Alan Jacobs, a member of the faculty at Wheaton College, writes a terrific essay about the higher standard of Christian faculty at Christian institutions of higher learning.  He writes in the context of a tough call: Wheaton fired one of his colleagues for getting a divorce.  Now, before you freak out and call Wheaton the Home of the Grand Inquisitor, read this, and see what you think.

Kent wasn’t fired for getting a divorce, as so many of the headlines say. Though Wheaton, in keeping with what it believes (and I believe) to be historic Christian teaching, sees divorce as a very bad thing, indeed often tragic, it does not fire people for getting divorced. We have a number of faculty who have been divorced while employed here; in the past dozen years or more, only one has been asked to leave. But the college authorities do ask to interview employees who are getting divorced in order to understand the circumstances. It was this interview that Kent declined to accept, and that’s where things unraveled.

Now, why would a college want to pry into such personal matters?  Well, for a very good reason.  If colleges and their faculties and staffs are in loco parentis - and they are still in that role at the best colleges - then that’s reason enough.  But don’t take my word for it.  Read the essay, and Jacobs’s defense of why it was okay for Wheaton to fire his good friend.

Mr. O’Rourke gives us a nice example of the kind of commencement speech we won’t be hearing this month, at least at most colleges and universities.  For your benefit, I have reprinted the best lines here, in the form of advice to the young graduates

• “Go out and make a bunch of money! […] There’s nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.”
• “Don’t be an idealist!  Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you’ll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That’s $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?”
• “Forget about fairness! […] I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.” What we need is more income, even if it means a bigger income disparity gap.”

And this one’s my favorite.

Be a religious extremist! […]  The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there’s the tenth: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

Here are God’s basic rules about how we should live, a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts. And, right at the end of it we read, “Don’t envy your buddy because he has an ox or a donkey.” Why did that make the top 10? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, include jealousy about livestock?

Well, think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own.

I’d throw my cap in the air for that one.

HT: Phi Beta Cons

“oh antic God” by Lucille Clifton

oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.

(from Mercy, 2004)

This is not a post about country music.  This is not even a post about rap.  It’s not even about the death of the short story.  It’s about the need for authenticity in art, and how the current audiences of just about every art form are craving it.  In other words, rather than fiction, we prefer non-fiction, memoir, and biography in our books.  We want our films to be “Based on a True Story.”  And we want our rappers to actually be real gangsters, and our country music stars to actually be rednecks.

If Huckleberry Finn were released today, it’s easy to imagine the mass-market audience responding with a yawn. “Not even written by a fugitive slave.” Fiction is absent from our general interest magazines, replaced by intensely reported narrative features. The message is simple: We want it to be real.

Of course, this writer says that maybe country music is the one place where we don’t demand authenticity.

Some genres are immune from our weird and novel demands. Country, both in its classic and alternative forms, tops them: “I take the truck on into town/ And buy whatever we can’t seem to grow/ I work these hands to bleed cause I got mouths to feed/ And I got 15 dollars hid above the stove.” You don’t hear that and think: I know Ryan Adams is a wine-guzzling short guy with a lot of money, not a poor farmer.

As a writer of plays and short stories, oh, how I feel the burn of all this.  I’ve written creative nonfiction, too, but I’m afraid that if I start focusing my writing on personal essays, I’ll run out of subject matter and have to start making it up, like David Sedaris does.  What do you think?  Why do we seem to crave authenticity now more than ever?  It’s not an uncommon question.  Postmodernism is supposedly all about authenticity.  I suspect the answer is theological.

Ah, behold the new Malcolm Gladwell piece at The New Yorker - “In the Air.”  It’s about a company called Intellectual Ventures (I.V.), which is exactly what it sounds like.  It’s a group of really smart people - physicists, surgeons, computer men, et al. - who do nothing but come up with ideas, with solutions, with inventions.

The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner. Dinner.”

Gladwell also talks about multiples, or the idea that the same thing can be invented at the same time by two different people in two different places.  It happened with steam power, with the telephone, with the microchip.  How does this happen?  Gladwell says, Maybe the ideas are out there, waiting to be discovered at a certain time and certain place.  The ingredients are there for all the same people.  We just have to cook them.  Fascinating, and so well-written.

Why teach taste?  Painter and art professor Laurie Fendrich says some of her readers wonder why she professes to teach, and to be able to teach, taste. 

Why are college art professors so afraid to convey to their students that they have superior taste?, and, Why are they afraid to teach that taste to their students?

This is a good question in a world where taste might not exist.  She says it has something to do with the same kind of moral relativism she sees in university types.

This same relativism clearly shows up in people who insist that matters of aesthetics boil down to preferences. It shows up in university professors when they say they are there simply to “make it clear to…students that the job of an art historian is not to judge whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (i.e., notions of our own taste are not what matters), but to try to understand art within the context in which it was produced.”

Of course, Fendrich doesn’t seem to have a problem with moral relativism (read the essay), although she is offended by aesthetic relativism.  Of course, God doesn’t provide as many universal imperatives about aesthetic behavior as he does about moral behavior, which means it’s even more difficult to judge, even if the implications are less dire.  Nevertheless, she makes a good point.  When art professors teach the absolute relativity of aesthetic tastes, then “No wonder so many students fall asleep in art history classes!”  Nothing is more caffeinating than a professor who says you’re wrong.

Psychologist Wray Herbert retells a story from a Woody Allen film, and all of us can relate.

In the classic film “Play It Again, Sam,” Woody Allen is the nervous and insecure Allan Felix, who has recently been dumped by his wife. When his best friends set him up with a blind date, the character blunders his way through the evening with one gaffe after another, ending with an appalling display of table manners at a Chinese restaurant. When his visibly dismayed date excuses herself to go to the restroom, Allen turns to his friends: “She likes me,” he says confidently. “I can read women.”

The dramatic irony, of course, is that he can’t.  We are privileged in the film to read his behavior and judge him unable to read women, at least in that situation.  The other ironic thing is that this happens to all of us all the time.  We judge ourselves incorrectly all the time.  Herbert things he knows why.

This recent column at the Times suggests that fibbing - or exaggerating the truth, rather than inventing a wholly new fiction - is way easier to do than lying, and way less stressful on the body and mind and soul.  I know, I know.  The legalist in me wants to say that fibbing is lying, no matter how close to the truth.  And that’s true, strictly speaking.  But it happens, and it happens more than lying, and it’s easier to do.  So, come clean: what have you fibbed about this week?  I’m thinking.  Let me think.  Ah, yes.  I fibbed to my wife about the color of paint she chose for the new baby’s room.  It’s called “Pale Daffodil,” and is a plain yellowish hue.  She asked, last night, if I liked it.  I said yes.  I don’t hate it.  But it does look a little plain, a little too much like the color of an elementary school hallway.  But I didn’t say that, because I don’t care.  And if I had said it, she’d have spent another week looking for paint and painting - and she’s pregnant, and she needs to paint and be done with it.  So, I fibbed.  Did you?

Laurie Fendrich, a blogger for The Chronicle Review and a painter and a fine arts professor, shocks higher education by suggesting that not everyone has good taste.

It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

I’m sure her students love to hear this, and her colleagues.  But why teach art or literature - which is just another way of saying one teaches “taste” - if there’s no such thing?  Fendrich is going to be writing more columns about taste and how to teach it, and I’ll be commenting here.

National Review reviews a new reality show that’s something like Dog the Bounty Hunter meets, well, meets deadbeat dads.  The show is called Bad Dads, where a bounty hunter finds deadbeats behind on their child support and busts some heads, metaphorically speaking. 

Bad Dads is just the latest insult to men and especially fathers who feel, appropriately, that they’ve been maligned and minimized through television programming and advertising. In sitcoms, men are typically buffoons. And fathers, if they exist, are inept and unreliable, while Mom is a paragon of virtue and competence. Television executives and advertisers may profit from such “entertainment,” but who’s having fun? Apparently, women are. Four out of five network sitcom viewers are female.

It might be justice for the families who need that money, but it’s just more injustice to the institution of fatherhood.  But fathers have no one to blame but themselves.  Be a good dad.  It’s hard to do, and not very good television.