The Golden Age of University Education

          Last week I had lunch with Jim Earl, a retired professor of English at the University of Oregon. I asked him how things were going at the university, where I had taught as a graduate teaching fellow and then a post-doc, 2006-2013.

          I loved teaching at UO. But, it seems, things have changed.

         "Teaching at a state university isn't what it used to be," Jim said with a sigh. "You and I taught during the Golden Age."

         The Golden Age, it seems, is over. The emphasis is no longer on education but on jobs. Professors, for instance, are no longer student advisors. Professionals now perform that role, experts in advising students what courses to take, given that their goal, according to the new paradigm, is to get a job. "Don't waste your time with English and language courses," the experts say. "Take only what relates directly to your major." Since the drive is towards jobs, and since STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—are the job-oriented subjects, STEM majors abound. The old question, "What can you do with a degree in English?" is louder than ever and comes from the mouths of experts who don't care for what they see as fluff courses.

          No surprise that the number of English majors at UO has plummeted. 

          The same thing is true throughout the humanities, and, according to Jim, throughout the nation.

         I find this extremely distressing. For centuries the hallmark of American education has been its broad approach, an emphasis on education as something different from job training. That was the Golden Age of liberal arts state schools, which were affordable and, in many cases, provided superior education. 

          The Golden Age is over. STEM reigns because a STEM major means a good chance at a good job. Where will our poets come from? Where will our writers find their training, much less their inspiration? Without our history majors where will we find the depth of historical understanding so necessary for reasonable action today? We need, we desperately need, what the humanities teach us; we need compassionate social workers, tax consultants, receptionists, nonprofit board members, schoolteachers, and everyone else who works with other people. We need linguists and people who know languages. We need art of all kinds. A great nation deserves great art.

          Not to overstate my case, because it's true that a science major aiming towards that great job can be a compassionate person without taking a bunch of humanities courses. But I also think of something a friend who taught chemistry at Southern Oregon University told me: that he taught Chemistry 101 always with an eye towards reaching that one person in the back of the room who had never thought of becoming a chemistry major but who now finds that she loves it. I also think of my UO student in a class on the eighteenth-century novel. She was a social science major, but she said to me, "I just love this class." When we orient students towards only their majors and emphasize education as preparation for a job, we cut off the exploratory aspect of education that opens the world to us. We give people jobs, but we limit their education.

          I'm so grateful for the liberal arts education I received, first from Vanderbilt University, with its broad range of required classes, then at Cambridge University, with its tutorial system of individualized education. I am also grateful for having taught college and university classes during the Golden Age, when the emphasis was on a liberal arts education. It was a wonderful career. It was a great job. I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Beethoven and the Devil's Punchbowl

        Last Sunday I heard Angela Cheng playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra.  Beautiful! The last time I heard the Emperor Concerto in concert was also with the Rogue Valley Symphony, years ago. I wrote a Jefferson Public Radio commentary about it, which I'll publish here on my blog because it says pretty much what I felt about the piece hearing it this time, too.

         

          A few weeks before I left for a trip to the Devil's Punchbowl, a high-altitude lake in the Siskiyou Wilderness Area, I went to a concert of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, the Emperor Concerto. At first I was disappointed that the program called for that particular piece, which I knew so well that I could sing it in my sleep (or so I thought), but such familiarity wouldn't keep me from going. The Emperor Concerto is a beautiful piece, and, besides, every experience doesn't have to be a new one. Because I have been swimming in a particular lake before, would I not go there again?

          But maybe every experience is a new one. On the one hand, I was surprised to be hearing what I had not remembered was there. Then would come those familiar passages that touched not so much the familiarity through memory as those depths where I had hidden the music because I had made it my own. I lamented not that it was so familiar it had lost its excitement, but that it was not familiar enough to reach those depths for its duration. Flashing fingers commanding the keyboard, bold and collective chords from the orchestra, themes pushing through swirling notes to emerge with clear beauty—those were fine moments, but the passage I must have actually been singing in my sleep because it was the one I woke up with was the simple soprano notes with both hands, the orchestra a forgotten background to the piano's individual experience with beauty, the small moments of exquisite pleasure in solitude.

          The next week I climbed to the Devil's Punchbowl, a 93-foot-deep cirque lake surrounded by jagged peaks. Snow from the peaks lapped at the lake's side. An osprey hung in high, hesitating spirals over the lake, the sun catching an occasional tilt of the wings. For a cold-water, high-altitude-lake devotee, it was water to swim in.

          But it was not water to throw oneself into with a splash and a yell. This environment importuned respect for sacredness. Gently I waded into the lake. Slowly I sat down on a submerged rock, till the cold water rose over my thighs, over my breasts, then over my shoulders, and with a gentle push with my feet, I was waterborne.

          Far out in the center of this perfectly circular lake, under the eye of the osprey, poised between the depth of the sky and the depth of the water and caught between the blue of both, there were those passages from the Emperor Concerto. There were the tinkling moments of beauty one experiences in solitude and brings back to those one loves, even as the piano and orchestra merged again.

          I wasn't thinking about Beethoven's concerto while I was swimming in the Devil's Punchbowl, nor did I think of a swim while I was at the concert, and I am not so naive as to think Beethoven meant to symbolize such events in his music. I only mean that for me there was an affinity between the two events that implied self-similarity. The music and the swim—that performance and that swim—were among those events that create a universality in my life, a common thread I can touch and know this is I.

Heating the House

          My childhood home, in Sandy Springs, Georgia, was heated with an enormous oil furnace in the basement. A thermostat was mounted on the wall of the sunporch, upstairs. With seven people in the house, usually someone was cold and someone was hot, so the thermostat was now turned up, now turned down. When someone turned it up or when the furnace automatically started, it came into action with a loud "whoosh" that terrified me as a child because I knew it meant a fire had started in the basement. Fire! Wasn't that dangerous, to have a fire in the house? 

         When I lived in Europe in the sixties, first in France, then in England, everyone I met spoke with admiration and envy about central heating in America. In England all the rooms I was ever in were heated with tiny gas stoves set in the old woodburning fireplaces. Many were operated by coin insertion. When I went to the rooms of my professor, Sita Narasimhan, for tutorials in Elizabethan literature at Cambridge University, we would sit close to the tiny gas fire, swathed in thick wool sweaters, sipping sherry and talking about Shakespeare and Spenser. Every so often, Sita would insert another coin into the heater.

          Ironically, given both my childhood fear of having a fire in the house and the envy of Europeans for American central heating, I have for the past fifty years, here in Oregon, chosen to heat with wood. In the tiny house I built here on the mountain, for $300 and poorly insulated, I spent many snowy days huddled close to the stove. I liked seeing the fire through the stove's window. I liked the exercise of chopping wood ("Chop your own wood and it heats you twice," I would say as I swung the axe), and I liked the elemental connection of building a fire.

           Therefore, when I built a new house, ten years ago, I never considered heating with anything besides wood. Because building codes required a second source if I heated with wood, I did install electric wall heaters, which I have never used. Needing a larger and better stove, I bought an old Vermont Castings stove that my son found for $300 on Craig's List. It was quaint and pretty, but because it had been sitting outside for years before I bought it, by the time I had had it for another nine years, it had begun to wear out. It stopped holding a fire for more than a few hours, wasn't heating the house, and was creating volumes of ashes.

The old Vermont Castings stove

I wasn't about to resort to my electric heat source, so, just before Christmas, I bought a new stove, from Home Comfort, by repute the best stove store in the Rogue Valley, a reputation I like to hear because my husband owns it. With Mike's advice, I chose a Jøtul, the right size for my house and Quaker-like in the simplicity of its design.

          When the Home Comfort installers, Brian and Jeptha, dismantled the Vermont Castings stove, they discovered a hole worn through the metal in the interior top of the stove. No wonder it hadn't been working well! Jeptha and Brian wrestled the Vermont Castings stove onto a dolly and wheeled it to their truck, then brought in the Joøtul and the new stovepipe.

Brian, Jeptha, and Mike,
moving the old stove out

While they worked, efficiently and pleasantly, to put it in place, Brian told me that he had worked for Home Comfort for fourteen years. "Mike is a great boss," he said. "You don't stay with a company that long unless you like your boss." 

Jeptha and Brian bring the
new stove in

         I like his boss, too. 

          I also like my new stove. When I get up in the morning, I just throw kindling on coals to restart a fire. The house stays warm. I am using less firewood than I did with my Vermont Castings, and I empty ashes less often. If, when I was a child, I dreaded the thought of fire somewhere in the house, one of my enjoyable relaxations now is to sit on the couch meditating on the fire, watching the orange flames dance on the logs through the exceptionally clear, clean glass window of my new Jøtul stove. 

Preparing for Snow

          "What do you do to prepare for snow?" a fellow student at yoga class asked me, knowing that I live in the mountains, remotely.

          Ah, yes. Snow is coming. The weather forecast puts the snow line above my 2600-foot elevation, but I feel snow in the air. I wouldn't be surprised to have snow on the ground when I wake up in the morning.

          So I've been thinking about Evelyn's question. I used to drive my car the half-mile to the paved road at the first sign of possible snow and walk back up the hill secure in knowing that I could always walk to my car and get to the valley because the main road gets plowed. In the last few years, though, I've just taken my chances. If I'm snowed in, I'm snowed in. I can always ski out if I need to.

          But Evelyn's question reminded me that there are things I should do to prepare for snow, so this morning I hauled four wheelbarrow loads of firewood to the front porch.

I took my snow shovel from the tool shed and put it on the porch, in case all that firewood doesn't see me through to snowmelt and I end up wheelbarrowing wood to the porch over snow, after all. I did a week's worth of grocery shopping yesterday, so I have plenty of food. After I hauled the firewood, I tried to charge my emergency battery, but for some reason it wouldn't charge. Mike asked me, when we were talking about Evelyn's question after my yoga class, what I would do if I didn't have any light. "These are long, dark, winter evenings," he reminded me. I would get tired of sleeping so long. Couldn't read. Couldn't knit. Couldn't use the computer. I lived for more than forty years without electricity, but things changed once I built a house with electricity. I no longer have kerosene lamps and don't want to ever use a kerosene lamp again. I do have candles. I wouldn't be entirely without light, but that talk with Mike spurred me to find my large flashlight and charge its battery this afternoon.

          My former neighbor, Sylvia, taught me to fill the bathtub with water as soon as the electricity goes out and to fill pots and bottles, too. That seems smart. I can cook on the wood-burning stove if the electricity goes out, but I think I'll make that beef stroganoff tonight so if it snows and the electricity goes out, I can just heat it up on the wood-burning stove without having to cook a whole meal on it. I do have a backpacker's butane stove, with fuel, but you're not supposed to use it in an enclosed space, and I doubt that I would want to go to the back porch to cook. 

          So I feel pretty prepared. The only other thing to do is make sure my skis are waxed and my ski boots laced. And then, let it snow!

          

         

Playing Janus: 2019 and 2020

          At the beginning of the New Year I like to play Janus, the two-faced Roman god of gateways and transitions, whose one face looks back at the year past and the other ahead at the year to come.

          So, looking back at 2019: The biggest and best thing to happen was that I got married. Huge celebration.

Wonderful ceremony on the Applegate River with friends and family coming from all over the country. The wedding with its accompanying events was certainly the high point of 2019, but there were other peaks, too: taking a three-day hut-to-hut cross-country ski trip in the Central Cascades,

hiking 75 miles (with Mike) for my 75x75 project, finishing that project (to do 75 things of 75 repetitions each during my 75th year of life), and then celebrating that accomplishment with a wonderful 75th birthday party at my house with many friends. Other peaks were Mike's and my trip back East to introduce our respective families to each other, a trip to Hawaii for Mike's family reunion,

and other, more usual, family visits.

          But 2019 was a roller coaster year. Until only just before the wedding, Mike was in chemo for esophageal cancer. The good news came halfway through January: that the chemo was working. Chemo has a lot of down sides, but nothing mattered nearly so much when we knew the tumors were shrinking.
         Death struck in other places, though. My good friend Chris Bratt died, at home, basically because his good, big heart was worn out. He died singing. My dear friend Barbee Heilman died, of cancer, in her home in Tennessee, after an intense illness, during which she showed us all how to die well. And my friend, former student, and knitting teacher, Vera Hulme, died after a short illness and a long life. In addition, Mike had two close friends die during the year, one by suicide, the other by cancer. That was a lot of death to face in one year.

          And then 2019 came to an end with a New Year's Eve that lasted till 4:00 in the morning. I'm kind of proud of still being able to do something so off routine, although the debauchery, I have to admit, was pretty tame. Mike and I were just simply so involved in a diabolically difficult jigsaw puzzle that we didn't think of going to bed until we were so bleary-eyed we couldn't see the pieces any more. It took us about an hour to finish the puzzle the next day.

New York City skyline, in anticipation of a trip to NYC in 2020

          That's what Janus showed me with his looking-back face, all those highs interspersed with sorrows. When I turn with Janus's other face towards 2020, I hear Mike making a resolution to stay healthy: no more chemo, no more broken bones or falls off cliffs. I wholeheartedly support that resolution. Mine (besides the usual lose weight and do more yoga) is to not lose things, like all the earrings and hats I lost last year and the mail or tools or cell phone I spend too much time looking for around the house. This year will be different. Firmly resolved.
          But, alas, not so firmly adhered to. On New Year's Eve I left my hat at the chic-rustic bar in Medford where Mike and I went after the Rogue Valley Symphony concert, and yesterday I lost an earring on a walk. Mike retrieved the hat for me, and I'll take the same walk today that I took yesterday and see if I can find the earring, but how am I going to keep to my resolution with such a poor start?

          All in all, though, it's what I take away from looking back that is most important to apply to looking forward. The many joys and occasional sorrows of 2019 all have the same lesson: "Lif is læne," as the Anglo-Saxons used to say—life is fleeting. Never procrastinate love.