Mr. Jefferson’s Rotunda

Posted on by

This photo heads a piece that’s been in the news for a few days. It shows the columns of the historic Rotunda at the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson, with the word greed spray-painted on them. University officials have painted over the letters and hired an expensive PR firm to help Rector Helen Dragas and the board members who supported her star-chamber ouster of UVA’s President, Teresa Sullivan, weather the storm of criticism that has engulfed them. A Google search just now unearthed over 1500 news articles and opinion pieces about the matter.

Today’s Washington Post carries a fine piece by Valerie Strauss about UVA’s present horror. Strauss quite rightly points out that the removal of President Sullivan “reflect[s] the way school reform at all levels has been carried out in recent years in some important ways.” Strauss’s painstaking comparison of events reported to have taken place at UVA and the now familiar scenario of “reform” that continues to be imposed on educational institutions of all sorts by venal legislative bodies and corporate boards and abusive, tyrannical administrators is telling, as is her point that the UVA board’s appointment of “Carl P. Zeithaml, dean of U-Va.’s highly regarded McIntire School of Commerce” should be taken very seriously as an indication of the direction Rector Dragas wishes to chart at Charlottesville.

At the center of the modern school reform movement is the philosophy that public schools should be treated not as civic institutions but rather as corporate entities. That the interim leader is Zeithaml, whose speciality is in the field of “strategic management” speaks volumes about the direction the board wants the school to go.

I take Strauss’s analysis a step further, for it seems to me that the emerging philosophy of higher education on display at many of our nation’s flagship universities regards these institutions as mere brands to be bought and sold like companies ripe for takeover. It’s a sad affair when a corporate vandal is able to leverage the purchase of an American institution like Anheuser Busch here in St. Louis, deplete its workforce, destroy its corporate culture, destabilize its philanthropy, and generally turn what was a sustainable enterprise and something of a model of corporate good citizenship into a mere profit center, only because, as he declared when he came to town, corporate vandal Carlos Brito wanted the Anheuser Busch brand. That’s a sad affair. But when the same logic is applied to a great public treasure such as the University of Virginia, that’s criminal. And of course school reform is being pursued according to a similar logic, taking us back to the discredited idea of the factory school.

Strauss points out as well that “education reform” has been a goal of “the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators,” who have “worked in secret for years to promote privatization and corporate interests in education and other areas of American society.” The corruption of university research by corporate money is an open scandal. It’s now common practice for the giants of corporate chemistry to produce “studies” favorable to their own marketing strategies and seek vulnerable faculty to sign their names as researchers. And undergraduate education is going the way of the public school. Faculties are being scapegoated just as public school teachers are. Mindless sets of “assessment” instruments are being imposed on them and upon their students by entities outside education who now find themselves able to demand “accountability” from them. Academic tenure is being undermined in all venues, but of course tenure has never protected faculty from the most egregious actions of administrators and boards of directors.

Thomas Jefferson regarded the founding of The University of Virginia as one of his highest achievements, second only to the composition of The Declaration of Independence. It is hard to imagine that Jefferson would approve what is presently happening in the shadow of his Rotunda.

From Mahler to Jolie Blonde . . .

Posted on by

Last evening my beloved and I attended the funeral of a friend, Joe Kleeman, who had played bass in the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra for many years. Pretty much the whole celebration was music. The Choir of Bethel Lutheran Church, where Steven Mager is music director, was supplemented by a group of SLSO musicians, including Concertmaster, David Halen.

Perhaps because of the music, and perhaps because I am still reacting to the death of Doc Watson, I came home in a mood to listen to something; but instead of classical music I decided to watch a DVD I have had for a while of the first series of Transatlantic Sessions, organized by fiddler Aly Bain for the BBC back in 1995.

I had got the DVD because one of the songs on it had disappeared from YouTube. I had posted “Maiden’s Prayer” here long ago, from the sixth program in the BBC series and told a story about the supposed origin of that fiddle tune. Some time after I posted it, the tune disappeared into the void of closed accounts. But last night I watched and heard it again. In fact, I watched two thirds of the Transatlantic Sessions DVD before giving in to sleep.

Among wonderful things in this music are several performances by Iris DeMent, including “Our Town,” the music from the last episode of Northern Exposure, Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell,” in whicn Ungar and Bain lead what amounts to an entire fiddle section, and many performances by DoBro player, Jerry Douglas, who plays throughout. You’ll hear him on this Performance of Jolie Blonde, together with Michael Doucet, Ricky Skaggs and others.

One YouTube comment declares this song to be the author’s “favorite waltz in all the world.” “[D]on’t you Cajuns call this the Cajun National Anthem?” he asks. I don’t know that it’s my favorite waltz, but I love it a lot, enough that I just ordered the second season of Transatlantic Sessions from Music Scotland. One of Joe Kleeman’s daughters wrote of her dad that he would listen to Mahler, take a sip of his drink and exclaim, “God, this is beautiful!” It’s a long way from Mahler to “Jolie Blonde,” but as I watched Transatlantic Sessions and sipped some reasonable bourbon, I felt like toasting Joe.

p

The Poet of Deep Gap

Posted on by

Doc Watson (1923—2012)

Arthel “Doc” Watson was as true a poet as I know. And now he is no longer resident in the mountains of his beloved Carolina but “scattered among a hundred cities,” as Auden put it when he remembered the death of his friend, W. B. Yeats. It’s a good thing, too, that the poet’s death be kept from his poems. Doc Watson now resides in the many tunes and songs and licks and riffs he left behind in various media, in the many good and generous gifts of himself that form the recollections of fans and friends who wrote about him in yesterday’s newspapers.

Blind almost from birth, a touring musician for whom touring carried the constant apprehension of being marooned, and a bereaved father; Watson, hugely talented, transported himself and his music nevertheless, into the lives and hearts of countless listeners like me who will recall him with fondness as we collect his recordings with renewed focus and energy, perhaps remembering when we first heard him in person (for me it was Durham, North Carolina, in 1967). For all of us, as for the world at large, Doc Watson is now timeless in memory—sad, to be sure (unexpectedly sad as a friend put it), but the sadness is the common sadness of human life. In Doc Watson’s case, as Daniel Gewertz put it in the comment section of yesterday’s New York Times obituary: “It wasn’t an easy life, but it was touched by amazing grace.”

It’s hard to pick a favorite recording, but here’s one I love that features Doc in his prime. It’s the ensemble recording of “Blue Railroad Train,” off the old Southbound album from 1966 that he made with Merle and others.

Notes from past weeks

Posted on by

I sometimes wonder if this blog has any use, much less any readers. I don’t write here regularly enough and tend not to keep resolutions to change for the better. Yesterday, though, I had a note in the mail from a chance reader in Germany inquiring about the inspiration for my poem “Flatbush Waltz.” I was flattered and answered quickly. I wrote the poem because I had fallen in love with Itzhak Perlman’s recording of that Andy Statmen tune. You can hear it here on YouTube.

Writing that poem also gave me occasion to search out a copy of a book I loved back in the 1970s, Thad Stem’s First Reader. Thad was one of a group of writers I knew in North Carolina in those years, who practiced their craft in the state’s network of newspapers, many of them small weeklies, an informal fraternity that that included Sam Ragan, Cliff Blue and others. The Late Tom Wicker got his start among them, writing for The Sandhill Citizen.

Over spring break, my beloved and I made a fast trip to Texas. On our way home we stopped off in Marshall for a few hours. Marshall is in Harrison County; my mother’s people settled there in 1834, hoping, I think, to escape the abolition of slavery in the United States by migrating to the fledgling Republic of Texas. They claimed large tracts of land adjoining Caddo Lake and eventually named the place Scottsville.


We found a few remnants of Scottsville on our visit: a cemetery dedicated to the memory of the Confederacy, and the Scott house, where My Grandfather was born in 1879. The old dwelling was originally built by W. T. Scott in 1840, according to a pamphlet kindly provided to us by Beverly Smith, whom we met at the Scott cemetery chapel. I grew up with a wealth of stories about the Scotts, some of them lurid; and I told a few of those stories in a piece I published back in 1992. I am thinking of telling them again, more thoroughly and at greater length.