Let Who Will Be Clever

Were my father still alive, he would have turned 70 today. Despite our rocky relationship, I find that I miss him. There are times when those days immediately after his death trapped in Louisiana at the mercy of Teamsters and the South's slow pace seem like just yesterday. Other times they seem so far away. The same goes for memories of my youth. On occasion it doesn’t feel like it was so long ago that my dad, then aged 49, took advantage of IBM's early retirement plan and said farewell to Chicago and the workaday world. While there are certainly things from this time that I often would rather forget, one thing my parents generally and my father specifically did that I cannot let loose from my mind was that they reinforced in me a notion that being smart is laudable and a love of learning, even for its own sake, is virtuous. I am, I think, reasonably smart but, if the latter is true, then I can stake a claim to a large chunk of virtue.

During my childhood, the old man was a voracious reader and, while his library wasn’t exceptionally voluminous, it was substantial in other ways. During the last few years of my father's life, he began giving his books to my brother and me. It seemed he was giving up on one of the great joys in his life. He always claimed that he couldn’t read any longer due to failing eyesight which I never understood. For one thing, his ocular problems were nothing that glasses couldn't correct and secondly, there are large print books available. Hell, there were audiobooks ready and waiting for him. He never took to them, however, and I saw him reading many a time even after he'd emptied out his library having pleaded bad vision. My father's library had more books on World War II than was probably safe and my brother caught the history bug early. Ergo, when my dad began dispensing books, those tomes ended up with him. I, on the other hand, got all 54 volumes of the Great Books of the Western World and its 10-volume introductory set.

Now, lest this post fall any deeper into overwrought sentimentality, I will say that I bring all of this up for a reason. It's my blog and my father has been on my mind but it's really a post at Dane101 that caught my attention and inspired all of this. The post is called "State GOP would tune out one of Wisconsin's greatest resources" by Jesse Russell. It's part encomium for Wisconsin Public Radio and part lament at the prospect of its loss. The potential budget cuts which would herald the end of WPR are explained by Bill Lueders of Isthmus here. It's part of a larger scheme by Republicans in the State Assembly to shortchange our public university system. WPR, along with WPT, the UW School of Workers, the UW-Madison Havens Center, and the Wisconsin Humanities Council are all satellites of the UW and are all looking at their funding drying up. Also on the financial chopping block is the UW Law School because Rep. Frank Lasee (R-Green Bay) thinks the state already has too many lawyers and they "excess" ones are filing too many frivolous lawsuits. I don't know that there are too many lawyers here in Wisconsin and, besides, why not take action against those who file frivolous lawsuits instead of beheading an institution of learning? All of this is part of a larger realm where our university system is held in low regard by various lawmakers. I've seen some of them on the WPT program Here and Now and their remarks always frame the UW as a financial drain. The Democrats on the program are only marginally better as they tend to take the opposite tact and advertise the UW as a generator of revenue with both sides being in opposition to our universities as institutions of learning. Why are the notions of an education having value beyond income and having an educated public so often ignored?

Reading Lueders' piece served to reinforce my preconceived notion that anti-intellectualism is prevalent here in Wisconsin and the country at-large. I first read John Erskine's "The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent" when I was a teen and I found it in on my dad's bookshelf in one of the volumes of the introductory set to the GBotWW. In it, Erskine argues against our Anglo-Saxon inheritance where intelligence is equated with evil and for our Greek forbears who gave us "assurance that sin and misery are the fruit of ignorance and that to know is to achieve virtue". The former holds that "stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct" and I am severely tempted to assert that certain Republican assemblymen hold this dictum to be true or, at the very least, the folks who elected them do. This is not something which I can prove but my experience of living outside of Eau Claire for three and a half years does little to dissuade me. While the multiple teachers' strikes in Chicago when I lived there spawned animosity, I was not prepared for the derision poured upon teachers when I found myself a resident of Wisconsin. Saying that folks disliked teachers is like saying Packers fans dislike the Bears. For me, that most parents didn’t care one iota about education was obvious from the way kids on the sports teams were venerated while those of us on academic teams were ignored; it was apparent in the sheer ignorance of some of their kids and the pride that the kids took in it. I could go on for pages but let me just give two examples.

The first is a short ditty. I am a junior sitting in my American History class. The girl in the adjoining row asked me one day – in all earnestness – why we celebrate the 4th of July. My second example came when I was a senior and our physics class was grading the exams of the remedial physical science class. There was a question akin to "Gravity is: a) a breakfast cereal b) a model of a car c) a force which pulls objects to the ground". That's not verbatim but it was written in such a way that the right answer stood out from the rest. One guy got this wrong. He also left true/false questions blank. His writing looked like that of an 8-year old. And these weren't just the odd exceptions to an otherwise studious group of kids. While not the rule, these kinds of things happened very frequently.

It is tempting for me to conclude that, if most Wisconsin residents valued education instead of venerating athletes, we wouldn't be having these debates. But I'm reluctant to wholly endorse it. Americans tend to be ambivalent about learned folk. We are quick to cite the view of an expert's take on an issue if it suits our purpose. Unfortunately we are just as quick to denounce experts as being out of touch with reality when their views conflict with our own. UW philosophy professor Lester Hunt, however, has no problem with endorsing the view. In a post where he tossed around the idea of privatizing our university system, he commented:

On the other hand, state universities are supported by all the taxpayers, who are forced to do so. Many of them don't understand universities, don't give a damn about them, and in some cases would be hostile to the very idea, if it were correctly explained to them.

While it may be the case that the United States has always had an anti-intellectual bent, is seems that the situation has come to its apotheosis over the past few years. Christopher Hitchens observed that in 1800 "electors were offered a choice between the president of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences." Today we would be lucky have even the most junior member of any such organization as president. Such a person would, of course, be denounced from many quarters as an "elite", which is now a pejorative term. Todd Gitlin quotes Baynard R. Hall who wrote of the nascent state of Indiana in 1843: "We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness." The popular vote of the 2000 presidential election notwithstanding (and even it was a very close race), doesn't this still ring true today?