Federal and foundation funds increased after World War II, but especially after Sputnik in 1957, paralleling and driving the vast increases in attendance. Any community of scholars as it may have existed prior to that moment in Newman’s sense (Newman, 1953), splintered into those areas where there was external funding and those which had none. The Institute of Technology at the Minnesota literally stole the hard sciences from Science and Liberal Arts (SLA) in the late 1950s, and biology went its own ways to affiliate with medicine or agriculture. The two-culture split between sciences and humanities, noted by C.P. Snow already by 1959 (Snow, 1964), persists to this day. Faculties went their own ways. The only common interest or issue, already by 1963, was that of finding parking spaces (Kerr, 1963).

In the 1960s, the rise of grantsmanship further splintered the faculty into individuated entrepreneurs, as careerism gradually replaced vocationalism.

And, in the early 1970s, when the expanded and newly created institutions slowed down their expansions, administration consolidated its hold on the university.[7]

I think it was during this period that the structural idea of departments overtook the more conceptual notion of disciplines. Whereas disciplines developed and largely remain the outcome of particular questions, problems, or issues, departments are collectivities whose identity has become largely bureaucratic; places to house faculty whose power and importance are directly related to the size of its budget, more than to any intellectual import of its disciplined-thinking.

Whenever – perhaps especially now – that the society (government, foundations, especially corporations) wants new or other questions addressed, the department has often been found to be intransigent and closed-in. The obvious solution has been to direct research across or among multi-disciplines. But the actuality of multi or interdisciplinary work often disregards or loses the centrality of disciplined thinking, as it often directs itself to externally generated problematics. Current pressures on the idea of a university, then, seem to be largely integrative: trying to construct an administrative soul for a very loose collectivity in which department backgrounds discipline.

While much of this seems obvious and productive, there is often a loss of history and reason for differently disciplined thinking, at least some of which seems to be at the heart of the Liberal Arts. The question of the future of the university surely involves questions of the importance or integrity of disciplined thinking across a vast curriculum. As example, much of botany and zoology have literally been replaced or overtaken by microbiology, the biology of the cell; a form of chemistry which is certainly both important and yielding of monies. But many important questions about humanity and life have simply disappeared, unasked: morphology, taxonomy. Geography, physiology, philosophy seem about to fade, as well.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the very nature of administration changed in what Bruce Wilshire characterized as the moral collapse of the university when administrators began reading paper more than judging the quality of their faculties, or asking questions about knowledge and the meaning of the university (Wilshire, 1990).

During this time, there was also a democratization of the university: first, ethnic Europeans (primarily male Catholics and Jews), then (mostly white, younger) women, and not so many persons of color. While this was a wonderful and democratizing occurrence, I think that these events took notice away from the administrative and bureaucratic changes that were also occurring. One result was that there has been very little criticism of the idea of the university during this period. Another has been the training of most administrators to think of the university as effectively without much sense of purpose: to judge one’s own institution with respect to others, more than with respect to some idea of what a university ought to be and do.

Another aspect of the democratization was the vast increase in the numbers of students who came to the university, also contributing to its bureaucratization. The notion of a credential gradually began to replace the idea of an education (Kerr, 1991). A degree – any degree – replaced most deeper questions of the meaning of an education. As a result, the institution became increasingly opaque to the multitudes of students (parents and community, as well) as the faculty gradually disappeared into their productive modes.[8] The sense of isolation in universities increased markedly for students – perhaps more particularly for faculty.

Visibility and image – as in the media – overtook the harder work of personal judgment. University presidents began to look at other places a bit better – a bit worse® – to see where their institutions (and careers) were situated (Cohen and March, 1974). This set up and continues to confirm the current pyramid of universities in which reputation largely determines quality, while actual work is done for like-minded colleagues in other places. Little occurs in one’s home department or university of any institutional value. Visibility and celebrity have overtaken authority… One could go on.

Related is the rise of the knowledge society in which our Colleges of Education see information, access, and use of knowledge as keys to a good education. Teachers who might purvey wisdom have become managers and facilitators as the importance of education as a profession has dwindled. John Dewey’s School of Education at the University of Chicago was phased out recently – placing an apostrophe on an era when we might have had a dialogical interchange with a sage. This is to say that information and knowledge have overtaken education as wisdom has faded from our ideas of the course of a long life: something about the technologicalization and bureaucratization of life.

All this analysis affirms that the current wonderings about the future of knowledge and the university are set within an institution which hasn’t thought too much about questions of its meaning since at least the early 1970s. My concern is that we are asking questions about futurity within a model of the university and knowledge that has been running as much on inertia as substance for quite a while.

The Recent Past

None of this analysis of the depth of change should be understood as a downgrading of any current sense of crisis and sudden change that have been occurring within the university. To return briefly to the vision of the Present Age, it is the pace and directions of change which have moved me to suggest that the central function of the important University of Minnesota will be to study seriously the changing nature of these times.

Where to begin? . . . a crisis in meaning (Sarles, 2001). This crisis – first noted by Nietzsche well over a century ago as the rise in ‘European nihilism’ (Nietzsche, 1968) – has deepened. Television is a prime suspect in which authority has been replaced by celebrity. The pursuit of truth, and that faculty and universities can certify it as such, has weakened considerably. Techniques of revisionism such as Spin and PR are by now so common as to be cliche.  Fame and becoming a star professor is the current measure of competitive quality. A much longer story, but central to our concerns.

Here the Internet and email have opened up opportunities for us to communicate easily and rapidly. No paper necessary to communicate all across the world – to develop conferences, to arrange…whatever. The downside is that questions of truth and authority become more in flux. Truth, logic, knowledge, reality?…Whew!

The idea that the world is politics/economics (in either order) – and nothing else – also seems increasingly attractive, and awaits (new?) theories of global governance, whenever an apparently insatiable capitalism must eventually(!) overstep itself. This, too, is a developing current of postmodernism, in which most left-leaning neo-neo-Marxists are searching against, but also for, new directions. Within the context of the meaning of the university, however, the notion that all is politics/economics tends to be undermining.[9]

As I often taught the Sciences and the Humanities course at Minnesota, and as I have that on my mind: whatever ‘postmodernism’ may mean or convey, the rifts between science and humanities have deepened a good deal. I characterize the differences being between the World-as-Text and the Text-as-World. As technology continues to rise with amazing power, science is backgrounded, and the notion of narrative – that all is talk about, but any real-reality is located in texts – seems very attractive.

The rise of religious fundamentalism is related – as such thinkers are actually scholars of religious texts, which they use to determine/specify the ongoing reality: thus, the Text-as-World. None of this can be overestimated in its possible powers. The intellectual impact of this is to replace ideas of history and linear development of our being with concepts derived from prophets whose sayings may overtake all of thinking (Sarles, 1999).

The Future

It hasn’t helped that science (thus rationality, and the politics of liberalism and democracy) is increasingly seen as self-serving: scientists working for/with corporations that fund research at universities more cheaply than they could do it. Isn’t everyone for sale?[10]

Aren’t our deans all urging us to apply for grants, never mind questions of integrity? Who can judge quality, anyway? And endowed professorships seem fairly open to those who can pay the prevailing price: professorial stars; or ideologues?

Increasing senses of globality have entered our thinking and actualities.  Movements of vast sums of money each day and night have helped blur the conceptual boundaries that we have called nation-states. Bill Readings (1996) wondered poignantly if the Kantian idea of the rational university which would teach the citizen of the rational state is now passé, and its meaning adrift. Where, then, may the idea of a university locate itself?

Relations between structures of economic and social life now rise into contestation, as transnational corporations operate between and around the concepts of nationhood and law. This further destabilizes or blurs our positioning in the world.

Within the recent rise of cosmology, the sense of our being has diminished radically. After a few centuries of forms of humanism which urged us to center our being upon our lives and our experience, we find ourselves in the vast universes of sci-fi and more blurring of boundaries: in these contexts, between life and death, and the questioning of the meaning of life being determined outside of our very existence.[11]

One more arena of large change in the academy – one which has reflexes of a cycle from the late 19^th century. We can note that the amazing concentration upon money as the measure of the quality of life, the developments which drove the ‘Re-Organizing Knowledge’ conference, (where this essay was published) also led in the 19^th century to the kinds of biology, evolutionary psychology, and neurology of determinism, which are in increasing vogue right now: then they called it eugenics.

Here again, the temptation to ask questions of meaning of our lives and of the university, are obscured in the excitement of MRIs (magnetic resonance – brain – imagings) and the idea that we are close to finally solving the problem of the human. Evolutionary psychology – by any name – is very similar to the Social Darwinism which accompanied the Gilded Age and Robber Barons of the 19^th century. Much of it seems like politics in the name of science, especially if one takes seriously the political applications of eugenic theories in Hitler’s realms. As an increasing portion of our being is being seen as predetermined by our genes, the nature of our actual experience is background and unimportant, or uninteresting…or not-psychology or not-biology.

As money replaces meaning, and the game goes to the most competitive, the notion that these aspects of our being are particularly hereditary becomes first interesting, then compelling. Education is directed toward success; success determined by the opportunities and fads of each day. And the idea of a university floats…

If the experience of the early 20^th century parallels the excesses of the current love-affair with money, here at least there is some direction: some form of retrieve or return to a progressive pragmatism along the lines of thought of John Dewey et al. (Hofstadter, 1992: Chapter 7).

What this presages is an increasing concern with experience and doing, replacing the sense that how we got here is more determining than how we experience and live our lives. And we have to re-earn some of the authority which has so diminished in this era of celebrity and consumerism.

Conclusion: The Study of the Present Age

Much of this analysis of the university and the contexts in which it finds itself, our wonderings about the future of knowledge and of the idea of a university, seem to be as much in flux as one can imagine. It is primarily for this reason that my vision of the Study of the Present Age seems like a good path for solution to the future university. In this essay, I’ve taken the position that the Idea of the University remains an important one, both in developing and preserving.

I assume, believe, trust, as well, that there must remain some deep sense of integrity to the institution; that we can and must pursue the truth. I don’t mind the polemics or arguments – at least most of them. The splits between the sciences and the humanities, and the curses or cries of joy of postmodernism, rifts like those between the notions of rationality which abound in economics, psychiatry, philosophy, and law, seem to me really interesting. I try to study and discuss them.

Except: they get very little public discussion and less awareness. We have tended to retreat into our protective and protected spaces, rather than explore and confront those who are different from us, or those who disagree with us. The politics of academe are not always pretty. But I think that the differences and depths of disciplined thinking remain very important in the human condition. And I remain somewhat confident that disagreements or passings-by can be brokered, understood, sometimes reconciled; but not within the currents of isolation which presently make the university easier to administer or to compete with others.

There are, in fact, several universities within the one that is the University of Minnesota. For example, many of the disciplines promote thinking which depends on case studies and abstracts to generalities later (Law, Medicine, Anthropology, Engineering and in some ways the Humanities often use texts as cases), while others begin abstractly and come to specifics much later (maths, physics, much of biology). In this context, the notion of theory is often used as a bludgeon, a bit of politics attempting to raise the import of certain studies, persons, or claims, while the theorists often relegate the case studiers to lesser status.

It is similar with those who tend toward the analytic and reductionistic talking past their colleagues who are more holistic. In this context, there are palpable cycles whose patron saint may be likened to Humpty-Dumpty. Here, philosophy is presently seen as coming to an analytic impasse, with a call back to a renewed American Pragmatism.[12]

We have also been creating institutional distance and disparity between research and teaching, stemming from the 1960s, but continuing.  In our recent attempts to distinguish the university from (apparently) competing private and public colleges, we have been playing games with teaching, making it burden more than joy. In the Center for the Study of the Present Age, students will want to study with the best thinkers, not merely seek the easiest or most convenient credentials. Lecturing with Power Point is most often telling much more than it is teaching.

I have to think that good management can enable us to get beyond the social definitions of whose teaching, thinking, knowledge is more important, simply by virtue of their belonging to a field which is currently prestigious/hot. All of this tends toward the bureaucratic, neither attractive nor intelligible. Vast differences in pay scales represent image and visibility and the incursions of markets, and continue to erode the institution. And this has also contributed to the notion that credentials are more important than education.

Not! – at an important University of Minnesota.

The Study of the Present Age admits-commits to the idea that the world is changing very rapidly and in ways that we cannot fully understand or penetrate in any moment. The Present Age is a concept that may enable us to grasp the present, and to move it toward the futurity of its students (what parents, community, legislator, businesses really desire – they’re running scared for their childrens’ futures!). In an unscripted world, the university has to become and remain some sort of anchor.

It is necessary to be the important University of Minnesota, because we have to have (earn and assert) sufficient authority to continue to claim to be persons who profess and pursue truth. It seems OK not to know everything at once . . . if we can show that we possess and continue to pursue the wisdom(s) of this time and of all of time.

The Center for the Study of the Present Age is a concept (soon, we hope, to be a reality) that will study, monitor, critique, and interact with these times. It will engage the entire faculty in a joint enterprise and regain us the sense that we are a community of scholars: in it the distinctions between research-scholarship, teaching, and service will meld into a singular pursuit.

The university must remain open to various communities, inviting them to participate and join us on occasion. Here, I include the global community, perhaps especially those persons of wisdom from the entire world who wish to continue their pursuits in conjoint contexts.

Leadership will be paramount. A central commitment – of the President or Chancellor – is crucial because she or he will have to have sufficient nerve to take Minnesota away from the secure comforts of pyramidal location (a pretty good university – e.g., 3^rd best public research university), and to take or support us as we go our own way. Similarly, parents, students, citizens, legislators will have to swallow deeply as we all have to relocate ourselves globally, then locally. And we have to adjust to the conceptual sense that Internet, email, and virtual reality are us.

We will have to rethink our ideas of ageing, ageing faculty and the ageing of the developed world with some study of the traditions in which teacher-as-sage is the direction and path of a very good life (Peterson, 1999).

All of this will be done with the integrative sense that disciplined thinking can be done within the contexts of particular ideas, problems, and histories. It is paramount that some of us can explore, broker, and explain the nature of knowledge and the broad curriculum with and to one another.

The Study of the Present Age will preserve the idea of a university by entering the world at a level and in senses where we can do what it is important to do, as much in our own terms as possible: call it the pursuit of wisdom in changing times. We do this by studying and critiquing the world as it is occurring: carefully, well, thoughtfully, continually. We will need constructive criticism from the global community – and hope that they will join us frequently in our deliberations.

In this way, we will also be able to preserve, conserve, continue the Liberal Arts and Sciences as they pursue knowledge in their variously disciplined modes and manners. The curriculum is vast, often competitive, and whether it serves the futures of our students is at much risk in the momentariness of vogues, fads, and ready markets.

I hope that having a Center that pulls everyone together some of the time will enable us to know and to study one another, and to stop much of the splinterings and talkings-past that have characterized the bureaucratization of the university in the past few decades. Careers belong to the ephemeral world and political economies, so we have to reinvent the pursuit of character and of vocation, which will help us to be models for and inspirers of our students.

It is we, the thinkers, the teachers, those of us who attempt to be real professors who can attempt to guarantee or underwrite the sense that students’ futures can remain hopeful and doable. It is the Idea of a University in the Present Age which is the vision for this coming reality.

Notes

[1] Kierkegaard’s principal critique is of the rise of bureaucratic thought and thinking. In this context I have crafted an analysis of the University: “The Nature of the University: Bureaucratization of the Mind and of Knowledge.” (ms)

[2] The faculty will also be asked to develop their own – new or renewed – plans for their future work: one-, two-, five-, 10-year projections. Within disciplines and/or across disciplines.

[3] My own thought and work in teaching has been interactive, toward the Deweyan idea of becoming a self-thinker, an autodidact (see Sarles: “Teaching as Dialogue”).

[4]. I mean by ‘an unscripted time’ that the future looms without much certitude about potential or real vocations or careers which the university qua university can train them toward. In a world in which ‘temps’ are the leading career at present, and even some professions (e.g. medicine) are changing almost daily, it is unclear that the largely historical university can train students and retain any sense of its integrity or reason for being. Much of this discussion hinges about the perception of the pace and depth of changes which we are presently experiencing. I presume that we must educate students to be able to deal with their futurities, irrespective of the university’s particularities.

[5] I don’t mean that this envisioned university will be a mere retirement haven for ex-academics.  Rather, it will draw the very limited number of older persons whom we can think of as master teachers or sages in the contexts of other traditions in the world which have highly respectful wisdom traditions of ageing.

[6] I taught such a course for several years to incoming Foreign Fulbright Graduate students from all over the world, and propose it as a good introduction both to our own history and to global thinking (see Sarles, 1998).

[7] I note with dismay that there are very few (any?) current university presidents who have national intellectual stature.

[8] My metaphor continues to be the curriculum handbook of the University of Wisconsin Madison when our son went there in the early 1980s: 135 pages of majors and courses and not a single mention of any faculty. Not one!

[9] I usually agree with postmodernists that politics are involved in almost everything, but think that, with ongoing awareness and cultural critique, much of the politics can be overcome; cf., this essay.

[10] Personal communication, Philip Regal, a now retired ecologist at Minnesota, and a close colleague. He was at one time the lead scientist in a lawsuit directed against the FDA to require the Government to label all genetically altered foods…(Oh well!)

[11] In a recent course, I taught ‘Philosophy’ to a group of middle-school children. I observed that these arenas (stories, movies, videos, games) pervade their thinking, most of it remaining floating and uninterpreted (Minneapolis Metropolitan School).

[12] Donald Davidson, a leading analytic philosopher, made just this point in a series of lectures at the University of Minnesota in 1998: ‘The Resurrection of Truth’ pointed back to the work of Pragmatists, particularly John Dewey.

References

Cohen, M.D. and March, J.G. (1974) Leadership and Ambiguity: The American College President. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hofstadter, R. and Metzger, W. (1955) The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hofstadter, R. (1992) ‘The Current of Pragmatism’, in Hofstadter, R. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Kerr, C. (1963) The Uses of the University. New York: Harper & Row.

Kerr, C. (1991) The Great Transformation in Higher Education: 1960–1980. Albany: SUNY Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1940) The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-religious Treatises.

Translated by A. Dru and W. Lowrie. London: Oxford University Press.

Newman, J.H. (1953) University Sketches. Dublin: Browne & Nolan.

Newman, J.H. (1976) The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage.

Peterson, P.G. (1999) Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave will Transform America – and the World. New York: Times Books.

Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sarles, H.B. (1993) Teaching as Dialogue. A Teacher’s Study. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Sarles, H.B. (1998) ‘Explaining Ourselves through Others. Cultural Visions: A Mini Course on America”, in J.A. Mestenhauser and B.J. Ellingboe Reforming the Higher Education Curriculum: Internationalizing the Campus, pp. 135–49.  Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

Sarles, H.B. (2010ms) Prediction! or Prophecy?

Sarles, H.B. (2001) Nietzsche’s Prophecy: The Crisis in Meaning. Buffalo, NY: Humanity Press.

Snow, C.P. (1964) The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilshire, B. (1990) The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation. Albany: SUNY Press.

Am I on target?

Do I know where I am going? And why am I headed in a particular or certain direction; and not in some others?

Where I am?

I am often confused: between doing what is polite and what is right – and clearing some sense for which is which.

Confused between knowing what my work was and was for, and what is my work, now, in changing times, between being who I am for others, and who I am for myself. Confused about the future and its possible directions.

Living in a world where everyone is presumed to be out for oneself, for success, for power, fame and gain…I am pulled and pushed and yanked around by an aging vanity.

But which sense of self endures; which will I find, and be found?

If I am so smart: “why ain’t I rich,” my neighbors ask; “why am I not at Harvard,” my colleagues whisper; “why am I here,” I ask. “And where am I?”

The meanings and concepts of our being in the world reduced by language; reduced to a language in which opposites proclaim each other’s territories: War is Peace, and Peace is War, and so it is in the actuality of 1984.

1984 – the novel; 1984 – the year of our being; appear so different.

1984 – the novel, dark, brooding, each day rewritten, revised so there is no longer any sense of tomorrow. Each next moment is promised, then stolen. Time is guaranteed, robbed, promised…a theoretical exercise in “Doublethink.” The concept of time, of history reduced is going, going…gone

1984 – today, this weekend; our experience, not Orwell’s imagination.  Yet here we are pondering what he said, wondering what was warning; what was prophecy. What is this time, 1984, the year of our being, here together? The wars, vague; the blanket upon our lives the darkness and dystopia of nuclear holocaust that each next moment does not rewrite the last moments, but that Life itself may disappear and all our concepts flow down some Divine drain: opposites, metaphors, histories, ironies, concepts, words, gone; all gone.

1984 – the novel, warned us that we would not recognize 1984, the year of our being, for what it would be, and what it is.

1984 – our being cast into a deepening quest and search for meaning, not that words and history reduce, revise, but that the concept of existence is cast in deepening doubt.

Who am I? A deep and developing question. But I did have several teachers who helped me to formulate my thinking and directions.

Above all, Ray Birdwhistell – the originator of “Kinesics,” the study of the human body-in-interaction. He was an Anthropologist who was the best observer of people I’ve ever met – observer in the sense of seeing people in careful and detailed senses. He was trained as a “classical” dancer, and seemed to see all others as performers in life’s dances. And he didn’t only concentrate on each individual. He also/always noted how they interacted: in groups, in life’s varieties of social contexts from infants to older, the ordinary and the exceptional in every sense; richer and poorer, healthy and injured and “odd” and…; ethnic, linguistic. His ways into the world were always expanding. Life is social, interactive: the individual…?

My Teachers (click image to enlarge)

Ray was a student of the Chicago School of Symbolic Interaction – heirs of the American Pragmatist, George Herbert Mead, and the anthropologists who wandered the entire world. His work wandered from American Indians to the average family dynamics, to the sick – physically and, particularly, mentally. And he directed me to the U. of Chicago, Anthropology, where I continued my studies with linguist Norman McQuown – under whose tutelage I (and family: J, and infant daughter Amy) studied a Mayan Language (Tzotzil) and lived in Chiapas, Mexico for two years deeply immersed in both Indian and Ladino (their term) cultures during this time.

Ray was also a student in the line of thought and active fieldwork (life is fieldwork!) of Franz Boas: Margaret Mead (especially), Gregory Bateson, influenced his thought. Boas’ observation and insistence that the study of the human includes the Physical, Cultural, and Linguistic – (and his friendship with John Dewey, G.H. Mead’s buddy) – all floats in my being and work. Boas’ work on the nature of the shape of the human head/body as cultural, has yet to be fully heard. This tradition, which insists that all humans are equally part of the human condition – and that it takes continuous observation and wonderment of how we are…including oneself…to begin to understand the human condition. Many of the ideas of Human Rights developed within and from their work.

I met Ray Birdwhistell at SUNYBuffalo, where he joined linguists George Trager and Henry L. Smith, Jr. – who had previously led the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Dept. They had recently been dismissed (all the anthropologists-linguists) – from the FSI – and began the study of Anthropology and Linguistics, where I was one of their first two students. With Smith and Trager, I got deeply into questions of language and expression: how language “works,” as grammar, but also as sound – in the various contexts of culture and society.

Trager’s wide-works were more embedded in the works of some other former colleagues (e.g., “The Silent Language” – written by Edward T. Hall) which became part of my thinking on intercultural communication, “proxemics” – the spaciality of interactions, always expanding to questions about “how the world works.”)

We spent a summer with Trager in Taos, N.M. examining “paralanguage” in the Taos Indian language: i.e., how language sounds and “pitch” are bound together in speech and interaction. Some of my work (“Language and Human Nature” – resetting many issues surrounding “artificial intelligence”) flow from this thinking.

From Smith, more the involvement with one’s native language, and how to see and examine oneself speaking, observing; he was well known, as well, as an expert on American English dialects. My concern with language, expression, context sprang deeply from these connections and teachings which continue to frame much of my thinking as I approach the world of people: talk, interaction, the body, context…culture, institutions, history.

The work and thinking of my teachers at Buffalo is more expressed by others (e.g., E.T. Hall), and by Birdwhistell’s student (also sent to Chicago), Erving Goffman, whose work and thinking (“Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” etc.) elaborates much of Ray’s conceptual and intellectual orientation toward the study of the human.

Again, the two years of fieldwork in Chiapas under McQuown, taught me to observe and think (with several other co-students) about other languages/cultures. The opportunity there also provided me with two years of “hanging” around home, where I could observe daughter Amy learning language (actually two languages), and where being outside in the tropics afforded me the ongoing opportunity to see everyone and their families, etc., in the context of a fairly small community of Venustiano Carranza where both Indian and Ladino cultures and languages were spoken. Living in other cultures, speaking other languages, has been powerful in my being and thinking.

Beyond this were various teachers I had throughout my schooling: some very good and fairly memorable; a couple with whom my interactions were, frankly pretty terrible (in a year’s study in Medical School – which experience still resonates powerfully in my thinking – dissecting a cadaver remains in my thoughts.) The couple of “bad” experiences with teachers has strongly influenced how I think about and actually teach students: my book and practice, “Teaching as Dialogue.” (See the movie, “Paper Chase” to get the taste and flavor of those experiences – I try to pursue kindness and critical thought, social critique, more than directed study or lecturing!)

Resonating in my being, still, are also a couple of violin teachers from age 8 until my college days. Paramount in my thinking is Bernard Mandelkern who helped me to become a kind of “self-teacher” on the violin, whose study I continue to pursue most days in the vague hopes of being able someday (soon?) to play (perform?) J.S. Bach’s unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas.

I’ve also had “teachers” as I have been engaged in studying the world, people, institutions, ideas…two years as a mathematician-programmer at Cornell Aeronautical Lab in Buffalo, and four years in Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh doing research on the dynamics of Psychiatric Therapy.

As a critic-commentator of the (idea of) the University, Stanley Williams directed and joined with me on how to study and understand how such institutions work (from his experience as Manager of a Research group in Surgery); Phil Regal, on how to think about biology and most everything else; Mischa Penn who urged me to broaden my thinking and framing of all of knowledge; and various of my students, some of whom remain close co-thinkers, especially Jerry Timian and Glenn Radde; and members of the “Body Group” with whom I studied the body with observers, curers, athletes, musicians, etc. (especially R. Hruby).

And there are teachers of Alexander technique, tai chi, and ongoing yoga study with Nancy Boler – which I practice most days. Dan Latorre is my teacher-guide to the internet: I have much to learn.

Above all, hovers the wisdom and critique of partner Janis Sarles: my major teacher for over 50 years.

A nerve, a verve, a…willingness to do and be. A fear, a sense of fear kept in tow, if not exactly conquered. A question of why the issue of being confident should even arise.

A loss…of confidence? – more clearly the issue; the disappearance of nerve, of verve, of the fright of the willingness to do, leaves me almost breathless. Perhaps it is only a feeling, located somewhere in the depths of my bowels, but nonetheless a power in my life which determines much of what I will never think of doing…less of what I might actually do.

Confidence – that when I get up to play the violin (if I have prepared sufficiently), that when I perform or lecture, that I can depend on my knees not shaking so wildly that I will be forced to sit down or sit out; that my voice will not fail, that my mind will not blank, that my thinking will be fast enough, that words will be found in my thinking’s machinations; that whatever happens I will not lose my control, my coolness of mind…that I will be able to smooth over whatever anger or anguish may arise: others and my own.

Confidence in balance with wanting new experiences, to learn from and while doing, so I can move on toward new ideas. Confidence in some balance with the variety of fears which motivate and which obscure, which turn thinking aside, away from, toward the past and gaining ascendance over what I may do or will do in actuality.

Today, close to tears, I mourn my self that life is not the panacea I seem to have had in mind…for today. Little space in which to ply hard-won skills, I am forced to ask for favors, instead of getting fair-market value in a market for which there is no obvious demand.

Favors: bribes upon my character; psychic debt; stinging loss of integrity’s feathers and petals. My man-child’s leg crumpled beneath him: knee bent out of dimension, requiring repair. ‘They know what they’re doing,’ we’re told. ‘Do they know what they’re doing?’ – we ask.

Time will tell. Youth’s aches, temporary, remarkably self-healing, can be rubbed away with an ease that surprises.

Do they know what they’re doing?

We repress the question, but it asks itself in the midst of night’s dreams and wakefulness.

Today, close to tears, sitting here, waiting for…tomorrow?

A couple of years ago, while driving to my place of work with my just grown-up daughter, we were hit from the side and behind by a large truck. Carried along for an interminable hundred feet or yards, she gained control of the small auto and we came to rest beside the freeway, plowing down a road sign upon the way. I found my self, that day and for several days afterward, wanting…needing to confess my surprise and positive pleasure at being there, wherever, and with whomever. Life’s angers, wishes, all seemed vain and very small compared with the fact of our remaining presence.

Strangely, then, the experience of a close-call became cleansing; a moment in time became all of our time. Actual, we felt actual in a way of great completeness. And, in a certain way, life was renewed, a gift to have a future; what, now, to do with it? No longer in debt to my own history, but indebted to futurity. I wonder: must it require that level of experience?

Who I am, who I was and will be, replaced somehow by a what-ness, much due to questions of scale in the cityscapes of life’s living. The bureaucratization of life as I became some cog in others’ imagination – whether it fits me well, or not so well.

Losing some war in which I found my self thrust, between who I was and who I thought they thought me to be, I abandoned thinking about my being. Often I invented a new war between what was left of some notion of myself, and my refusal to be that depiction. And the war became my entire self…or its replacement.

I, growing older, flirting with problems of death and life, became the observer of my living, as I experienced the pains of tension’s tension, and entered also into war with my bodily being. Always a few seconds from pain, it became my enemy, someone to avoid, and I was then two: myself and my pain. As pain became my master and guide, I felt lost.

Recovering, yet recovering, I learned to stretch my muscles and joints and ligaments, and studied the pain which was my guide, until I learned it and it became me. As it did, I could remove my self from the pain or the pain from my self, and gain a distance from it, which I used to locate the character which had disappeared.

During money bubbles (“Gilded Ages”), there are certain sorts of “mind-sets” toward the world, and (every/any) one’s sense of future. What seems obvious or natural during such times – attitudes toward the world, judgments of what and who are the best and most successful people – flows in the direction of big power and big money being the proper ways of the world.

We are (about to enter 2009), just emerging from a money bubble. The bottom is dropping out of the economy all around the world – interlaced as we have become during the past 50 years or so. This gilded age has been enabled by the great rise in technological innovations, which have refocused much of our experienced world, and opened the entire globe to our thoughts and interactions.

Some aspects of the money bubble sort of mentality, which hover upon our thoughts:

Fame is really good! Money and power direct themselves to the precious few, while the rest of us think this is the natural way of the world as we try to play along with the world and people we see, and often admire or even adore. (I want a BMW to park in front of my mega-mansion!) The people who “run” the risen economy “deserve” all they can siphon from their merged corporations. Students go to college less for an education, more for a credential which will ensure their future success (and a BMW…maybe a Jaguar as they mature). This state is the proper/natural state of the world, and will go on and on…! We are all independent individuals – the government should stay out of our lives. I am motivated to succeed…and will…to.

Whenever a bubble bursts, its power over our very lives requires that many/most people rethink the world, and where there is to go in these so-changing times. Resentment rises, puzzles persist, as new notions of their near future resonate on the edges of their very being.

Some people respond principally from fear: e.g., many older persons who thought their worlds were fairly well set, now finding their pensions have declined dramatically. Others consider the apparent scene and await more clarity about the world, and about their own fates, and the possibilities for themselves…and their families.

Age and experience can make a great difference. My particular view is as a teacher of young, but mostly grown up persons. Seen from my world of teaching college students, I worry about them, perhaps reflecting my own family as they tried to deal with and rebound from the market crash which created the Great Depression in 1929.

People under about 25 have principally known and had their thinking shaped by this bubble mentality. The rich have gotten much richer – and this has seemed O.K., or not bad, or the direction that any really ambitious student would like to explore. Universities have become really competitive (and expensive!), and the professors with whom one might like to study and think with, have been backgrounded in relation to the bubbly idea of “star professors” who play well in the world of monied judgment. Get grants, patent your ideas, share your profits with the university.

The worlds of fame and framing the world by the “hotties” and the most “important” persons in a hierarchy-oligarchy in which the rich rule, has been the way the world “is,” all their lives…so far. Humans are basically “competitive,” the riches go to those who somehow “deserve” them. Power and money blend as we watch.

And…we wake up to note that there are many fewer jobs awaiting the about-to-graduate. What to do, how to think, adjust, readjust to the seemingly impossible idea of a bursting bubble. The bubble was “it,” the way of the world as they lived in it. The bubble mentality wasn’t about a limited moment in their history; rather, it was/is the way the world “is.” And now it “isn’t?”

The way the world “was,” was only a brief time “in history?” Come on!

The central problem of the bubble mentality as we move into new times, is that a good number of these college kids made pretty “hard” or committed decisions about their futures when they were quite young. College and career got into their thinking very early on as they competed to get into the “best” colleges and universities…or not.

And, if they had “great” ambitions – which must get rethought or rewritten as the bubble bursts – many of them will find it difficult to readjust to the idea of themselves in “different” times. They had been very good…successful…for so long (most of their lives, for they have had no other experience). This was all their experience, the way the world “is.” Very few of my students have had any awareness that they were living “in” a bubble. Life in a bubble, is the “way it is” directed toward any futures.

What to do? How to rethink? Where to go for a career or a future, perhaps now reduced to any job which they can seemingly guarantee or even bet will furnish them with the funds to live O.K.

To Live O.K. How difficult is it – how difficult it is – to rethink a world which had seemed so clear and certain, and could or would extend way out into their futures?

For some: not so bad. Life would be tough. Some wouldn’t be very ambitious or competitive. But most of those at the University were both.

So: I suggested to them (told them?) at the beginning of Fall Semester (based on all I knew, had read, observed) that we were at the beginning of “tough times.” How many of them were at aware of the impending changes? – maybe one or two out of forty!

“I’m not really worried about you, if you were “clever” enough to get here. You are smart, clever. But you may have made very firm decisions that the way the world has seemed, is “the way the world is.” I told them I was raised by a father who had gotten caught in the 1929 market collapse – and never really seemed to have gotten “beyond” the pictures of the future of a really “bright” kid whose future clearly seemed “golden.” Anger, disappointment flowed through a pretty good life, but one whose money bubble mentality arose persistently for most of his life, and affected those around him, often deeply.

The money bubble burst, apparently, not too long ago. I remind them – in this class on “Cultural Pluralism,” that different persons, and “kinds” of persons (social definitions) do well or not-very-well in various times. How to study the world, inclusively, and be able to see and rethink themselves? Come into today! There are many ways of being a good person, of succeeding, of being involved in living in a democracy.

Time to envision a democratic future, and to do what it “takes” to help ensure its future. I’m feeling pretty positive, even optimistic as the Semester is now half over, that most of these students will be open, receptive and beginning to be active in making those visions happen?

Moving out of a money bubble mentality: no simple task!

Once we create the gods or transcendental concepts, after a little while they take on lives of their own in ours.  They are, they do, they become this and that; inspire us, threaten us, control us, cajole us. We beseech them, pray to them, fight them, pit them against one another. They reflect us, we reflect them. It is all very confusing.

Where does it all begin, we ask. At the beginning, we answer, no longer admitting, not realizing that the answer begot the question. No longer wanting to explore experience, the senses which are, which reveal and deceive, we decided not to grow in outlook when our bodies decided to halt growing in height.

The gods, the concepts like language and society and economy all become invisible hands, work over us and work us over. God fights Satan, and we are pawns. Capitalism battles socialism, my eyes blink arhythmically. Nature captivates culture which wards-off technology. Books are written which explain all of this: authentic texts, the word of…

Let them all fight, I think to myself, not wanting to be caught in epic wars of too-tall gods inventing intrigues. People, I think, are not all that different in the visible spectrum.

Searching for meaning, we are tempted to believe…it is not within us. The problem is in being large enough to live our lives, neither too diminished nor too enlarged, praying for bits of help or arrogating the graces of our own imagination.

My response: search for ourselves, the character within each of us which may grow to fill the longest life! Toward each of our next places…!

Change, Change, Change! Yes, Yes, Yes…

Change, Change, Change – Yeah, but…

In my office at the University where I teach, there is a poster which I look at frequently, but keep mostly hidden from others: “I touch the future: I teach.”

Now older, many years of experience in thought and in teaching, I am even less bashful. “I inspire the future : I teach.”

Change, yes: but towards what? How can we envision the futures of democracy, without probing where we are, how we got here; and where is there to go?

Where are we: emerging from another “gilded age,” a “money bubble” which has so altered the shape of democracy, that it might be powerful enough to shape our very ideas of change. How to see, how to study these so-fragile times?

How we got here? We have been part and partners in the great money bubble: our children, our students go to school less to learn how to think, or grapple with their futures. More they go because that is the “thing to do.” Not to think critically, but to work toward a credential as “efficiently” as possible. Then their futures will be “O.K.”

Envision the future?? It will take care of itself, as long as we do what we do? Think critically? Bah! Do what we’re “supposed” to do, and…

Change, change, change. The mentality of the gilded age has pushed us into ourselves on facebook and U-space. The world in which we reside shapes us so much more than we realize. We have – not thoughtfully – accepted the oligarchies of money and power which shape our very desires. As it is all collapsing – in “crisis” – my students hardly blink, as they hardly realize that the world is always, already changing. Democracy entails awareness.

How to study these so-fragile times? History can be very useful? How did the last “gilded ages” – of the late 19th century and the 1920s collapse? How did the “progressive age” take place? Explore Hofstadter’s “The Progressive Movement,” and Josephson’s “Robber Barons.” How did we move – forward – from the great depression?

How might we envision the future of democracy? Where may our “Next Places” be – both politically and personally? A next progressive era?

Education: said John Dewey – probably the most thoughtful of the progressive thinkers – and do-ers. The very idea of democracy must be rethought, and taught to each new generation. It is the future, their future, in which they need to think and act. Teachers need to be sufficiently thoughtful and “important” to be able to inspire their futures.

The gilded ages have been driven mostly by new technologies: ideas, products, and the new monies generated and then controlled by the very clever, and very selfish and greedy few. How to return the U.S. to “we the people” as we go from boom to…?

Explore where we are, try to foresee various possibilities, then set out visions for the futures of those students whom we inspire to become truly engaged – in these times and their times – toward education and democracy.

In certain times, there is a sense of progress and riches. In such times many of us can ply our trades and offer our wares with youthful panache and virtuosity. There appears to be much work to be done, and we offer to do whatever there is and more, because we want to be in on the doing. There is room for all: the more, the merrier. We expand to the edges, to fill the space of these times, as if they are all of time.

Then, times change. Space contracts, and we have grown older. Now it is difficult to know which is what; where causes lie. Some of us, hurt, strike out in the directions we can still find, and strike inward at the past’s duped selves. We were bought and sold out of our own exuberant innocence. Digging in, we strove to get beyond the times, and beyond our former selves, to do whatever the work we had promised our selves.

Others have made fewer self-promises. No one at home, they sought causes and found them in all directions outside of themselves. The truly skilled found support in continuity: others, flushed and flashed, disappeared from view. The causes, the support, the on-goings and the going on, all exacted certain costs, and demanded certain prices. And the less self-promised paid them, lest they, too, disappear. Stronger, now, in the weaknesses of belonging.

Here we are still, together. Strong…appearing. All of us less innocent. Which of us survive until tomorrow?

Beyond disappointment, I thought there were some around, of those who taught well and inspired. By now, I understood and understand that teaching is too difficult for very long, except for the strongest to bear. Where, then, to look, to search? How much of my own time to devote to these explorations in the realities of every day? How to deal with the experiences of isolation which the teacher-I-am has to endure?

I found them many of those for whom I was searching in the texts and ideas of all of time: in the books, in the writings, in the history of how we got here. Augustine trained teachers and created the church which has endured for almost two millennia; and I have him, his thoughts and writings, in my house and in my office, and in my mind, and in my being. He is very present in my thoughts, so alive that I can talk and walk with him. And Plato, who thought and talked sitting down, and his student, Aristotle, who talked and thought while walking around; I have them, as well. Confucius, Aesop, the ancients. The seers and oracles and shamans of other cultures, they, too, are now available; at least in books, and in my active thoughts.

And the moderns who have shaped our thinking…? Maybe it is that I have already swallowed whatever the tears of my disappointments, thinking that tears should not be shed upon the ground of life. I wish to meet all the teachers of the world who live still, now that I can attempt to grapple with their concepts and histories, now that I am thoughtful and full of sufficient knowledge. Disappointed?

Disappointment: a concept that middle age cannot sustain and reach its own beyond.

The older seemed not wiser; just older. The older, tired, worn, their lives as teachers many years beyond the hold on knowledge they had themselves gotten in the schoolings of their youth. Knowledge, itself, older, tired, lacking…We, older, still seeking and searching. Older, we came upon some synergy which hinted of wisdom, of so many year’s experience in dealing with the minds of students that a hint of talk revealed the landscapes of their inner minds, heretofore hidden, even from themselves.

We, older, trying every day in every way to understand the what of what we study, sense the growth and growing lengths of the paths by which we got to here, musing that all of this is not so clear and not so obvious to the young who have no experience with experience.

I wandered in the world, seeing what there was, guessing what there could be, and wondering. I smelled the new, damp green of spring as it appeared, and wished, each winter, that the days of snow and grey would give way. The wishing turned into meaning as I learned how to brood and to wish away whatever was, for what would be, and what I wished. The world had become stage; the people, actors in my creations; my real leaning toward grotesque, the unreal wanting to become my beauty.
I redid the mirrors to reflect my eyes’ vision. My third ear compared what I wanted with what there was, until reverberations could be refiltered to match. Awful! I learned to watch my doing. As the others saw me, I learned to see myself; what they wanted to see, I sought to be. At one point there was no watching left. I cracked, revealing nothing, no one. I was only what they thought. Now, no wiser; perhaps, wary. I try to see each flake of snow; see it fall, see it down to the snow banks of my life.
I become the painter of the silvering which backs the glass transparencies, now become its own mirror. Trying to locate what is, where I am; while still seeking for illusions. (An existential accounting for the experience of paradox in our lives!)