Our chief weapons

The annual Fall Faculty Meeting in Tucker auditorium yesterday felt to some of my colleagues less like the falsely flattering pep talk it usually is, and more like a public scolding by our university president for the benefit of those tight-fisted GOP state legislators sitting just before him in the front row. They must've loved seeing Bill Ford, proud adviser to the Young Republicans and past scourge of our philosophy department, receive his lifetime achievement award. Graciously too, I must admit.

"If students interrupt your day you're in the wrong profession!" True enough. Teaching at every level should always be "student-centered." So should research, at least in the sense that it (like the best teaching) is ultimately auto-didactic.

But the new public university mantra "retention and graduation" began after awhile to remind me of MLK's alliterative allusion to George Wallace, "lips dripping with nullification and interposition." Of course we want to keep our students for four good years and then send them into the work-world with minds made full and curious and compassionate (as described in that wonderful Rhodes vision statement).

We also want to be sure our students are not just racing through a curriculum modeled on the industrial assembly line. I'm uncomfortable when my president speaks of the library, for instance, as a mere source of "input" not to be allowed to interfere with churning out our "product" (a degree-holding and employable new worker for the 21st century) on deadline.

"We can philosophize all we want" about this results-oriented  approach, President McPhee allowed, but the "reality" is that public higher education now must deliver the goods. And to underscore the point, he held up the morning's newspaper with its headline about the Tennessee approach being applauded by President Obama as a possible model for the nation. He looked just a bit like Harry Truman in 1948.

And he's right, there's nothing more important in education than student success properly defined. And yes, again, the cost of higher ed is shameful. It can't be lowered soon enough (especially for those of us with kids in college.) We can't fix a broken system or insure student success, though, guys in the front row, without taxpayer support.

But OK, I'm ready. After lunch in the shiny new grand ballroom of the shiny new Student Center (speaking of student-centered learning at all costs) with grousing colleagues from other disciplines (those from mine bailed, but I never skip a free lunch) I stuck my head into the bookstore and confirmed that all my books are indeed on the shelves, waiting to be whisked up by knowledge-hungry young minds.

(So students, please do your jobs: acquire and read them: HAP 101 top right, CoPhi bottom left.) One distressing feature of the new student-centered paradigm has been a greater administrative tolerance for those students who report that they just don't like to read. Despite current trends, though, I'm not an administrator.)

Then, I popped over to Forrest Hall. It's the ROTC building on campus, and (since we lost our old classroom across the hall) the venue for my first class of the new semester Monday.  The walls of my new classroom are a little scolding, too.

Yes, our chief weapons include a ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the, umm, Provost? Gotta love this new era of accountability.  Don't forget fear and surprise.

Looking on the bright side

I don't teach in summer, so it takes a good reason to get me out onto I-24 for the 50 minute commute from Nashville to Murfreesboro in July. Yesterday I had three.

First, an encouraging meeting with our Education Abroad staff. They're as excited as we are, my colleague and me, about our proposed 3-week course on the British Roots of American Philosophy. I'm ready to pack. Almost. Just need to sign on a few more enthusiastic travelers first.

Program Description

Program Name:     “American Philosophy in Britain”

Program Site(s):   Oxford University, Oxford U.K. and environs

Term to be offered: Summer 2014 (2015?)

Anticipated dates of the Program:     July 2014 (2015?)

Approximate duration (in weeks): 3

Proposed Course Title and Description: (Academic Content, briefly describe the academic content of your course):      “American Philosophy: British Roots” - American philosophy in general, Classic American Philosophy more particularly, and Pragmatism precisely (especially in the writings and the person of philosopher/psychologist William James) was heavily influenced by Darwin's theory of natural selection, John Locke's, David Hume's, and J.S. Mill's empiricism, and F.C.S. Schiller's pragmatic humanism. This course proposes to highlight their significance and contributions as the British “roots” of American thought, and also to explore some of the more salient “branches” of that thought amongst contemporaneous and subsequent philosophers in Britain including Oxford’s more prominent post-Shiller “enfant terrible” A.J. Ayer.

Additional rationale: I'm now completing the draft of a book I'm calling Philosophy Walks. It's about the interplay of walking, landscape, and ideas. The landscape of Darwin's, Locke's, Hume's, Mill's, & Schiller's Britain is the perfect backdrop for exploring pragmatism's genealogy. The course will be based at Oxford, possibly at Schiller’s Corpus Christi College or Locke’s Christ Church, or at the Merton College home of James’s and Schiller’s Oxford bete noire F.H. Bradley. In addition to exploring the immediate environs of Oxford and Oxfordshire, we will make day-trip excursions by train to Darwin’s Down House in Kent, to Cambridge (home of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein), and possibly for an overnight to David Hume’s Edinburgh (also home of the famous Gifford Lectures and site of James’s 1901-1902 “Varieties of Religious Experience” lectures. Also possible, depending upon logistics and feasibility: trips to Anjou in France, where Hume wrote his Treatise of Human Nature, and to the site of John Locke’s exile in Holland. And back in Oxford we will attempt to connect with Professor Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading Darwinist.

 The good news is, you don't have to be enrolled and seeking a degree from MTSU to join us. Don't even have to be a student. So come on along!

Stopped by the department after our meeting. Oh, what they're doing to my old classroom. But it's going to be ok.

Then, recorded another fun session On the Record with Gina Logue. We talked happiness, mostly, and Gina asked about the Python wisdom of always looking on the bright side. She let me pitch the Study Abroad course too. It'll air soon, stay tuned.

‘MTSU On the Record’ delves into philosophy of happiness Host Gina Logue’s interview with Dr. Phil Oliver, an MTSU philosophy professor, is scheduled to air from 5:30 to 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 5, and from 8 to 8:30 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 11, on WMOT-FM (89.5 and www.wmot.org). 

And finally, met my student at the library Starbucks to talk philosophy and his prospective career therein. A woman in line ahead of us couldn't help overhearing, and declaring,  you must be philosophers. She then regaled us with her story of meeting a famous philosopher of science on a web-dating site. She doesn't think things are going to work out between them, but apparently he talks like us.

First time I've ever closed a Starbucks, at 4 in the afternoon no less. But I think my student was reassured that his new major, and the philosophy in  his future, look so bright he'll have to wear shades.

Talking and living

This would be a good post to reprise in the early Spring, but now's when I happen to be grubbing down in the dusty vault. One more from March '07:

My building at ESU yesterday was host to two noteworthy academic occasions:

1. Our department sponsored an address by a charming visitor from Chicago, who explained at length (and diagrammed) the structure of racial and sexual oppression in America. He used many words to say that black women have it worse than black men and whites generally. His thesis was almost too true to be good, too obvious to profit from theoretical elaboration. The ensuing trans-gender, poly-ethnic Q-&-A discussion was constructive, but on the whole I was reminded of what Richard Ford said (noted in Tuesday's post) about the futility of exhaustive explanations. The post-talk reception in our department chair's back yard, though, under a gorgeous moon on a perfect early spring evening with terrific food and drink and uninhibited conversation among good people, was more than worthwhile. I enjoy my friends and colleagues (and, btw, am pleased to report that they will continue to be my colleagues for the foreseeable future).

2. The English department sponsored a conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture. The luncheon speaker was the infamous old Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, who was villainous when I was 11 years old because he helped defeat my Cards in the '68 World Series... and villainous later too, accused of racketeering, extortion, conspiracy, theft, money laundering, and mail fraud. He spent six years in prison. But his talk was all baseball. McLain had disturbing things to say about Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin (Martin "killed" Mantle) and Boog Powell (he broke Powell's hand with a "purpose pitch") and my hero Bob Gibson (he "hates America" but was a great pitcher).

I attended a session in the afternoon on the incredible old Negro Leagues star Satchel Paige (who was finally given an opportunity to pitch in the major leagues, and pitched well, at age 59). Paige said: "Age is a case of mind over matter, if you don't mind it don't matter." And: "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" Well, he was 75 (though his birth certificate apparently cannot be located to confirm this) when felled by emphysema. Smoking is not a good idea if you want to pitch forever, as Satch once proposed to do.

I spoke a few years ago at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, saying in part: "I suppose we are all here because we love to talk about baseball. Yet, and perhaps paradoxically, those of us who are most enthusiastic about baseball know that talk about it is ultimately incapable of bearing its own weight... personal enthusiasms run deep, to a place beyond talk and the objectifying intellect." It was fun to visit the Hall of Fame and meet fellow enthusiasts, but in the end I'm still with Ford: we need to "leave off explaining" and get on with living. "What an awful trade that of professor is," William James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." And yet, he came back to teach again in the Fall. As will I.

So, in the name of leaving off explaining and getting on with living: our daughter's little league season opener is tonight (she's the only girl on her team of "Diamondbacks") and I intend to enjoy it, not explain it. Happy Opening Day!
DS 3.31.07

We'll be packing that little girl off to college soon, to become a Lynx and just possibly a humane and sophisticated adult too. No explanation required, it's just time passing. Enjoy.

Execrable, inexorable, indefeasible rules

Presented at the 18th Annual Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro TN-