Jerome McGann’s Keynote Address from the Stuart Curran Symposium 2024
“Performing Politics on a Tight Little Island”
by Jerome McGann
What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street?
(William Blake)
When Kaila, Elizabeth, and Robin asked me early last April to speak here today I told them I couldn’t see how to do it.
Of course I felt then and still feel the honor of the invitation. Salute Stuart and his exemplary scholar’s life? Speak at this last celebration of the Byron bicentenary?
At such an invitation, who would hesitate even for a moment?
“Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart?”
And yet I did. Why???
Because the title of the conference: “Performing Politics”; and its date: ten days before the election were asking me to comment, somehow, on our immediate national politics. What could I possibly say about that grievous topic at a scholarly conference that wouldn’t seem fatuous? And then suppose I said nothing on that elephant in the room – is it still an elephant at all? --but just talked about some long-gone political events during the Romantic Period? I felt unable to do that on October 25, 2024!
So I was trying to work up a polite refusal when something happened that changed my mind. It reminded me that I should tell some stories, mostly personal, from our tight little academic island. They will be as true as I can make them at this time, which means they can’t be the whole truth. Several go so far back that I’m sure I’ve forgotten, or distorted, some of the truthful things they involved. Perhaps some of you can fill in their blanks.
The stories zero in on certain events that have been important for me personally. They shaped how I’ve tried to understand and practice my vocation, the vocation of most of you here. So it’s the political significance of our vocation that I’ll be talking about. And as much as I’m sure that Donald Trump should not be elected, that he is clearly unfit, it’s not the outcome of the election that preoccupies me, or will occupy what I’ll be saying. It’s this:
That Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and the MAGA syndicate have shown and told us in no uncertain terms what their political and social agenda will be from an autocratic Day One through the next four years and, according to the manifesto of Project 2025, well beyond. That is upsetting, but not nearly so upsetting to me as this: 10 days from now, some 60 or even 70 million American citizens, our countrymen and women, will vote their approval of that result.
That inconvenient truth presses hard on all these stories and why I want to tell them.
The first story is crucial for several reasons, as you’ll soon see. It was the event that changed my mind about speaking here today.
Last April 4, the day after I received your invitation, the University of Virginia held a public ceremony dedicating our new library. The work took four years to complete, from 2020 to 2024. It was a momentous day for the university.
The spirit of the library dedication was blazoned everywhere on the signage with the library’s new name: the Shannon Library. Because the library is the university’s vocational center, its name is especially important. UVA’s famous Rotunda, one of the nation’s historic buildings, was the university’s original library.
But the Rotunda was replaced when UVA built a new central library in 1938. It was named after Edwin Alderman, UVA’s first president, who had made his name as an educational reformer. His long tenure as president (1904-1931) included important accomplishments. But the most prominent was also the most unfortunate. An enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, he made a racist pseudoscience the clinical and curricular focus of the UVA Medical School, the biology department, and -- perhaps worst of all -- the Education School.
In 1938 America, eugenics was far from the discredited pseudoscience we know it to be. So in 2024 the UVA Board of Visitors and the Administration thought the new library needed a new name. Last April the Alderman Library became the Shannon Library.
“What’s in a name?” In this case, a great deal. Shannon was just 38 years old when he came to UVA in 1956 as an Associate Professor of English. Amazingly, only three years later, in 1959, he was installed as UVA’s president. But his presidency proved an even greater amazement. During his15 year tenure he completely transformed UVA and left a legacy second only to Thomas Jefferson’s. He took down UVA’s racial barrier, he took down its gender barrier, he established the University of Virginia Press, and – altogether -- he turned UVA from a genteel institution into a major American research center and -- crucially -- a model of UG public liberal education.
At the dedication ceremony, five speeches celebrated the decency and courage that grounded Shannon’s accomplishments between 1959 and 1974. He was UVA’s president during one of the most disturbed and fractured periods in recent American history, the late 60s and early 70s.
The ceremony reminded me how thoroughly his presidential leadership was grounded in his vocational practice as a humanist educator and scholar – an ENGLISH PROFESSOR! He continued to offer UG classes throughout his presidency, and when he left, he rejoined the English Department. After 15 years as president he picked up where he had left off and spent the next 14 years as a fulltime faculty member. And then he retired.
The library dedication led to my second story, a tale of the most celebrated single event of Shannon’s presidency. This was the speech he made in May 1970 to several thousand students who were protesting the Vietnam War and the deaths of the students who had just been killed at Kent State. Speaking from the steps of the Rotunda, Shannon – the president of UVA ! – condemned the war, honored the students who were protesting, and asked them to help him keep the protests peaceful and the university open. And so it came to pass. Unlike what happened earlier this year at many of the protests on our campuses, and back then in the late 60s, no police or National Guard troops invaded the UVA’s Grounds to break up the 1970 protests
Right after his speech, Shannon was denounced across the Commonwealth by nearly all its journalists and politicians. But the BOV stood with him. A few weeks later at the 1970 graduation ceremony he was greeted with a standing ovation by the faculty, the students, and the parents of the graduating class. Shannon’s speech from the steps of the Rotunda during the Vietnam student protests is now recognized as the most glorious ever delivered from that historic building. It called the entire university community – staff, students, faculty, and administration – to deliberate and work together to address the debacle the war in Vietnam had become between 1963 and 1970.
Many colleges and universities in 1970 were upheaved in the wake of the Kent State killings and the civil strife driven by the Vietnam War. The contrast between what happened then at UVA and what happened at U. of Chicago in May 1969, where I was then working, couldn’t have been more different. At Chicago a student protest was severely sanctioned and the entire university’s morale was fractured. I’ll come back to that story later. Here I’ll just mention that my closest friend in the Chicago English Department published his first book in the month of the Chicago sit-in. It was dedicated to me. But he and I were, like so many, so polarized by the events that our friendship never completely recovered.
As citizens we all have political views and allegiances and some of us become active in local, state, or national politics. But as educators we’re all “performing politics” all the time. We sign on to answer one clear public call: the Advancement of Learning. At the day-to-day level, that means working to cultivate in ourselves and others habits of thoughtfulness in every sense of that word. We make a pledge of an elementary political allegiance: to try make honesty and careful thought a way of life, a Second Nature of our human nature.
Shannon and his library throw a useful light on George Bernard Shaw’s notorious gibe about our tight little educational island: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” The remark is the other side of a counterfeit coin that reads: “Shut Up and Study”. Clearly Shaw must have run into some very bad teachers and teaching in his time, certainly no one like Edgar Shannon. What Shannon did in the spring of 1970 was what good educators do all the time, though often much less publicly: set an example of how to do something that is very difficult to do very well. Lots of people do bad things and all of us do things badly sometimes. If we’re any good at what we do we try not to do bad things at all, and if we do something badly, to do better next time. Everybody always has a lot to learn. That’s why Beckett made his watchword “Worstward Ho!” Fail again, fail better.
At college and university, if we’re doing at all well what we do, it isn’t “teaching”, it’s learning. And it’s learning all around because in our tight little island, faculty and students – and we hope, the university community as a whole -- work at learning together. That is a politics, a public service, performed at the most local level. Whose habits of truthfulness become more advanced in the classes we offer, the work we oversee, everything we all, students and faculty, write; convenings like this one and our neverending conversations and disputes? Our colleagues, our students, the absent public, ourselves? The answer to that question is the answer Demogorgon gave Asia: “Each to himself must be the oracle”. I dedicated The Romantic Ideology in 1983 “to my students at the University of Chicago, 1966-1975, who taught me how to learn”.
Whitman set an example for that kind of learning when he said: “let none be content with me, [for] I myself seek a man better than I am, or a woman better than I am”. And when he said this: “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher”. And then, even more truly, this: what Whitman might have told Kamala Harris when she urged us all to DO something now that will make a difference beyond our tight little island
An this coming election:
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid
and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue
not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or
number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with
the young and with the mothers of families.
I’ve known a few colleagues who could manage something like that kind of high-minded style from time to time in their work. And a high style in a good cause is often an excellent thing. President Lincoln’s style, Frederick Douglass’s style, Martin Luther King’s. But in our community, we are for the most part, young and old alike, far too ordinary to fit such exalted ways of talking about the lives of ordinary people.
We need less exalted examples. Like Edgar Shannon. Or a person even less notable than Edgar. A person like me and you. A person like the Homeric scholar Milman Parry, who died in 1935 when he was 33 years old. His legacy? A mere handful of scholastic essays and lectures. But how eloquent they are.
I single out one of those pieces because it tells me something important about ourselves that we shouldn’t forget. It’s an unprepossessing lecture he gave to the Harvard Board of Overseers in 1933 on “The Historical Method in Literary Criticism”. Downbeat and pedantic as that title was, plain and straightforward as the lecture’s prose, their theme was an ancient and uplifting commonplace: in Parry’s lovely words, “that there is nothing at the same time finer and more practical than the truth.”
Here’s a summary of what I said about Milman Parry in a lecture I gave just as the MAGA Movement were marching on Charlottesville in 2017 and forecasting January 6:
Parry’s heroes are not Achilles or Hector, not even Socrates or Plato. They are far more minor and modest. They are people [like yourselves here] who spend our days studying – sometimes alone, more often with colleagues and students -- works few people read and may have never heard of—perhaps even written in dead languages. We are learning the habit of truthfulness, learning to be careful and accurate, and to make honest and thorough reports about what we do. I knew a pair of scholars who set all their other research aside for months trying to write a footnote that told the truth about a sentence in a letter by the poet Tennyson – a sentence that mentioned, but didn’t identify, Tennyson’s toothpowder. For such adepts of truth, whether a document being searched has ideas with current social relevance is quite beside the point. Indeed, apparent irrelevance might be exactly TO the point for people who have learned to hold in honor the truth as such.
So a close commentary on a minor passage in Book XII of the Iliad led Parry in 1933 to highlight the importance of truthfulness. By 1933 Stalin had firm control of the Soviets, a year earlier Japanese fascism had established itself with the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, Hitler ruled Germany, and a freewheeling American capitalism had plunged the United States into such a tormented social condition that our American fascism was rising to prominence and power, and Alderman’s eugenics program was in full swing at UVA. Here are Parry’s reflections on that exact historical situation:
The chief emotional ideas to which men seem to be turning at present . . . are those of nationality—for which they exploit race—and class. . . . Anyone who has followed the history of the use of propaganda for political purposes . . . in the past fifty years [recognizes how] those who were directing that expressed their lack of concern, or even [their] contempt, for what actually was so, or actually had been so. (412)
So shameless had the contempt for truthtelling become in 1933 that Parry summoned his vision of the American Scholar to bring that untruthful world to judgment. So shameless has the contempt for truthtelling become in the last eight years that I’m moved to call out a bygone scholar of ancient Greek to bring judgment back into view today.
Parry’s fine and practical truthtelling is not what Wordsworth called “truths that wake to perish never”, nor what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said in the world”. Thomas Hardy inflected those comments on truthtelling more sharply when he wrote: “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst”.
Hardy’s point has rarely hit more home than it does today, when we’ve been forced to take an exacting look at the worst we Americans have put on offer. If the attack on the Capitol pales before the Nazi Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938, the view of American democracy from that fear-driven event of January 6 has been shocking enough.
Enough that we might recall the even more exacting wisdom of a man who made as deep a study of American Fear and derangement as anyone: Edgar Allan Poe.
Like the Bible -- a key text in a humanities curriculum -- the works we study were written by and about that company we all know very well, the company Poe called “The good and the bad and the worst and the best”.
The Good and the Bad and the Worst and the Best. We humanist students and educators are a subset of that very demographic. And we draw on a library of “The good and the bad and the worst and the best” that has been thought and said in the world. All the documents of our civilizations, all the documents of our barbarities. The Good and the Bad and the Worst and the Best have never been and will never be any different from ourselves. And there are few truths finer or more practical . . . or more difficult to deal with -- than that truth.
And if it’s true that “all politics is local” and should be local, it’s also true that no seriously engaged local politics stays local. Society creates institutions of Learning to instill those habits of truthfulness whose common-sense hallmarks are: curiosity, diligence, thoroughness, and candor. In a word: honesty. And it expects those habits will be taken into a larger world. As Parry argued, that’s where and when the thought that “there is nothing at the same time finer or more practical than the truth” shows itself as seriously consequential. Remember 2002? Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld all had excellent higher educations and they were experienced, worldly men. They KNEW that “Stuff happens”. What went wrong at all those fine institutions each of them attended?
I ask the question because I’m thinking of another story. This one happened in 1991 when I was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley.
The Gulf War had just broken out and the Berkeley community threw itself into resistance. While the administration justified its invasion as a defense of Kuwait’s freedom, the view from Berkeley was different. America wasn’t springing to defend Kuwait from a powerful neighbor. It was moving to shore up its ability to control access to Near Eastern oil. Kuwait was a pretext.
A teach-in was called at the university and several political activists from the 60s Free Speech Movement were asked to speak to the community about what should be done. One was the poet and diplomat Peter Dale Scott. Peter and I had become friends, and during a lunch we had together a few days before the teach-in he told me he was worried about what he was going to say. “I want all of us here to ask ourselves: ‘Where have we gone wrong? I mean us, not the government. What’s our responsibility for what’s happening?” I told him I thought those were exactly the right questions to ask, and that few communities were more prepared to pose them than the Berkeley community. But he left our lunch worried.
The large room for the teach-in was packed. When Peter got up he posed his questions and spoke passionately for some 10 minutes about their pertinence. The war on Iraq was supported across America. Had he and his Berkeley community been living in a twenty-year dream of dissent?
There was no applause when Peter sat down. Then a woman got up and said something like this. “Peter, I’ve known and worked with you for almost 30 years and I would never have expected you to betray what we stand for.” More of the same followed from others in the audience and no one signaled any approval for what Peter was saying.
Few public events in my life have made a deeper impact on me. It flooded my mind again last May when Ken Burns, addressing the Brandeis graduates, called for a “withering self-examination” by all tormented Americans. But he clearly had most in mind those who judged that Donald Trump was toxic and treacherous, what Burns called “the opiod of opiods”. Reading his address I thought of the withering critical question Jimmy Malone posed for Elliott Ness and his pals in The Untouchables: “What are you prepared to DO?” Truth is only a fine and practical thing when people make it so.
Where have we gone wrong? It’s not as if we haven’t seen a Masque of Anarchy being rehearsed in public since late 2020. Some have been trying out for leading parts in that tawdry show – even judges and elected politicians -- and many thousands have taken more minor roles or, since it was being produced as spectacle, signed up as extras. What’s our responsibility for the emergence of MAGA?
I can’t get Shelley’s poem out of my mind. Once upon a time it was unmasking a theatrical display of autocratic government orchestrated by Metternich, Castlereagh, and Alexander I. The public spectacle opened in Vienna in 1814-15 and Shelley’s poem spoke to its revival as an 1819 Theatre of Cruelty produced and directed by the Jenkinson Administration.
And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.
And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation. (sts. 12-13)
That could have been written sometime during the last eight years.
But what now of the poem’s famous, final call to action? “Ye are many, they are few”.
When I remember those 60 or more million Trump voters, that stirring line reverberates chastening echoes: “ “Ye are many, they are too”. They ARE many, very many, and so the line resonates yet again in an even more disturbing way: “They are many, they are you”.
“We have met the enemy and they are us.” How many of us have been unwittingly cast for parts in this performance spectacle? There are days, many days, when I feel as deranged as Donald Trump ! Is that what Peter was suspecting in 1991? What Ken Burns was saying at Brandeis last May? Is it the truth?
Not exactly. But I think it’s getting at what is true: that we still haven’t met the enemy that IS us.
That thought returns me to the story I said, some 30 minutes ago, that I’d come back to.
I’m remembering the 1969 winter-term student protest and sit-in at University of Chicago. Triggered by the tenure case of Marlene Dixon, the students were protesting the university’s failure to address two pressing moral and social issues. One was national – the Vietnam war that Dixon had been vocal in denouncing. The other was local and, for the university in particular, far more serious. For decades it had built a wall around itself and its southside neighbors, the black community of Woodlawn, and it manned the wall with policies that were nakedly racist and classist. The Life of the Mind meant to isolate itself from Life on the Street next door. And when the student protest broke out, the university found that it had to protect itself from its enemies within the castle.
The university fortress had a castle keep, the Administration Building, where “the life of the mind” held command and control. Proud of its famous students and faculties, the administration had always encouraged both to “free critical inquiry”. But like the ancient prohibition against eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, there was one key exception: university public policy. When the university deliberated serious public issues, neither students, nor even directly, the faculty were involved. That is, when it studied them thoroughly with the purpose of taking practical action to deal with them, or not to deal with them at all.
That’s why the frustrated students sat-in the administration building, not the library or the classroom buildings, and why much of the faculty supported them.
The protest was peaceful first to last, including – to its credit -- on the administration’s part. No police or military were called in, as happened often in 1970 and earlier this year when unspeakable violence struck Israel and then rolled wholesale across Gaza.
After 14 days the Chicago students in 1969 called off the sit-in. But because they stood fast to the issues at stake, when disciplinary tribunals were convened, 42 students were expelled and 81 were suspended – many choosing never to return. The sit-in failed.
Or did it? In a few years the United States called a halt to its war. And just about that time, 1974-75, the University of Chicago began committing itself to broad-ranging policies of just and productive community engagement. These were precisely the results the protesting students were committed to -- “no matter what”. The kind of commitment that measures the difference between failing and failing better.
But that story, like many stories, didn’t end there. Beginning soon after the punishment of the students, the University of Chicago turned its attention to its South Side neighbors, and that attention and community cooperation has never flagged since. But it would be another 40 years before it tried to address directly the question of its broad public mission: managing the Advancement of Disciplinary Learning on-grounds.
I’m talking about a document the university drafted in 2014 now known as the “Chicago Principles”. Endorsed by110 colleges and universities, it lays out a “framework” for dealing with “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation” of important public issues by “all members of the University’s community” together.
The importance of this document came clear last spring when various universities that had signed it forcibly broke up their student and faculty protests. Donald Trump found the police violence at Columbia “beautiful to watch”.
Did the universities that summoned police force to break up non-violent protests last spring deliberate their actions with their entire university community? It didn’t happen at U. of Virginia because, although it signed the Chicago Principles, it had no mechanism to carry out community wide discussion and deliberation. And it didn’t happen at University of Chicago, as Anton Ford, the university’s Deputy Dean of Humanities, pointed out. He condemned the decision to bring riot police to the campus because it flouted the express declaration of the “Chicago Principles”.
How many of the signatories to the document had actually prepared themselves to execute it? An administration can’t act on behalf of the university community if there is no structure for discussion and deliberation together. Failing that, the community is forced to improvise, and if the issues are seriously fraught, the improvisations will be seriously contentious. Formal structures are put in place to prevent worse things than combative discussion and concessive practical decisions. Virginia was blessed in 1970 that Edgar Shannon was its president. He was a very ordinary man, a Professor of English, but an ordinary man of extraordinary character. Every institution should be so fortunate all the time but, alas, we know that doesn’t happen. This past spring only a small handful of colleges and universities discussed and deliberated with their protesters together . Were they prepared or were they, like Edgar Shannon in 1970, improvising?
“But universities aren’t democracies!!” No, but neither are they autocratic. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all founded along Congregational lines whose model for governance was a complex system of democratic representation – a model that has been broadly influential throughout American history. And their ad-ministration was grounded in ministry, where ethical norms monitored the practical outcomes. The history of our secular state universities is similar, reflecting their emergence from the democratic state republics that established them.
But another history, -- American financial enterprise, -- has also been in play, and with the explosion of finance capitalism since WW2, universities, even colleges, have come increasingly to look and act like capitalist corporations. As does the country we pledge allegiance to, now a world empire.
We here should not forget any of that history because – in truth – we can’t do without any of it. As citizens we will vote on November 5 and hope for the best. But no matter what the outcome of those elections, we here will still be left with our vocational commitment to something we will never have and never know, though we pledge it our deepest allegiance: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, till death do us part.
So step away from our national politics and look homeward, angels. I’ve been telling stories that speak to our vocational politics. I’ve been telling them because I think they need our attention. What are we prepared to DO??? The last MLA Newsletter discussed some interesting curricular projects now being tried at several places around the country. Dana Williams’ column cited Scott Muir and Younger Oliver’s report on some innovative educational “Strategies” being tested out [Muir, S., & Oliver, Y. (2021). They ‘re especially interesting because they spring from the ground up.
But those moves don’t address the larger problem of community-wide “discussion and deliberation”.
Do we think, do you think, the university’s public policies should be set by executive and administrative officers without university-wide discussion and deliberation? The Kalven Report in 1967 called colleges and universities ”communities of scholars”. But if they ever were just that, they haven’t been for a long long time, and since WW2 the phrase has become a misleading, even a pious, descriptor. If communities of scholars are everywhere, and they are – here We are! -- for almost 75 years our institutions of higher education have been shaped in the image and likeness of a very different social order. Our population is now altogether diverse and transnational and our institutions are serious players in the social, economic, military, and political life of the nation and the world. Think about a university you can see in an interesting movie of 1942, The Male Animal. It’s worth seeing not just because it’s a pretty good movie, but even more because It’s worlds apart from the university we watched in 2010 in The Social Network. There’s a movie where we can meet the enemy that is us today.
Should university governance and public policy-making be responding to that “social network? A reasonable reply might be: well, “Each to himself must be the oracle” about that question And while I agree, I also wonder: have we actually deliberated the question, even with ourselves personally, or have we just let a status quo fall into place? And I also wonder: if we each have to answer the question for ourselves personally, aren’t we all in it together? On our tight little island, no one is an island. Perhaps never before have public issues and policies so directly affected the work of students and faculties – and university staff as well -- across the board. Protests erupt exactly when those concerns are forgotten or ignored. Just think back to last spring. How could universities NOT have been shaken by what was happening – is still happening -- in Israel and Palestine.?
“Shut up and study”??; “Universities aren’t democracies”?? Please !! How badly those kinds of exasperated cries miss the point. You’re tempted to blurt out an exasperated response. No? Well then what do you want us to be? What do we want us to be? Oligarchies? Ivory towers? If the “community of scholars” – the university’s faculty and students – doesn’t take its relation to the “real world” seriously, of what consequence could its educational work actually have? Then that part of the community – that heart of the community, if not of the university at large, that special company of the community would be -- no? -- what some want it to be, and others despise it for being: an ivory tower. At my back I hear Bernard Shaw: “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”.
In 1969 Edgar Shannon set an inspiring example of a person who sent forth what Byron called for: “a light to lesson ages, rebel nations, and voluptuous princes”. I only learned about it twenty years later when I joined the University of Virginia faculty. But in 1969, 150 students at University of Chicago set me a more chastening example of public speaking. If you were there in 1969 you would have seen what a mess those students made of things. And it was far from a beautiful thing to watch a community of young people I loved flailing and failing. What were they doing, what were they prepared to do?? They were prepared to match the university’s mission failures with their own way of failing better. So they sat-in the Administration Building to try to help wake the neighbors up. And so they did. “My students at the University of Chicago, 1966-1975, who taught me how to learn” what they were doing and why it was important. To learn about a better way to fail, a more impressive way -- to learn the hard way.
And then in 1991 there was the example of withering self-examination set by Peter Dale Scott to the Berkeley community. “Where have we gone wrong?” What is our responsibility for falling enrollments everywhere in humanities programs, for whole departments and disciplines being cancelled by administrative decision, for the flight from the study of culture and its languages? For policy makers who seem actually to believe – perhaps even honestly to believe -- that there is nothing finer or more practical than a core focus on STEM education? Or for a community of scholars where how few, even yet, have tried to make ourselves hands-on scholars of our digital culture and, crucially, of its digital tools and machineries.
Most of all, what are we prepared to do about the social network we have fashioned over the past 75 years in our colleges and universities? Have we been giving our hearts away to sordid things? No, I wouldn’t say that, because the world is always with us. Too much with us? Maybe, yes, because it CAN lay waste our powers. But then that wicked, wicked world may equally call our powers to attention. The Social Network calls attention to a world that a man like Wordsworth didn’t want to engage – good for him! -- and to a world that a movie like The Male Animal, for no fault of its own, hardly began to imagine. But it’s still a world that’s here and now and its got legs . . . for “The Good and the Bad and the Worst and the Best”.
So, “Look homeward, angels”??? Yes, I would say that. And with Peter Dale Scott and Ken Burns I’d ask: “Where have we gone wrong?” And with Jimmy Malone I’d also ask: “What am I prepared to DO?”
I decided to speak here today because I think those questions are worth asking and acting on. I’ll let it go at that. Thanks for hearing me out.
Jerome McGann
