THE AGE OF REFORM BILLIONAIRES! Bill Gates funds the education debate. Are liberals and scribes on the take?
MONDAY, MARCH 21, 2011
What may not be the matter with Mississippi: We’ve rarely liked a book as much as we’ve liked the clumsily-titled Higher Education?, last year’s street-fighting, much-ignored effort by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus.
Hacker is a well-known professor at Queens College; Dreifus writes for the “Science Times” section of the New York Times and teaches as an adjunct at Columbia. In their book, they bat the professoriate all around, portraying their colleagues as another mammon-driven elite in our mammon-chasing culture. They batter their colleagues for their greed—and for their refusal to teach. They mock their colleagues’ “so-called research,” which is often conducted in Tuscany, while on sabbatical. The authors aren’t rude, but it’s been a long time since we read a book which made so little attempt to be polite. Indeed, this book addresses one question after another which we asked ourselves in the fall of 1965, sitting in a big lecture class while the professor droned on.
(Where’s all the money going, we wondered. And why must we scribble all these notes? Why don’t they just type up the lecture and pass the darn thing out?)
We don’t know if Hacker and Dreifus are right on every point they address—but we strongly recommend their book for its values, its tone and its attitude. Beyond that, we treasured every word they wrote about the University of Mississippi. A bit of background:
Hacker pretty much made his bones in 1992, with his very aggressive book about race, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. Hacker is no squish on racism. For this reason, we were especially intrigued by what he and Dreifus thought they saw at Ole Miss.
The final chapter of Higher Education? is called, “Schools We Like—Our Top Ten List.” Hacker and Dreifus praise Western Oregon University, “a school without any frills or pretense that did its job with utter seriousness and dedication.” They praise Arizona State, which “may well be the most experimental institution in the country…where anyone with an interesting idea can get a hearing.” They praise Berea College, which “was founded in the nineteenth century by radical Christian abolitionists who wanted to create a center where talented young people of all races could learn together.”
And they praise the University of Mississippi. (“Indeed, of all the flagship universities we visited, we found the University of Mississippi the most appealing.”) We don’t know if Hacker and Dreifus are right about any of these schools. But we treasured their words about Ole Miss. We pray they’re right in what they thought they saw on that famous campus.
“We didn’t expect to like Ole Miss,” they write as they start a short discussion of the school’s social history. But after describing its painful integration in the 1960s, Hacker and Dreifus say this:
HACKER/DREIFUS (page 219): Today, on campus, there’s a statue of James Meredith and Ole Miss is a university where reconciliation and civility are at the very heart of the educational mission. Much of this transformation is the work of Robert Khayat, a remarkable leader, who retired from the chancellorship in 2009. Khayat, himself a former footballer, raised academic standards, tripled the African American enrollment, and banned confederate flags from athletic events—a truly courageous step…
Ole Miss now has a Center for the Study of Southern Culture that focuses on the art, literature, music and food of the region, black and white. Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, is an on-campus museum. Rita Bender, the wife of Mickey Schwerner, one of the civil rights workers murdered during the summer of 1964, gives a course in “restorative justice.” And did we see correctly at the football game? Was that really a black athlete escorting an extremely white homecoming princess across the field?
Our college girl friend grew up in Mississippi when that was a tough assignment for white progressives. (And a much tougher assignment for blacks.) We pray the authors did see correctly. We pray they’re right about this:
HACKER/DREIFUS (continuing directly): When Melissa Cole, a pre-med student in the Barksdale Honors College, first though about attending Ole Miss, her friends back home in Jackson asked, “Why would you want to go there?” She’s African-American. Once at Oxford, she got involved with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, which she described as having started much “dialogue of racial reconciliation, racial issues on campus, and how to come together. It’s not only black and white, but also international students who are having different experiences.” She believes, “Ole Miss has a lot to offer for anybody of any race.”
Why was this “the most appealing” flagship school the authors visited? “Unlike many of the signature universities, you see lots of young people about the campus. This place is actually for them.” We don’t know if the authors are right about that. But we treasured their words about the role of race on this campus. And then, just yesterday, we got to read this report in the New York Times. Just gaze on that beautiful photo!
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Can it be that people are finding their way to a future in Mississippi? In the past few months, we’ve often wondered if we modern white liberals are even willing to hope for that.
More on that thought in the next few days. But we do recommend that book, with its refusal to be polite about all that “so-called research!”
