Memo to the Claremont Colleges: In A Recession, Cut Costs

In Christmas's Los Angeles Times, there's an article about how colleges are struggling with their reduced endowments. Here's the graph which shows just how much the colleges have been hit and what they are doing in light of their predicaments. Only three Claremont colleges -- Harvey Mudd, Pitzer and Pomona -- are mentioned.

I have a suggestion for those college that might be seen as well, obvious : Cut costs.

Instead of applying for your buildings to be built with green materials, which is to say costly materials, build cheaply. Take advantage of all the cheap labor that Southern California provides!

Pitzer College, one of the schools mentioned in the article, had an the endowment which had soared 136% during the last six years, but it is now down 31% from its peak.

They could have put that money into a rainy day fund. Instead, they decided to build an expensive and swanky green dorm, which cost $29 million.

First Things Piece on Art

I found this piece on RealClearPolitics today, which seems fitting for the discussion on our blog currently about what is art (and more specifically good art). It's very long but worth a read.

These are some highlights. This paragraph shows what the end of art was in the Platonic tradition, to find the truth behind the nature of things. But it also shows how art can be deceiving:

The Platonic tradition in Christianity invests beauty with ontological significance, trusting it to reveal the unity and proportion of what really is. Our apprehension of beauty thus betokens a recognition of and ­submission to a reality that transcends us. And yet, if beauty can use art to express truth, art can also use beauty to create charming fabrications. As Jacques Maritain put it, art is capable of establishing “a world apart, closed, limited, absolute,” an autonomous world that, at least for a moment, relieves us of the “ennui of living and willing.” Instead of directing our attention beyond sensible beauty toward its supersensible source, art can fascinate us with beauty’s apparently self-sufficient presence; it can counterfeit being in lieu of revealing it.

Later on, the author shows the post-Enlightenment change in the significance of art:

We do not need Nietzsche to tell us that the disintegration of the Platonic-Christian worldview, already begun in the late Middle Ages, is today a cultural given. Nor is it news that the shape of modernity—born, in large part, from man’s faith in the power of human ­reason and technology to remake the world in his own image—has made it increasingly difficult to hold the traditional view that ties beauty to being and truth, investing it with ontological significance. Modernity, the beneficiary of Descartes’ relocation of truth to the subject ( Cogito, ergo sum), implies the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and hence the isolation of beauty from being or truth. When human reason is made the measure of reality, beauty forfeits its ontological claim and becomes merely aesthetic—merely a matter of feeling.

Finally, he says modern art today focuses too much on politics:

The subjugation of art—and of cultural life generally—to political ends has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age. Among much else, it makes it increasingly difficult to appreciate art on its own terms, as affording its own kinds of insights and satisfactions. Critics who care about art—even those who want to insist on art’s religious depth—are forced to champion art’s distinctively aesthetic qualities against attempts to reduce art to a species of ­propaganda.

"Teddy Was No Conservative," Says Ronald J. Pestritto

(Thanks go to Dan O'Toole CMC '09 for pointing me to this op-ed)

CMC alum, Ronald J. Pestritto, has a masterful op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on Teddy Roosevelt. Pestritto is a professor at Hillsdale College where he studies progressivism and the American founding. 

As students of Professor Charles Kesler's Liberalism and Conservatism know well, Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt were more alike than there were different. Pestritto illuminates this point. 

It was the Republican TR, who insisted in his 1910 speech on the "New Nationalism" that there was a "general right of the community to regulate" the earning of income and use of private property "to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." He was at one here with Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who had in 1885 condemned Americans' respect for their Constitution as "blind worship," and suggested that his countrymen dedicate themselves to the Declaration of Independence by leaving out its "preface" -- i.e., the part of it that establishes the protection of equal natural rights as the permanent task of government.

Petritto, ever knowledgeable that he's writing for the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page, suggests that we follow the American founding, rather than the progressives. He suggests that John McCain's greatest moment may have come when he went after Obama's plan to "spread the wealth" around, but that such an attack was half-hearted at best. So what for conservatives in the future? He writes, 

Looking ahead, conservatives hardly need to look back to progressives for inspiration. If there is a desire to "conserve" or restore something about our political tradition that has been lost with the rise of modern liberalism, how about the American founding as a model? It is with the founders that we can find the patriotic promotion of America as an exceptionally great nation -- a notion that attracts some conservatives to TR.

The difference is that, with the founders as a model, we get the idea of American greatness, but without the progressives' assault on the very enduring principles that justify America's claim to greatness in the first place.

A Response to Charles on Rap and Hip-Hop

I just wanted to highlight what a great debate we are having in the comment section of Charles' latest post, and to that end I am putting my most recent response to him as a new post. I encourage others to continue to comment on either of these two posts. Some (certainly not all) of the anonymous posters have added quite a bit to the discussion, so I'd encourage them not to hide their identity!

Here's my response to Charles:

In Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom also called rock and roll a debasing and degenerate form of music; but, again, I think he was wrong, as you are wrong on rap and hip-hop. Again, I'll disclaim that I agree that most rap and hip-hop are quite worthless.

However, I'm confused by your sentence, "Rap is all about the beats and lyrics, insofar as they add anything, are about deviance against a social order." I'm not quite sure what your meaning is, but I'll say immediately that all music, and all poetry, is about beats and lyrics.

Homer, after all, would not have been able to remember the oral tradition which he put to paper had he not been able to recall it through rhythm, rhyme, and beat (which is also why most poets write in some sort of iambic verse, and why intentional deviations from it highlight significance). That's also why he and most poets invoke the "Muses" -- from which we get "Music" -- who were the daughters of Memory.

So again, nothing you have said precludes the possibility of rap or hip-hop that strikes the right themes and rhythms that would elevate it to a higher form of art.

To the non-other anonymous, who thinks all kinds of art are worthy and important:

I think you might be giving too much credit to any and all attempts at art. All might be worthy of initial consideration, but ultimately some have to win out and be worthy of continued consideration. Why is it that Shakespeare and -- to throw in one of the great literary debates -- Milton, are often considered the best English poets? There has to be some reason, some standard on which most humans judge.

Put in another way, there must be some end to art; why should art be important? It is often said that Shakespeare masters the intricacies, depth, and gamut of the human condition, which is what makes him great, because that is the ultimate end of art: to express the human experience and provide insight into the human condition. Shakespeare does this better than Milton, and I'd be willing to wager he definitely does it better than any graphic novels, nursery rhymes, and rap lyrics.

Now I'll give a shout-out to Milton. He's often considered greater than Shakespeare in his poetry and verse: he has really perfected the meters and sound of the English language, which makes his poetry beautiful, elegant, and great.

All that's to say, I'm not discounting the possibility that rap can be like that; but the point is, it has to be somewhat like Shakespeare or Milton to be truly great, because in the English tradition, I believe, they have achieved best what is the ultimate end of art.