Wojtek
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 7:25 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> new book out, reviewed in NYR, College: What is Was, and Should be.
> Apparently, the author does discuss the argument that college was not a
> place where anyone cared much about the life of the mind, where school boys
> taunted and bullied professors instead. BUT, he says, there's more to the
> story.
>
> Looking forward to reading it when I get a chance.
>
> I had occasion to wander the halls of a college the other day. It was a nice
> day, so I wandered the quad and courtyards as well. Looked at the stack of
> books for sale, remainders from classes and saw a healthy batch of books
> square within the classical, western tradition. I gazed at bulletin boards,
> read the books for sale board, listened to people waiting to pay tuition
> bill or find out from the VA what award they were getting.
>
> Meanwhile, as I scooped up this notice and that about this talk, the
> workshop, the open house I realized that the guy who wrote French Theory,
> forgot his name, was very right about his description of the typical u.s.
> university/college, isolated from the rest of the city in the suburbs or on
> hills [1], that the one thing I really miss about the school - aside from
> the opportunity to learn - was the way it functioned as a community or town
> center. I don't know of any alternative to university-as-town-center - these
> days. Is this just my hazy memory? Me idealizing my misspent youth wandering
> about campus libraries?
>
> [1] historicallly colleges built in the 1800s were built on hills, as were
> cemetaries. This is because it was land that usually wasn't settled:
> farmers, builders, merchants didn't want to use it.
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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-- Wojtek
"Modern conservatism is just a neoliberal gloss on medieval domination."