Education for a Different Whom
Norton, Mary C.
"Education for a Different Whom" - it with an unsophisticated joy that is altogether endearing. You would think them guileless. Ho ho. Now, the trading session. The Huitotos are noted for their fine barkcloth with simple geometric...
...More than a third of the one hundred Fellows are there...
...Shouts and cheers—no concern for bourgeois etiquette here...
...Later, we're off to another Yagua village...
...Whispers my Chicano neighbor, "Thank God...
...He is given little encouragement, and subsides into silence...
...instead one had to excavate for it in private conversations and unguarded moments...
...It began, we are told, with William Danforth, an entrepreneurial capitalist and evangelical Methodist who made a fortune with Ralston Purina, and then established a foundation to support, among other things, the graduate education of individuals committed to college teaching and religious values...
...When the pharmaceutical companies get wind of this the tribesmen will not be content as happy little trinket traders...
...But of course...
...It is the first, and one of the only times that I will hear anyone define his commitment to teaching in terms of commitment to a discipline...
...We are an HEW dream come true: 51 women and 49 men, 16 blacks, nine Chicanos, one Puerto Rican, one Native American, and one American Indian (sic...
...Others announce that politics are below them...
...Done...
...Or attribute to "deeply rooted historical forces," the Katyn Forest genocide...
...Why am I taking notes...
...A sign on the bulletin board in the lobby announces: "The Left [non-marginal-centrist] Caucus will meet at 4:00 p.m...
...Why did the Foundation take so little trouble in choosing its Chicano resource persons that neither bothered to show...
...Our speaker is to talk of "The University and the City from an Aesthetic Standpoint," and, refreshingly, so he does...
...The introductory speaker beams, almost chokes, as he surveys us...
...he even has the gall to speak humorously of the upheavals of the sixties...
...I found this passage of your speech quite disturbing because it seemed to me that you felt driven to exonerate the most powerful dictatorship in the world by portraying it as—what?—a victim of such abstractions as "deeply rooted historical forces" or "philosophical pressures...
...They also make wall hangings called chamchamas...
...We are no longer, he informs us, if we ever were, members of the oppressed masses...
...They'll have that insufferable glimmer in their eyes just like the Arab oil sheiks...
...Their "listeners" refuse to consider or address the major points raised in the lecture, but instead harp on their own particular—usually very particular—grievances...
...The accepted creed of the Conference has been that individuals are insignificant in comparison with the collective...
...he next morning my roommate rouses me with the T news that I have slept through all the action...
...What relevance does this have to the Chicano struggle...
...This group, he observes, is slipping into individualist concerns...
...Mathematics...
...The impending revolution must, however, be postponed...
...The speakers do improve somewhat toward the end of the Conference...
...We picked Harvard...
...A dialectical twist solves the problem...
...These concerns are duly presented to the Fellowship directors, who promise to provide answers the next morning...
...All look expectantly, therefore, to our only black...
...This leaves me peculiarly saddened...
...You were dealing with Soviet-American relations which, you said, "will continue to be for a long time both cooperative and competitive...
...Back on The Adolfo we demand cervezas and soft drinks...
...You then went on and I quote from the Times: The competitive elements are there not because of evil men or because of evil designs but because of deeply rooted historical forces, philosophical pressures, geopolitical considerations, divergent political systems and different values...
...Prominent in my group is guilt over our role as oppressors, combined with eagerness to become involved in the great struggle of the oppressed...
...Let's just say that I represent those individuals due to be eliminated in the early stages of the revolution...
...One young man expresses his fear that I will report him to the police...
...Well," the speaker replies, now clearly in over his head, "I just don't...
...As manifestoes with question marks are hurled at them the speakers blink, seeking to untangle the question, any question, from the morass, and generally agree quickly that yes, of course, we must be responsive to that concern...
...For example, Frank Newman, president of the University of Rhode Island, tries valiantly to make the Fellows face reality...
...I refer you to the 16 The American Spectator January 1978...
...As, apparently, has the Danforth Foundation...
...He even refers to a historical tradition predating 1945...
...We are not amused...
...Bodies shift uncomfortably in their seats...
...Someone points out that in all fairness to the Foundation, the choice of graduate schools was left entirely to the Fellows...
...Some speakers, like Gregorian, cave in immediately under the pressure...
...In fact, answers prove to be in short supply...
...Paul Wright smiles reassuringly as we get lodged between two trees...
...But the apolitical Fellows keep their concerns to themselves...
...I begin to walk away, a universal bartering tactic from Tijuana to Tangier, and he calls me back...
...there is much ignorance, possibly convenient, about the nature of the Foundation's investments...
...but quickly shelved...
...A woman rises, shaking with fury, and informs him that she does not consider this funny...
...the crusty old shaman wants cash only, and Peruvian solez at that...
...One admits freely that the only politics she considers seriously are those of the Middle Ages...
...He has overcome himself...
...And mathematics...
...He'll tell them to keep a special copy for me...
...The university is co-optative, tyrannical, exploitative—and it is the institution which these future professors have chosen as their best weapon in the ongoing struggle...
...She is presently studying international relations at Oxford...
...A note concerning the children: The Amazonian A Indians, unlike the distinctly unoptimistic natives of India, cultivate a birth control berry that is positively breathtaking in its simplicity and efficiency...
...to him the vision appears real...
...As Machiavelli could have told him, such weakness is never rewarded, only further attacked...
...We are considering this," announces one young lady, "not individually but collectively...
...As is a proposal to take the money away from the Fellows —that's us!—and use it to establish a Third World University...
...Freedom of thought...
...It becomes clear that a target has already been selected...
...Take it once—if you're a woman—and you bear no children...
...After an hour or so our leader decides to stir us up...
...It is a theme perennially rediscovered by writers: Latin America, not to mention the Amazon, is simply unknown, except as an old geography lesson or recent newspaper headline, by the vast majority of North Americans, even by world travellers...
...One day, the tourist industry hopes, the stream will become a river...
...Any more adventures like that and I will be Inca Pacitated...
...Yet, though he does begin with a few good words for liberal education, he retreats under a barrage of accusatory questions from liberal education to "education for democracy," and from "education for democracy" to "commitment...
...Yet, claims Martin, there is a unity underneath this deceptive diversity...
...Religion...
...all concerns are considered important, none hypocritical...
...At 4:00 I head for the Left Caucus meeting...
...Even here we're served that weak Peruvian product called, yes, Inca Kola...
...Several members of the Left Caucus apologize to me about the note-taking incident...
...It is reassuring, in the end, to see the caucuses splinter into individuals at O'Hare...
...Ah, but he is here with us today...
...This is never done during group meetings, though, or during the question periods after lectures...
...For once, KTTV's Doug Dare puts down his movie camera, and with the single tin can on board begins to bail...
...Of course, the Danforth Foundation...
...Indignation follows, and the class struggle dutifully resumes...
...El Arnold Beichman An Open Letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski Dear Dr...
...He replies, "I'll be damned if I can't joke about it...
...Where does its money come from...
...Impossible to predict, but the Upper Amazon may be the next trendy watering spot, with rock stars hybridizing the Peruvian music and Hollywood romanticizing the Yaguas...
...They make dresses and loincloths out of this barkcloth and, for the benefit of tourists, little purses...
...He is, vociferously...
...The first, Vartan Gregorian, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, is to be our token defender of traditional educational values...
...but we have also "opted for reform over the status quo...
...What are his concerns...
...Back to the attack...
...Are all the workers in all the companies of all the Foundation's stocks organized into non-exploitative unions...
...Individuals, usually more interesting, and more moderate, outside their respective caucuses than within, have had some chance to talk between "Education for What," "Education for the Future," and "Constraints and Prospects for the Future of Education...
...What, after all, is the sexist, racist, elitist organization most readily available...
...Brzezinski: In the New York Times of 19 October 1977, I read a summary of a speech you made before a group of Washington journalists...
...Only now can I shake that ridiculous feeling that we've been cruising down the Adventureland streams in Anaheim...
...but this soon proves to be an error...
...It will, he assures me, be humanistic and nonhierarchical...
...some seek to disassociate themselves from the hard-core revolutionaries...
...and the USSR would exist even if the Politburo consisted Arnold Beichman is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of Nine Lies About America...
...What am I doing here...
...Or blame the post-Stalin seizure of Czechoslovakia, the slaughter in Hungary, the suppression of the East German workers' revolution in 1953 on "philosophical pressures" rather than on evil men and evil designs...
...Oh, but such repentance is offered in exchange...
...Yet those who stick to their guns, and their topics, do not fare much better...
...And away we go...
...It is across the river, nearly a mile wide here, and the humidity is outrageous...
...First, the area will have to be discovered by the trend-setters, the people who have jetted everywhere else...
...Various members of the Danforth advisory board, in a suitable variety of shapes and colors, field questions...
...I am curious to see what will happen when someone asks the inevitable...
...This is gingerly broached...
...Sounds a voice from the rear, "Hey, man, some of us have been otherwhere...
...More moderate...
...But what is most convincing of the Foundation's divorce from capitalism, to say nothing of Methodism, is Martin's boast that it is spending its assets—not just, he hastens to add, its income—faster than any other foundation...
...But the Yagua women, I cannot possibly communicate to him, were so transported by the Disney stuff that they eagerly traded piranha and monkey teeth necklaces for it...
...solely of virtuous men...
...There the silliness reigns undisturbed...
...Tales of life on the barricades are exchanged...
...Until you stand in one of its teeming cities, or slosh through a muddy Indian village, or cruise down the mightiest river of them all, or tread over a 1,500-year-old burial ground of one of the most mysterious civilizations ever—only then are you struck by the importance of this place, and by how unconscious of it you were before...
...The audience knows what it wants to hear, and gets it...
...We are in fact all "marginal centrists" who have "opted to avoid extremes...
...This pattern is to be repeated throughout the Conference...
...Particularly offensive is his irreverence...
...Let me paraphrase what you said in a way that Ambassador Andrew Young might understand: The competitive elements are there in South Africa between the whites and non-whites not because of evil men or because of evil designs but because of deeply rooted historical forces, philosophical pressures, geopolitical considerations, divergent political systems and different values...
...Or Hitler...
...Why, I can read Hayek in the public library any time...
...liberal credentials come lamely forth...
...I try to barter for a purse for a girlfriend...
...describes at length and with much glee the corporation's most recent transgressions...
...Speakers gulp—"Well, I...
...But the term was used generically, and he "refuses to feel guilty about this...
...As we go around the circle proclaiming our political stances and activities, it appears that Marxism-Leninism—preferably in combination with a little practical experience in subversion—is de rigeur here...
...Why do you feel it necessary to exonerate Brezhnev and his Politburo from a burden of evil...
...But their recent conference tells a different story—of the struggle against capitalist, racist, sexist, oppressive "Amerika...
...Says the Chicano student next to me: "I'm sick of this man masturbating on stage...
...He goes on to discuss two or three quite competently...
...The speakers, I am later told, are not meant to agree...
...if to South America, maybe to Rio or Bogota or Buenos Aires...
...The Conference is organizing, and we are on the march...
...A slight pause...
...Well, yes, there were some good ones, though not as many as one might wish...
...What—all question sessions eventually come down to this—have you done to further the cause...
...Mary C. Norton Education for a Different Whom Danforth Fellows allegedly combine a commitment to college teaching with religious or ethical concerns...
...Who says the sixties are dead...
...Why, at their New Fellows Conference twenty years ago he and his colleagues had been so smug, so insular, so...
...The bottom of the boat filling with water, we breathe relief as we reach the other side...only to turn up a swampy inlet for another three-quarters of a mile...
...they will think of other things...
...We are later provided some relief in the form of aesthetics...
...Come the revolution, he will be the first to go...
...He tells me tales of the imminent revolution, and of the world to be...
...Throats are cleared...
...But can this really be the issue...
...Several of us, including Wally, pile into an outboard, which is so seriously weighted it begins to leak...
...The smile on Warren Martin's face deepens and becomes increasingly sincere as he absorbs abuse...
...It will be allowed, even protected...
...Certain signs indicate that more tourists are streaming into this continent...
...A rumble is heard in the audience...
...President Carter's campaign on human rights becomes meaningless if you believe that evil is to be excluded as a factor in judging international relationships, for as Coral Bell has written, "both means and ends in foreign policy are eligible for moral scrutiny and moral judgment...
...Clearly, he informs us, we are more moderate than the militant Danforth Fellows of the recent past...
...Certainly there are plenty of Danforth Fellows who do not consider themselves revolutionaries...
...For the next three hours we are asked to sit through lectures on "Education for What...
...and "Education for a Different 'What?' " It is soon apparent that a consensus exists as to both whats: They are the same, and they are social change...
...Here with me on the last evening of the Conference is Antonio, a real live Arab/Chicano Marxist revolutionary...
...I chew on my Amazon River Cruise visor, by this time down around my neck, as I contemplate the real snakes swimming out there and the real piranha underneath and the romantic obituaries that will be written in Santa Ana and Seattle...
...And all varieties of unbelief are welcome...
...I'm not sure) and resume childbearing...
...Why talk of reform when we all know that capitalism must be destroyed before true education can flourish...
...Why, one woman asks, is he speaking of medieval man's relationship to the university...
...The message has been that individuals are beleaguered, but infinitely precious entities...
...Certainly the Foundation has overcome the ethnic and religious prejudices of its founder...
...Well," he says, "people of course...
...Not surprisingly, he promptly gets into trouble...
...Your statement implies that the "competitive elements" between the U.S...
...They could do worse...
...Take it again (or its antidote...
...Why are there no Chicano resource persons...
...He points to a beautiful chamchama I'd thought out of the question...
...We had been debating how best to encourage students to participate in and lead discussions...
...And I? Well, a marginal centrist I am not...
...Then he points to my plastic rain poncho, which I'd purchased at a Southern California surplus store...
...Either way, the stage is left clear for the extremists, and very few dissenting voices are heard...
...The American Spectator January 1978 15 Things look up a little on the last full day of the Con- ference...
...As if to demonstrate the truth of this, he Mary C. Norton is a recent graduate of Michigan State University, a Danforth Fellow, and a Rhodes Scholar...
...I rejoice for the intimation of reality...
...The word bias makes these folks uncomfortable, so we speak of ultimate concerns...
...Indignation runs high...
...Chewing gum and Mickey Mouse badges won't do...
...Shouts a white male student from the back: "I don't understand why you don't feel guilty...
...Of such surprises is the joy of bartering...
...Lest we be dismayed by this dubious connection, Warren Martin, director of the Fellowship program, assures us that Ralston Purina has no control over the Foundation's policies...
...There is still surprisingly little scholarly discourse—virtually none—but there also appears to be some embarrassment about the overblown rhetoric that has flown so freely...
...I am told to hush, and I put away my notebook...
...There has been much talent here, but it has not appeared openly...
...Instead we are, by virtue of our acceptance of a Danforth Fellowship and our decision to enter the academic profession, members of the Establishment...
...Two were invited, someone admits, but neither bothered to show up...
...How far we have come from those bad old days when he was—pardon the sexist term—a Danforth Fellow...
...When you exculpate the Soviet Union, you exculpate a country where, as you know, at least 500 prisons, prison camps, and "psychiatric" jails hold political dissidents, totalling as many as 1.5 million prisoners...
...Could you exonerate Josef Stalin in the same fashion...
...white...
...Many lose their confidence in the face of all this political activism, and wonder if maybe their particular moral and ethical concerns are rather paltry in comparison to, say, those of a Marxist-Leninist feminist...
...Why is there no specific support for gays...
...In the afternoon we are organized into small dis- cussionn groups and instructed to confess our biases...
...He is not, despite his record as a progressive educator, well received...
...There was a disturbing determinism in your words, as if the Soviet leaders are in the grip of forces over which they have no control and are exploited by some design which demands of them its fulfillment no matter at what price...
...Meetings were held "under the shadow of a cross," and afterwards "we hugged the wives we were going to exploit...
...And commitment is defined in just one way around here...
...There are "competitive elements" among the U.S., France, Britain, Japan, and Canada but you would not feel impelled to say about that rivalry what you have said about the USSR...
...He shines with energy and commitment...
...What about medieval women artists...
...Is it not reactionary to support exploitative universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago through our scholarships...
...Who, among this group of alleged future teachers, will choose to nurture them...
...The Huitotos are noted for their fine barkcloth with simple geometric designs...
...for persons involved in the working class, Third World, feminist, gay, and other progressive struggles...
...Conservatives, I remark—my only comment for the meeting—have occasionally been known to support individual liberties...
...Caucuses —black, Chicano, feminist, gay—have bloomed in the night, and 14 The American Spectator January 1978 already a coalition has been formed...
...If the Foundation is guilty as charged, must we return our scholarships...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
