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...
...Well," he says, "people of course...
...I am curious to see what will happen when someone asks the inevitable...
...One admits freely that the only politics she considers seriously are those of the Middle Ages...
...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...
...Chewing gum and Mickey Mouse badges won't do...
...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...
...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...
...More than a third of the one hundred Fellows are there...
...he next morning my roommate rouses me with the T news that I have slept through all the action...
...Meetings were held "under the shadow of a cross," and afterwards "we hugged the wives we were going to exploit...
...to him the vision appears real...
...Is it not reactionary to support exploitative universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago through our scholarships...
...But the apolitical Fellows keep their concerns to themselves...
...We are not amused...
...white...
...We are later provided some relief in the form of aesthetics...
...Not surprisingly, he promptly gets into trouble...
...Take it once—if you're a woman—and you bear no children...
...Instead we are, by virtue of our acceptance of a Danforth Fellowship and our decision to enter the academic profession, members of the Establishment...
...Whispers my Chicano neighbor, "Thank God...
...Well, yes, there were some good ones, though not as many as one might wish...
...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...
...And I? Well, a marginal centrist I am not...
...What relevance does this have to the Chicano struggle...
...We are considering this," announces one young lady, "not individually but collectively...
...but this soon proves to be an error...
...The impending revolution must, however, be postponed...
...Tales of life on the barricades are exchanged...
...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...
...Even here we're served that weak Peruvian product called, yes, Inca Kola...
...The American Spectator January 1978 15 Things look up a little on the last full day of the Con- ference...
...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...
...And all varieties of unbelief are welcome...
...It will be allowed, even protected...
...As, apparently, has the Danforth Foundation...
...Caucuses —black, Chicano, feminist, gay—have bloomed in the night, and 14 The American Spectator January 1978 already a coalition has been formed...
...He even refers to a historical tradition predating 1945...
...El Arnold Beichman An Open Letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski Dear Dr...
...Why, one woman asks, is he speaking of medieval man's relationship to the university...
...The first, Vartan Gregorian, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, is to be our token defender of traditional educational values...
...Says the Chicano student next to me: "I'm sick of this man masturbating on stage...
...First, the area will have to be discovered by the trend-setters, the people who have jetted everywhere else...
...Certainly there are plenty of Danforth Fellows who do not consider themselves revolutionaries...
...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...
...What, after all, is the sexist, racist, elitist organization most readily available...
...Come the revolution, he will be the first to go...
...The introductory speaker beams, almost chokes, as he surveys us...
...More moderate...
...Particularly offensive is his irreverence...
...All look expectantly, therefore, to our only black...
...The speakers, I am later told, are not meant to agree...
...As Machiavelli could have told him, such weakness is never rewarded, only further attacked...
...As is a proposal to take the money away from the Fellows —that's us!—and use it to establish a Third World University...
...Who, among this group of alleged future teachers, will choose to nurture them...
...A woman rises, shaking with fury, and informs him that she does not consider this funny...
...Any more adventures like that and I will be Inca Pacitated...
...The word bias makes these folks uncomfortable, so we speak of ultimate concerns...
...some seek to disassociate themselves from the hard-core revolutionaries...
...There has been much talent here, but it has not appeared openly...
...Back to the attack...
...Several of us, including Wally, pile into an outboard, which is so seriously weighted it begins to leak...
...What about medieval women artists...
...In fact, answers prove to be in short supply...
...Mary C. Norton Education for a Different Whom Danforth Fellows allegedly combine a commitment to college teaching with religious or ethical concerns...
...Someone points out that in all fairness to the Foundation, the choice of graduate schools was left entirely to the Fellows...
...Mathematics...
...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...
...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...
...It becomes clear that a target has already been selected...
...What am I doing here...
...It is across the river, nearly a mile wide here, and the humidity is outrageous...
...Several members of the Left Caucus apologize to me about the note-taking incident...
...Certainly the Foundation has overcome the ethnic and religious prejudices of its founder...
...How far we have come from those bad old days when he was—pardon the sexist term—a Danforth Fellow...
...He is given little encouragement, and subsides into silence...
...One young man expresses his fear that I will report him to the police...
...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...
...if to South America, maybe to Rio or Bogota or Buenos Aires...
...They also make wall hangings called chamchamas...
...the crusty old shaman wants cash only, and Peruvian solez at that...
...Paul Wright smiles reassuringly as we get lodged between two trees...
...Prominent in my group is guilt over our role as oppressors, combined with eagerness to become involved in the great struggle of the oppressed...
...Of course, the Danforth Foundation...
...But can this really be the issue...
...Two were invited, someone admits, but neither bothered to show up...
...The smile on Warren Martin's face deepens and becomes increasingly sincere as he absorbs abuse...
...He is, vociferously...
...all concerns are considered important, none hypocritical...
...But their recent conference tells a different story—of the struggle against capitalist, racist, sexist, oppressive "Amerika...
...Let's just say that I represent those individuals due to be eliminated in the early stages of the revolution...
...I am told to hush, and I put away my notebook...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...He goes on to discuss two or three quite competently...
...Either way, the stage is left clear for the extremists, and very few dissenting voices are heard...
...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...
...Indignation follows, and the class struggle dutifully resumes...
...Back on The Adolfo we demand cervezas and soft drinks...
...Only now can I shake that ridiculous feeling that we've been cruising down the Adventureland streams in Anaheim...
...But the term was used generically, and he "refuses to feel guilty about this...
...We picked Harvard...
...Done...
...Take it again (or its antidote...
...You were dealing with Soviet-American relations which, you said, "will continue to be for a long time both cooperative and competitive...
...And commitment is defined in just one way around here...
...he even has the gall to speak humorously of the upheavals of the sixties...
...What are his concerns...
...Here with me on the last evening of the Conference is Antonio, a real live Arab/Chicano Marxist revolutionary...
...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...
...The audience knows what it wants to hear, and gets it...
...The message has been that individuals are beleaguered, but infinitely precious entities...
...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...
...Why talk of reform when we all know that capitalism must be destroyed before true education can flourish...
...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...
...This is never done during group meetings, though, or during the question periods after lectures...
...instead one had to excavate for it in private conversations and unguarded moments...
...Clearly, he informs us, we are more moderate than the militant Danforth Fellows of the recent past...
...liberal credentials come lamely forth...
...And mathematics...
...there is much ignorance, possibly convenient, about the nature of the Foundation's investments...
...Your statement implies that the "competitive elements" between the U.S...
...And away we go...
...This group, he observes, is slipping into individualist concerns...
...Ah, but he is here with us today...
...Could you exonerate Josef Stalin in the same fashion...
...He points to a beautiful chamchama I'd thought out of the question...
...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...
...Why am I taking notes...
...A slight pause...
...Freedom of thought...
...Our speaker is to talk of "The University and the City from an Aesthetic Standpoint," and, refreshingly, so he does...
...Why is there no specific support for gays...
...solely of virtuous men...
...Some speakers, like Gregorian, cave in immediately under the pressure...
...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...
...A dialectical twist solves the problem...
...Then he points to my plastic rain poncho, which I'd purchased at a Southern California surplus store...
...These concerns are duly presented to the Fellowship directors, who promise to provide answers the next morning...
...For once, KTTV's Doug Dare puts down his movie camera, and with the single tin can on board begins to bail...
...I begin to walk away, a universal bartering tactic from Tijuana to Tangier, and he calls me back...
...After an hour or so our leader decides to stir us up...
...They'll have that insufferable glimmer in their eyes just like the Arab oil sheiks...
...If the Foundation is guilty as charged, must we return our scholarships...
...I'm not sure) and resume childbearing...
...They could do worse...
...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...
...He replies, "I'll be damned if I can't joke about it...
...He shines with energy and commitment...
...He'll tell them to keep a special copy for me...
...The speakers do improve somewhat toward the end of the Conference...
...When the pharmaceutical companies get wind of this the tribesmen will not be content as happy little trinket traders...
...Indignation runs high...
...I try to barter for a purse for a girlfriend...
...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...
...Speakers gulp—"Well, I...
...Later, we're off to another Yagua village...
...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...
...She is presently studying international relations at Oxford...
...Others announce that politics are below them...
...He has overcome himself...
...describes at length and with much glee the corporation's most recent transgressions...
...One day, the tourist industry hopes, the stream will become a river...
...For the next three hours we are asked to sit through lectures on "Education for What...
...Sounds a voice from the rear, "Hey, man, some of us have been otherwhere...
...He tells me tales of the imminent revolution, and of the world to be...
...Why did the Foundation take so little trouble in choosing its Chicano resource persons that neither bothered to show...
...It will, he assures me, be humanistic and nonhierarchical...
...Who says the sixties are dead...
...Why do you feel it necessary to exonerate Brezhnev and his Politburo from a burden of evil...
...This pattern is to be repeated throughout the Conference...
...Or attribute to "deeply rooted historical forces," the Katyn Forest genocide...
...Oh, but such repentance is offered in exchange...
...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...
...Why, I can read Hayek in the public library any time...
...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...
...they will think of other things...
...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...
...It is reassuring, in the end, to see the caucuses splinter into individuals at O'Hare...
...This is gingerly broached...
...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...
...They make dresses and loincloths out of this barkcloth and, for the benefit of tourists, little purses...
...Shouts a white male student from the back: "I don't understand why you don't feel guilty...
...The Huitotos are noted for their fine barkcloth with simple geometric designs...
...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...
...In the afternoon we are organized into small dis- cussionn groups and instructed to confess our biases...
...Yet those who stick to their guns, and their topics, do not fare much better...
...I rejoice for the intimation of reality...
...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...
...We are no longer, he informs us, if we ever were, members of the oppressed masses...
...Certain signs indicate that more tourists are streaming into this continent...
...What—all question sessions eventually come down to this—have you done to further the cause...
...Are all the workers in all the companies of all the Foundation's stocks organized into non-exploitative unions...
...Yet, claims Martin, there is a unity underneath this deceptive diversity...
...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...
...This leaves me peculiarly saddened...
...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...
...Various members of the Danforth advisory board, in a suitable variety of shapes and colors, field questions...
...Where does its money come from...
...Of such surprises is the joy of bartering...
...A sign on the bulletin board in the lobby announces: "The Left [non-marginal-centrist] Caucus will meet at 4:00 p.m...
...but we have also "opted for reform over the status quo...
...There the silliness reigns undisturbed...
...Shouts and cheers—no concern for bourgeois etiquette here...
...but quickly shelved...
...Why are there no Chicano resource persons...
...Or Hitler...
...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...
...I refer you to the 16 The American Spectator January 1978...
...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...
...Conservatives, I remark—my only comment for the meeting—have occasionally been known to support individual liberties...
...Why, at their New Fellows Conference twenty years ago he and his colleagues had been so smug, so insular, so...
...A rumble is heard in the audience...
...Throats are cleared...
...For example, Frank Newman, president of the University of Rhode Island, tries valiantly to make the Fellows face reality...
...We are in fact all "marginal centrists" who have "opted to avoid extremes...
...for persons involved in the working class, Third World, feminist, gay, and other progressive struggles...
...Bodies shift uncomfortably in their seats...
...Well," the speaker replies, now clearly in over his head, "I just don't...
...Religion...
...He is not, despite his record as a progressive educator, well received...
...The Conference is organizing, and we are on the march...
...At 4:00 I head for the Left Caucus meeting...
...We had been debating how best to encourage students to participate in and lead discussions...
...But of course...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
