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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-closing-doors-to-the-future-1302538.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Closing doors to the future
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Sunday, March 6, 2011
When my friends and I were growing up, public education was held sacred by our parents. As the children of immigrants, education had been their way into American society and their way up the economic ladder.
There have been criticisms and political attacks on the two flagship universities in Texas (Texas A&M and UT Austin) since at least 2008. Here I present a recent commentary piece I wrote with pertinent information and with links to other commentaries by Gov. Rick Perry and Gail Collins of the NY Times.
These are followed by selected reader response.
I have received permission to circulate these comments from the people who sent them to me.
They are worth reading.
TGP
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-universities-spending-on-sports-undermines-their-mission-1409458.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Universities’ spending on sports undermines their mission: education
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, April 18, 2011
Since 2008, I have represented the University of Texas on the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), the only faculty organization in the country monitoring National Collegiate Athletic Association programs within institutions of higher learning.
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-pair-hope-31-000-images-will-help-1565908.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Pair hope 31,000 images will help spur social change
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, June 27, 2011
It is easy to feel powerless about changing the world we live in.
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-we-the-people-are-losing-civility-understanding-1667192.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: We, the people, are losing civility, understanding
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, July 28, 2011
This Fourth of July, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, spoke on “Civility and the American Spirit” in Chautauqua, N.Y. (Read the text of his speech at http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/07042011.html.)
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/home-where-they-take-you-in-no-matter-1775334.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: “Home, where they take you in, no matter your challenges”
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, August 23, 2011
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-history-gives-us-guidance-in-dealing-with-1862859.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: History gives us guidance in dealing with national tragedy
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Saturday, September 17, 2011
The cover of the Sept. 12 Newsweek shows a solitary plane in the kind of spacious blue sky we praise in “America, the Beautiful.” On this background in white letters we read: “9/11 Ten Years of RESILIENCE.” Three words in black, “FEAR GRIEF REVENGE,” are placed vertically above the much larger word “RESILIENCE.”
This image conveys one take on a national moment of suffering and how we have lived through 10 years of history in reaction to it: the color-coded dark emotions of fear and grief fueling the equally dark human instinct to take vengeance. The Newsweek editors believe what we ourselves want to believe about what we have been through and where we are now. We are resilient. We have bounced back to where we were before.
I think all Americans have their own ideas about where we stand a decade after 9/11. Our opinions probably differ about whether we took the right paths as individuals or as a nation. Rather than discuss such potentially polarizing matters, I want to make some observations on how we use history and historical memory to deal with tragedy and the grief that stems from it.
It is a tricky subject. A senior honors thesis student, Abraham Callahan, recently asked me why Thucydides, the father of scientific history, had bothered analyzing the motives and causes of mass killings of human beings in civil wars and political revolts. Thucydides asserts that human nature is constant and will lead to such things happening again, presumably no matter how much history people have read.
Fortunately, intelligent human beings, from the Greek soldier-playwright Aeschylus to leaders of our nation after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., have thought about the nature of collective grief after violent public acts, where our emotions want to take us, and what happens if we let them take us there.
One way we might confront an atrocity like the Holocaust is by placing it beyond human understanding. Claude Lanzmann, whose long documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” focuses on personal testimonies Continue reading
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-single-sex-education-study-flawed-1912538.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Single-sex education study flawed
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, October 11, 2011
In the late 1960s, I learned how to read and think and talk and write at St. Ignatius High School, an all-boys school in Cleveland. Many of my teachers were Jesuit priests. They had doctor of divinity degrees and doctorates in a second subject area. They had done serious community service, like work among the urban poor in the United States or in foreign countries.
Our teachers at St. Ignatius were devoted to the life of the mind and to our minds. But they never forgot our souls and spirits and hearts. They taught us how to think. They even taught theology skeptically. My high school education prepared me to question my Catholic faith, but it instilled positive moral and social values that enrich my life to this day. I looked forward to school every day, although I had to travel 20 miles for 75 minutes on a public bus each way. I left home at 6:30 a.m. and got back in rush hour, about 6 p.m.
The buses were packed with working-class men and women and with teenage boys and girls going to Catholic high schools in the city. I felt lucky to be getting an education. I sensed how poor life could be without a cultivated mind and caring spirit. The worldly wise Jesuits reinforced this idea.
The controversy surrounding “single-sex schooling” and the Ann Richards School raised by a two-page article, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” in the journal Science struck a deep chord in me and in others. I read the article as if it were assigned reading in a second-year English class at St. Ignatius. Here is my homework.
We might expect a priori that an article co-authored by eight active founders and board members of a national organization championing coeducational schooling would show some bias. It does.
Its authors, including a psychology professor at the University of Texas, accuse educators who support single-sex schooling of pseudo-science. For a psychology professor to join in doing this is “a pot calling kettles black.” Psychology itself is not an exact science.
The eight authors criticize proponents of single-sex schooling for cherry-picking their arguments. But they cherry-pick a straw man, a random “teacher in a single-sex public school classroom,” whose opinion they quote from a local newspaper, the Gaston Gazette.
Conforming to recent politically driven data mania within higher education, the Science article equates school success solely with standardized test scores. It declares that a sample single-sex school achieves the same high results as a sample magnet program. Instead of praising and supporting both kinds of schools, it proposes getting rid of single-sex schools. It then argues that the high scores of students in both types of schools are linked to their admissions policies, as if this is somehow bad. Should we then eliminate both magnet and single-sex schools?
The Science article does briefly consider a larger social issue. But it has nothing to do with the wide range of reasons that make parents want to send their children to single-sex schools.
The eight authors cherry-pick a United Kingdom study that argues that men who have had single-sex schooling are more likely to get divorced than those with co-educational educations, yet “no parallel differences were found for women.” We can make four points about this inept logical gambit:
Citing a U.K. study that isolates education as a factor in divorce is of dubious relevance to our American experience. British manners, customs, social attitudes and cultural values are very different from ours.
Does this mean that the authors think single-sex schooling is OK for women since they do not become more divorce-prone because of it?
If this were relevant and valid, why should we not isolate the factors in single-sex schooling that produce such results and adjust them to make men less divorce-prone?
My brother and I both went to coeducational grade schools. Unlike me, he went to coed high schools. He has been divorced twice. I have been divorced three times.
The factors leading to our divorces are many: family dynamics, religion, growing up in the 1950s, our individual personalities, our ex-spouses, bad luck.
I have seen therapists for more than 20 years now. Not one has said to me, “Tom, you should have gone to a coed high school.”
Palaima is professor of classics at the University of Texas: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net .
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/remembering-origins-of-veterans-day-1957502.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Remembering origins of Veterans Day
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, November 8, 2011
How many Americans know why we observe what we now call Veterans Day on November 11th? How many know what this national holiday originally commemorated? How many read the presidential proclamations issued yearly to guide our remembrance?
World War II veteran Paul Fussell wrote in his award-winning 1975 study of the human significance of World War I, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The supreme irony is how easy it is for those of us who are not veterans or do not know veterans to hold onto unrealistic expectations about war.
On Oct. 8, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Proclamation 3071. It informs us that on June 4, 1926, Congress passed a resolution that Americans should observe the anniversary of the end of World War I, Nov. 11, 1918, with appropriate ceremonies. In 1938, Congress made Nov. 11 a legal holiday called Armistice Day.
Eisenhower changed Armistice Day into Veterans Day because of “two other great military conflicts in the intervening years,” World War II and the Korean War. Eisenhower declared these wars necessary “to preserve our heritage of freedom.” He called upon us as American citizens “to reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that (the) efforts (of veterans) shall not have been in vain.”
Ironically, two years later we began promoting enduring peace with 58,178 official American military casualty deaths in the Vietnam War between June 8, 1956, and May 15, 1975. The start is ironically hard to pinpoint because there was no formal declaration of war. The last casualties occurred two weeks after the war ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.
As our troops pull out of Iraq, there will be ironic deaths like these and like British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen’s. Owen voluntarily returned to the fighting in France in July 1918 so that he could write about the realities of trench warfare. He was killed on Nov. 4, a week before the armistice. In the preface to his poems, Owen wrote, “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Their realism strips away the lofty sentiments about noble sacrifices in most presidential Veterans Day proclamations. His poems and his death remind us instead how long it takes and how much it costs to stop wars once we start them.
The very word “armistice” offers a strong warning. It means “a temporary cessation of the use of weapons by mutual agreement.” It reminds us that no war will end all wars.
Indeed, Kurt Vonnegut, who as an American POW survived the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, grasped the irony of doing away with Armistice Day. Born Nov. 11, 1922, he recalled that, when he was a boy, “all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the 11th minute of the 11th hour of Armistice Day,” the moment when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.” Veterans told him that on the battlefield, “the sudden silence was the Voice of God.” So it must have seemed.
Obscenely ironic was that, after the armistice had been generally announced at 5 a.m., generals still ordered soldiers into battle. The 11,000 casualties suffered in the war’s final six hours exceeded those on D-Day. Henry Gunther, a U.S. Army private from Baltimore, was killed at 10:59 a.m.
These stories don’t tell us everything about what makes war so traumatic for veterans. But they continue a long tradition of soldiers trying to tell us. At the start of this tradition, Homer and the Greek tragedians distilled the essence of what veterans have to say: Owen’s pity, Fussell’s irony, Vonnegut’s deep feelings of senseless absurdity and Eisenhower’s sincere longing for an enduring peace.
On Thursday from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., noted director and translator Peter Meineck will bring his national initiative, Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, to the University of Texas at Austin with a free program of readings from ancient texts about war designed for veterans and the concerned public. A dialogue discussion will follow with Sharon Wills, Team Leader for the Postraumatic Stress Disorders Clinical Team at the Austin VA Outpatient Clinic.
See http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/classics/events/20475 for details.
At 11 a.m. Friday, the opening of the University of Texas at Austin’s Student Veteran Center is scheduled.
See http://www.texvet.org/event/2011-11/grand-opening-university-texas-austins-student-veteran-center.
Make Veterans Day meaningful wherever you are.
Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas. tpalaima@sbcglobal.net
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/excess-in-education-hurts-everyone-2041751.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Excess in education hurts everyone
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, December 19, 2011
As published with, in square brackets, a section that was edited out.
The ancient Greeks had two famous sayings that have been used as guides to ethical conduct even in modern times: gnothi sauton “know yourself” and meden agan “nothing to excess.”
Diodorus Siculus reports in his “Library of History” how the Spartan statesman Chilon (sixth century BCE) carved these two maxims, and a third one, on a column in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi as offerings to the god. Diodorus declared that Chilon’s apophthegms were worth more than all the magnificent dedications set up at Delphi during its long history by rich and powerful men, cities and countries. His sayings helped men lead good, humanly rewarding lives rather than accumulate wealth and power.
In Diodorus’ view, we can only know ourselves by becoming truly educated. True education will make us wise, moderate and prudent. False education will lead us to wrong values and eventually to ruinous excess.
“Observing due measure in all things” was equally important. Chilon therefore advised that we should “prefer to lose money to gaining it dishonestly because the one causes misery in the short term, the other in the long term.” Oliver Stone will never make a movie about this maxim.
Still reading about Chilon gets students thinking about moral and ethical values. In McGuffey’s “New Fifth Eclectic Reader,” widely used in the late 19th century, lesson XLII took up the theme: We must educate. It did not mean education to acquire the skills to make money, but education to develop “the conscience and the heart,” because otherwise “we must perish by our own prosperity in our haste to be rich and mighty.”
I have been thinking about what is called the “ethics flag” in undergraduate courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Ethics is a tricky and sensitive subject. It therefore tends to be avoided or given lip service in higher education. One assumption seems to be that, like former U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart and pornography, we will recognize unethical behaviors when we see them, and also know where they will lead.
Let’s take the recent scandal in the UT Law School as a case in point. As the American-Statesman‘s Ralph K.M. Haurwitz reported this month, an outside foundation provides private money that the dean controls.
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/ut-law-dean-forced-to-step-down-2021690.html
Is this a bad idea?
It is if the dean never read or thought about what concerned Chilon and McGuffey’s Reader and awards himself a $500,000 forgivable loan or if he offers a spokesperson the title of “visiting scholar” and $101,292 and she accepts. Where would they get the idea that to do such “not illegal” things was OK?
As we might guess, they had a model ready to hand. The chancellor and all the presidents in the UT System have modest base salaries paid by state appropriations. They get whopping amounts of money from supplemental outside sources called excellence and gift funds or interest on temporary investments. In fiscal year 2011, UT President Bill Powers’ base salary was $65,945. He received a $547,667 dollop from such other sources. Coaches’ salaries work the same way.
But university salaries should be determined by guidelines based on a holistic vision of the true good of public education. [Those in control of ‘private monies’ can play favorites. The regents can decide that the president of UT Austin who needed $265,279 in supplemental funds in 2003 cannot get by without twice that amount ($534,655) six years later. And the president’s successor as law school dean might decide that such wealth is his due measure, too.]
Wealth and power act upon ethics like narcotics. In the aftermath of the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal that has ruined the lives of at least 10 boys and those who know and love them, the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum met in New York City Dec. 7-8, “a must-attend by college athletics glitterati.” Penn State and its ethical issues were barely mentioned.
But Powers attended and spoke against reining in immoderation, or, as he put it, “We need to be careful not to punish success.”
But we should punish what is called success, wherever it leads to habits of behavior that cause those entrusted with the common good to act contrary to sound ethics, in extreme cases, to leave young boys undefended from adult predators.
Why, after Penn State and many other intercollegiate sports scandals, would the president of our public university want to help big business go on as usual?
Palaima is professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.
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