My Brilliant Matchmakng Career: A Fairy Tale

never wanted to be a matchmaker but, once upon a time, I became one if somewhat against my will. My brilliant matchmaking career, as I have subsequently come to call it, happened shortly after I had moved from Dallas, Texas to rural Indiana. 

Some might think that moving from a big city like Dallas to a small rural county in Indiana might be difficult and traumatic. But it wasn't that difficult or traumatic for me for reasons I will try to explain. Yes, Dallas was a city of over 600,000 souls when I left it in the 1970s, while the county I moved to in Indiana barely had 15,000 people and was basically the same size as Dallas in terms of square miles, but what might have been difficult and felt traumatic for some wasn't that difficult or that traumatic for me because my Dad and my Mum had set boundaries for me and my younger sister Catherine after we moved into our brand spanking new Dallas subdivision in 1965. 

One day just after my parents, my sister, and me moved into our brand spanking new home in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas my parents sat me and my sister down at our large rectangular wooden dinner table in the informal dining room and told us that we had to stay within certain boundaries of our neighbourhood. We were not allowed to cross Five Mile Creek to our north, the wood along Blue Ridge Boulevard (the road itself was partially unpaved at the time) to our south, Westmoreland Avenue to our east, Kimball High School and T.W. Browne Junior High to our south east, and Cockrell Hill Road to our west. That me and my sister didn’t always stay within those set boundaries probably doesn’t even need to be said, but I will say it anyway. On several occasions, I must confess, new Beatles singles or new Beatles albums (both me and my sister were mad about the Beatles) made both of us violate the rules on a few occasions and seemingly get away with doing so.

While most people move somewhere for a job or due to a job I wanted to live in Indiana because I wanted to go Indiana University and it was cheaper to go to IU as an in-state student rather than an out of state student (me being a moron at the time I could have gone to the University of Texas for around $50.00 per term rather than the thousands of dollars at IU something I could and should have availed myself of as a Texan). So my Mum, my sister, and myself packed up and moved to Camford County Indiana where my mum got a job working at a local 3M factory. Dad stayed behind in Dallas because of his job. He had a good paying managerial job that he had moved up to step-by-step while working for Philips in Big D.

I wanted to go to IU because that was where my father had gone to university in the 1950s. Dad loved IU, he loved Bloomington, and and he loved telling me over and over again how much he loved both IU and Bloomington. As I listened to Dad talk to me over and over again over during my teen years about his years at IU I increasingly imagined myself living amidst the rolling hills, dense forests, limestone hills, and limestone fences and buildings of IU, Bloomington, and Monroe County, Indiana. When I did finally matriculate at IU I did, in fact, love living amidst the rolling hills, dense forests, limestone walls and buildings of Bloomington and Monroe County. What I didn't love was the subtropical climate of the place with its high humidity. It was simply not a good place for someone with respiratory problems like myself to live.

Speaking of respiratory problems:,I got severe asthma suddenly when I was twelve. My asthma was so severe that I was hospitalised many times over the years, too many to count, in fact, Hospitalisations only ended when I was put on a regimen of Advair and Singulair sometime in the 1990s. 

At first having asthma wasn't that bad thanks to the cortisone my Methodist Hospital doctor put me on. I could even continue running track while being on it. After the cortisone began to cause problems, however, it made my face cheeks puff up, it meant that I could no longer run track and it meant that I had difficulty even walking up the stairs from the first to the second and the third storeys of the Browne Junior High that I went to. Eventually, my doctor replaced the cortisone with a nebuliser which I had to take three times a day and then clean it so I was pretty much housebound for much of my teen years because I really didn't feel very well and the cleaning process for the nebuliser was a complicated and arduous one.

It was my asthma perhaps more than anything else that made me an introvert, a loner, and a sickly housebound kid. All these, in turn, made me someone who was not the kind of person didn't have a lot of friends but who did listen to a lot of music. Now don't get me wrong, I did have a few of what I called friends that I hung out with. John Celino was my best friend in Dallas and he and I hung with each other during school and after. He and I bonded over the Beatles, prog rock, and our opposition to the Vietnam War, which was raging at the time. I even recall that once upon a time he and I wanted to go to Robert E. Lee Park in Dallas to protest the war but our parents, rightly I know now told us no because the cops would bash our heads in. And bash our heads in they surely would have because that is what the Dallas Police typically did to dissidents in Lee Park at the time. The Dallas cops, you see, were not known for their gentle treatment of dissident protestors and probably still aren't.

I had friends in Indiana too. When I first moved to Camford County in Indiana I hang with the two D's: Doug and Dick. We, and particularly Doug and I, bonded over music and pot. Once I stopped hanging with the three D's I hung with the two Ken's, the Ken who had moved from Hawaii to rural Indiana and who, like me, was an exile and an outcast initially because of that, and the other Ken, the Ken who was a homegrown born and raised rural Hoosier lad. It was cannabis and acid which bonded me to the two Ken's. And it was the other Ken who was indirectly responsible for me becoming a matchmaker.

Here is how it happened. One day at high school during a break in classes a girl named Teri, who I didn’t know very well, stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I would introduce her to the other Ken. She knew I hang with him. She told me she liked him and she wanted me to tell him that she liked him. At the time, I didn't tell Teri that I really didn't want to play matchmaker being someone who didn't go in for what I thought were the fantasies associated with romantic love (romantic ideologies associated with love have probably killed and injured more people than Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler combined). I was already cynical you see. Thank you asthma. Thank you Vietnam. Thank you Gulf of Tonkin. Thank you Watergate. Thank you tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Nevertheless, being shy me who needed all the acquaintances he could get I told her that I would do it and I did as I had promised her just a bit later that day when I intentionally ran into the other Ken during class break.

From the moment I told the other Ken that Teri liked him he and Teri became a couple. I didn't see either Ken or Teri much after that though I am sure I gained social capital from them both for the match made in proverbial heaven. I would occasionally see them in the high school halls holding hands and doing what couples typically do, public displays of attraction. 

One day at school Ken stopped me between class break and asked me if I would trade cars with him the upcoming Friday evening. I had an MGB. Ken had an Opel GT. The other other Ken had a Triumph. We were the two and a half foreign sports car having musketeers, me being the half since they hung with each other more then they hang with me. When I asked Ken why he wanted my car he told me that he and Teri were turning a wish they had into a reality; they wanted to screw in all the cars they could before they graduated from high school. Mine was the next car in line for the Ken and Teri screwfest.

Of course, introverted me really didn't want to do the car exchange thing anymore than I wanted to play matchmaker to Teri and Ken. I dnd not like to loan my stuff out fearing that I would never get it back or if I did get it back it would be damaged (both happened to my stuff too many times in my life). Nor did I want the detritus of love to spoil my car (some might suggest that an MG could not and would not be spoiled anymore than it already was by such escapades but that is another story). As usual shy and lonely me gave in I told Ken that I would trade cars with him. 

Ken told me to meet him later that night at Teri's place which was right across from the fairgrounds in the Camford County county seat. At the appointed hour on a beautiful warm spring evening I drove my car as planned to Teri’s and knocked on the door. Ken was not there yet. 

As I entered the house I saw Teri out of the corner of my eyes over in the corner of the living room surrounded by three young women. The three young women appeared to be playing courtier to Teri's Queen preparing her for the evening's ritual love making activities. Teri, and I remember this well for what should be obvious reasons, was dressed in an orange halter top and a pair of green short shorts. I don’t think we called them hot pants yet. Queen Teri's courtiers were making the final adjustments to her kit, what little there was of it that is. What it definitely was was an easy access pass for sex with Ken later that night.

As I sat on the couch I couldn’t help but look again and again at Teri though I tried, as we often did in those days and times, not to. It just wasn't kosher to stare at someone you were trying to eye in secret (though you often did get caught doing it). It was the first time that I really saw Teri, REALLY SAW Teri. I saw that she had an amazing body. Her legs were gorgeous. Her free range breasts, which were sizeable but not oversized, were bouncing this way and that way and up and then down, and I loved bouncing breasts for some obscure reason at the time and still do. Her tanned skin was beautiful save for the rectangular patches of blackheads on her face which I am sure she tried to get rid of but couldn't. We all did at this age. Luckily I had a father who loved to squeeze them. I never realised, until that moment, how attractive and beautiful and sexy Teri was. I an sure I fell in lust with her that very minute of that very day.

About fifteen minutes later Ken arrived and after switching cars I left in his Opel while he and Teri left in my MGB. I imagined Teri and Ken heading out to the rural boonies to have sex in my MGB, assuming it started which it did not always do. The next day we traded cars back and I headed home with Teri again on my mind .She rarely left it for the several days after.

After graduation from high school I didn’t see Teri or Ken at all, something that often happens when you leave high school (see Buffy season four). I was planning on going to college but I had to put college on hold for the time being for some mysterious reason that escapes me now, and started instead working at a factory in town like so many others of my generation did at this stage in their lives. Dad and Mum got the job for me. (Don't you just love networks of power and privilege?) I later heard from someone, I don't remember who, who told me that Teri and Ken had gotten married. I was not invited to the wedding, of course despite being the one who had introduced them. Oh well such is the life of a sickly introverted loner.

One day, I think it was a Friday, my sister and I ran into Ken and Teri in town. All four of us were doing the ritual circling of the downtown square of Camford City before we got stoned, went to the basketball game, and went to Pizza King with what seemed like every other high schooler in the county. We were going clockwise around the square; they were going counterclockwise. They invited us to their trailer outside of town to drop some acid. 

Like so many of the kids of my generation I dropped acid and mescaline and smoked a lot of grass during my high school years. We came to Ken and Teri's. We dropped acid. We got really high. We listened to a lot of music. We ate a lot of potato chips. I saw.

I saw Teri again, really saw her again. This time she was dressed in newish Levi’s, the jeans of choice for my generation, and a white Oxford shirt. She didn’t have a bra on and you could see her beautiful breasts quite clearly through the thin almost transparent fabric of her shirt. She looked amazing. Thank god for white shirts! I could not take my I am trying to keep them secret eyes off her. She was so sexy.

I saw something else that winter night as well. I saw something that deeply disturbed me. I saw Ken abuse, or what I would call abuse, Teri. I don’t know whether it was the LSD that made Ken do the things he was doing to Teri. It sometimes did with those I knew who dropped acid. I hoped it was the acid but I had a sneaky suspicion that it wasn’t and that it was what Ken was really like in private (the acid turned the private into the public). He grabbed her breasts hard in front of my sister and myself so hard that she screamed in pain. When she asked him to stop he manhandled her even more. He was a big guy. He eventually did stop trying to force Teri to do what he wanted in front of me and my sister, probably because of me and my sister, but the damage was done at least on my end. Teri asked me to stay the night, hoping, I suspect, that it would keep Ken from doing more of the same or even worse to her later that night.

My sister and I slept on the two sofas Teri and Ken had in the living room of their single large trailer. It was hard for me to sleep not simply because of the acid high, something that usually kept me up all night, and because of what Ken did to Teri, but also because I was so turned on by Teri. I had been turned on by other women before, one or two as I recall, but nothing like this. I was beginning to wish that Teri and I were a couple.

My sister and I left early the next morning. Teri was awake already and offered us something to eat, we declined, and bid us goodbye. Ken was still in bed. 

I didn’t see Teri again until well into the summer. I was preparing to head back to Dallas before I started uni at the University of Texas in Austin. By this time Indiana and Indiana University and Bloomington Indiana were causing me so many health problems that I decided to go back home, so many health problems that my doctor told me to apply for medicaid, which I did without success. I did run into Teri one day in town and she invited me out for lunch at her trailer. Ken wasn't there. He was doing his usual thing which generally involved cars, drugs, or some combination of the two. 

It was the first time I really got to know Teri as something other than a sex object. We had a great time eating, talking, laughing, and bonding. I remember her saying how surprised at how funny I could be. I may have been an introvert but I was an introverted devotee of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief album (definitely a hoot when you are high) so I could be funny in that Monty Python sort of way sometimes. 

As I left the trailer I told Teri I was off to Dallas and, after that, to uni in Austin. The factory life was not for me. She followed me into town in her car, a monster of a car, as I recall, one of those whale sized Lincoln's I think. My sister told me later that Teri had run out of petrol and was trying frantically and desperately to flag me down so I could pick her up and take her into town to get some gas but to no avail. I was, I suppose, daydreaming about Teri and being with Teri. By that time, you see, I had fallen in love with her but being the too shy introvert I was I was afraid to tell her I loved her and I was afraid of, as I always was when it came to dating, being hurt. And of course, there was the fact that she was already married.

I haven't seen Teri since that summer day. I did think of her and still do quite often. I did see Ken once, I was back in Indiana hanging with my best friend Steve. Steve drove us down to a ghost town called Elizabethtown on the Mississnewa River in Delaware County. It was one of the places we used to go to to marvel at a bridge that had fallen into the Mississnewa, a fitting symbol for what became of the town, to check out the cemetery there, another fitting symbol of the town that had died at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to smoke some pot. The other place we went to do all three was the thirteen graves.

As Steve and I walked toward the downed and partially drowned Elizabethtown bridge I noticed someone in the distance walking toward us. As I got closer I could see it was Ken. As we moved closer to each other Ken’s eyes briefly met mine and after a split second of recognition I averted my eyes almost immediately from his in order to avoid his gaze and his attention and kept walking toward the fallen bridge with Steve trying to hide the fact that I had indeed recognised him. I didn't want to recognise him because I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Teri that cold winter night in rural Indiana. I later heard through the gossip grapevine (our internet at the time, one that was quite effective and just as unreliable) that he and Teri had divorced. It was way to late for me by this time.

After college I never returned to my rural Indiana home ever again. And I am glad I never did. The oil crises, globalisation, and deindustrialisation took their revenge on the city, town, and already poor villages of the county. Businesses went out of business or left for climes with cheaper labour costs and better weather. The once vibrant downtown that we circled around this way and that every Friday was decimated and has never, so I am told, recovered. Retail establishments went out of business and the buildings downtown began to literally fall down, some with the help of a wrecking ball. After uni I returned instead to Dallas, well suburban Dallas, Duncanville to be precise, which, like Big D itself, saw more and more people and more and more businesses arrive every week, so many, in fact, that the sunbelt city began to stretch almost all the way to the border with Oklahoma and further and further south in the direction of Waco and Austin.

Though I have never been back to Indiana since I have never forgotten Teri. She has always remained somewhere in my mind ever since. Even today, some sixty years later, I still think about her and think about what might have been. She still lives vividly in my 85 year old brain. But then so much of life is about what might have been isn’t it? I am just happy that what might have been for me was not the occupation (or is it vocation?) of matchmaker even though I did successfully match Ken and Teri one day long ago and once upon a time in the not so magical world or rural Indiana. 

The Bank of America Kiada or Ron Gets Screwed Again Thanks to His IU Credit Card

It, incompetence that is, never stops. It never sleeps. It always rusts. It never ceases to amaze me and, at the same time, it never stops fucking me over in some way, shape, or form. I learned this joyous lesson again today.

So, a bit of backstory first.  I have an IU credit card through Bank of America, hence the picture to your left. I got it when I was still proud of Indiana University alum. It was where I took, on the Bloomington campus, my bachelor’s degree. I am no longer a proud graduate of IU, a school that while it is growing its sports programmes and spending millions doing so, is slashing Humanities programmes, which historically have been at the heart of the college and university in general and at the heart of IU in particular. IU, which was once upon a time an overgrown liberal arts college and not Purdue, has recently seen its administration, its Trumpian administration (the Trumpian governor of Indiana has packed the Board of Directors with politically and ideologically correct flunkies), decided to end bachelor’s programmes in Art History, American Studies, Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature, Dance, Earth Sciences, Geography, East Asian Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, Music-Ballet, Religious Studies, Statistics, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to cut master’s programmes in African Studies, Comparative Literature, Communication and Culture, Journalism (they also tried to end the print version of the student newspaper the Indiana Daily Student but backlash, including from money givers like Mark Cuban, forced them to backtrack on this), Statistics, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to eliminate doctoral programmes in African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Art History, Astrophysics, Chemical Physics, Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Public Policy, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. The flagship Indiana University campus, in other words, is becoming more and more like, as one Cynthia Fox who took a doctorate at IU and who teaches at SUNY Albany reminded me, more and more like the financially unstable I SUNY Albany, a university I did postgraduate work at. That these programmes, particularly the doctoral programmes, were some of the best in the US and were internationally known and highly regarded seems to have been of little if no consequence to the politically and ideologically correct and corrected Board. What does seem to have been consequential is the fact that these programmes were often critical of the mythhistory that undergirds the delusional populist right’s perceptions of American history. And they should have been and should be because academic and scholarly analysis is not nor should not be cheerleaders for delusional mythhistory myths. Moronicity on the march.

It is moronicity on the march because you simply can't have a world class university with doctoral programmes in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Music, or hard sciences without strong language programmes, something IU has had for years and something IU has been known for and something that has made IU a world class university in the post-World War II era. I suspect the parochial closed minded theocrats on the IU Board probably know this and this is exactly what they want because a world class university breeds empiricism and that breeds the questioning of myths, something the theocrats who run IU and want to return it to what is was in the early 19th century, a seminary, don't want. Obey theocratic authority seems to be their mantra. I hope the Association of American Universities takes a long hard look at what is happening at IU, the making IU theocratic again, and do to IU what they did to the University of Nebraska and Syracuse University, drop them from this organisation of elite American research universities. It would be a perfect match since IU has already dropped significantly in world university rankings, and deservedly so, since I was a student in Bloomington. The IU I went to is not the current plummeting IU, an IU that looks more and more like SUNY Albany (which isn't in the Association) every day save that SUNYA wasn't at the bottom of a recent free speech rankings analysis, that exists today. 

But back to the credit card fiasco: Because of these cuts and because of the increasing emphasis on winning sports programmes at IU I returned my diploma to my department, Religious Studies, and I intended never to use the Bank of America IU Credit Card I had again because it benefits the IU Foundation monetarily and financially. It turns out I had to keep it, however. I had to keep it because I became a member at Costco and Costco, you see, has a honey pot deal with Visa, the credit card company, and they only accept Visa at the cash wrap. So, I had to keep my IU card in order to shop easily at Costco because I could not use my American Express card, which is my default credit card. And use my Visa card I did.

In June I paid my bill to the Bank of America. This morning I got up and I discovered that this bill had been paid. Again. Since it had already been paid I wondered why I had been charged twice particularly after I had paid it. After four phone calls, two to my credit union and two to Bank of America (they each blamed the other for the redundant charge), I learned that the Bank of America had recently switched from an old online banking system to a new one. The problem was that the old remained active as well. So while I had paid my bill, something the new system clocked, the old system, which I had the recurring payment option turned on on (it was not on in the new system so I thought I was OK), did not clock the fact that the bill was paid so it charged me again for something I had already paid. Hello Franz Kafka.

I finally got the problem fixed, or, I should say, I hopefully got the problem fixed (stay tuned). According to Bank of America the recurring payment option on the old system has been switched off and my refund has been approved. It took me two hours of pro bono work to get this problem fixed (so much for the time is money mantra). And some wonder why some of us are so angry about the seemingly never ending Sisyphean nature of the brave new digital postmodern world. We are angry because fuck ups like this happen every month if not every week for those of us who avail ourselves of the toys of this brave new digital postmodern world. They are, it turns out much like everything else of importance, a double edged sword. They are very helpful in some ways and they are a royal pain in the arse in others (see above). God I am glad I am not long for this increasingly fucked up digital world, a digital world where fact and fiction mingle on the same level. Moronicity on the march.

Oh I almost forgot, thank you Bank of America for fucking up my credit score...

Postscript: I got the refund from Bank of America on 21 July 2026. It is always nice to get a refund for something one should have never been charged for.
 

Musings on Weber: The Spirit of German Romanticism (Warner Classics)

Of all the giants in the classical music recording business Warner Classics is by far the best. Warner Classics leaves Decca and Deutsche Grammophon in its dust. 

Recently I picked up a copy of Warner's Carl Maria von Weber box set, Weber: The Spirit of German Romanticism. The box set celebrates the 200th anniversary of Weber’s death.

I am not going to talk about the quality of the music making. Many of the recordings, which date from 1908 to 1996, have gotten good reviews in the late great Penguin Guides to classical music and in Classical Music: The Listener’s Companion, an American counterpart to the Penguin Guides, a guide I generally prefer to the Penguins. What I want to talk about instead is the choice Warner Classics made of what to and what not to put into this box set.

I have no problems with the items that are in the box set whether the recordings of the symphonies, the concertos, the chamber music, the lieder, or the operas. I am not sure about the discs of works after Weber, meaning taking off from Weber, or the transcriptions and arrangements of Weber’s work. They are probably not necessary but I suppose they are nice to have.

What would have been nice, however, is if Warner included even more performances of Weber’s actual work. While the Harnoncourt recording of Der Freischutz is nice to have why wasn’t the EMI Kelberth recording of the opera not included as as part of the multi-disc historical recordings discs or as a standalone? And why wasn’t the Virgin Pay and OAE recording of the two clarinet concertos and the clarinet concertino not included to give us an idea of what Weber sounds like in a historically informed performance with original instruments? After all both EMI and Virgin are part of the Warner’s stable now.

As with the recent Bizet box set Warner has given us another wonderful box set. At the same time, however, the box set could have and should have been better. But then beggars can’t be choosers I suppose and it priced for beggars like me.

 

Rolling That Bolder Up the Price Chopper Hill Yet Again...

 

There are several things in life you can count on. Death. Taxes. Corporate greed, incompetence and, malfeasance. Human stupidity and moronicity. And problems with the Capital Region’s Price Choppers.

Last week, I think it was, Price Chopper had a special on Beyond Meat Patties. Since the only Price Chopper I know that carries Beyond Meat—though they advertised the Beyond Meat sale in flyers that don’t carry it including the East Greenbush and Glenmont Choppers—is the Delaware Avenue store, the store that used to be called in popular parlance, the Ghetto Chopper, the Chopper where lots of poor college students shop. Anyway, on Saturday morning I got up and got to the Delaware Chopper at a little after 6 am. And guess what? They didn’t have the patties. I asked a stocker who was working if they were in the back. He said maybe but that finding them in the back finding them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I wanted to buy other items and thought well I will just get a rain cheque for them. Uh think again Ron. Customer service was closed so no rain cheques for me there. The cash wrap didn’t have them either so no rain cheques for me there. So, I wrote to Price Chopper headquarters explaining the situation and asked for a rain cheque from them. After several days I got a canned reply that read that the folks at PC central would check into my issue. Yeah, sure. As for rain cheques from them well again no rain cheques for me from this source either.

Was I surprised by this corporate bs? No. Was I surprised by corporate incompetence? No. Was I surprised that something that could have been done easily—rain cheques for the patties mailed to me—was beyond (pun intended) the ability of Price Chopper central? No. All of this is part of parcel of the American corporate world. All of this is part and parcel of the bureaucratic corporate bs we consumers have to put up with everyday. And it is for this reason that Price Chopper should not be surprised that I prefer to shop at Costco, the Big Y, and Hannaford.

The Books of My Life: The Making of the Modern University

 

Virtually ever since the modern university with its devotion to the scientific method, its various natural science, social science, arts and humanities departments, and professional schools, and its graduate programmes arose in late nineteenth century America, intellectuals who have written on the transformation from college to university, academics like Lawrence Veysey and Roger Geiger, have sought to understand why these new universities were so different from the antebellum and early 19th century college that preceded it and why they have dominated the American higher education environment ever since. Often these analyses were tinged with a sense of sorrow and of loss. George Marsden in his The Soul of the American University and other of his essays, James Turner in several of his works, and D.G. Hart in several of his works, seem to regret that the modern university did not put morals and religion at their heart as the old colleges supposedly did. So does Julie Reuben.

In The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Julie Reuben has waded into the debate over why the differences between the old colleges, which put morals and religion at their heart, and the new universities which seemed not to. Like others before her Reuben explores how the new science, one grounded in evolution and change rather than Baconianism with its emphasis on observation, taxonomic classification, and the discovery of unchanging natural laws, aspects that made it easy at least initially for Protestants to harmonise science with Christian ideology. Reuben explores how this new science, a science which impacted everything in academia from Biblical Studies, to the natural sciences, and to the new social sciences, played a role in this transformation. Unlike earlier commentators who saw a more of a straight line between religious college and secular university, Reuben sees more circles and curves (something that is not necessarily a bad thing).

Reuben grounds her study of the transformation of American higher education in articles of academics,  and particularly in essays by university presidents in “popular" magazines like Popular Science Monthly (which she references extensively particularly in the early chapters of the book), Science, the Atlantic, in the new scholarly journals of the era including the American Journal of Sociology and Political Science Quarterly, in books, and in primary source material, particularly presidential records and university presidential reports. She focuses on eight universities, the two state universities of Michigan and California, and the private universities of Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Stanford—three of the new universities that arose in the era—and Harvard, Yale, and Columbia—three old colleges that transformed themselves into universities. While Reuben focuses on these eight schools other universities make cameo appearances in the book including the universities of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Acadia (presumably the one in Pennsylvania and not the one in the Canadian Maritimes).

While not denying that evolution and modern biblical criticism did “secularise” American universities Reuben argues that the transformation from old college to new university was much more complex and nuanced that many other commentators on the transformation have it. Reuben argues that there were three ideal type stages in this transformation: the religious stage between 1880 and 1910, the science stage between 1900 to 1920, and the humanistic and extracurricular stage from 1915 to 1930. 

In the first stage according to Reuben, university reformers, who were part of what was essentially a social movement, tried to reconstruct a Christianity for the new scientific age. They opposed denominational control of the universities they were building seeing it as too dogmatic and close minded compared to the open and free inquiry ideology proffered by the new science. They saw sectarian colleges as inhibiting this free and open inquiry thanks to their hiring of members of their own denominations and the peer pressure at these colleges to follow the party line of the denomination that ran the college. 

Despite this scepticism about denominational colleges and the belief that such colleges limited freedom of inquiry, university reformers did not initially, according to Reuben, want to jettison religion or morals and moral education, or the notion that the study of everything together resulted in the unity of truth from the curriculum of the new universities. They believed that science and particularly evolutionary science with its emphasis on observation (their definition of objective) could be harmonised with Protestantism, Liberal Protestantism that is. This they attempted to do, claims Reuben.

By the early 20th century, Reuben argues, this effort at the harmonisation of evolutionary science and religion had failed. The evolutionary study of science (something that fed into the new biblical criticism which argued that the Bible developed rather than came fully formed out of nothing) led many to conclude, says Reuben, that scientific and religious “truth” differed and that the new science could not be harmonised with either the old or new adapted religion. Moreover, students at the new universities showed little interest in courses on religion studies scientifically or in religion itself. Finally, they concluded that religion had an emotional not an intellectual value.

While these reformers marginalised religion in the new universities they did not jettison moral education, secular moral education, from the curriculum, writes Reuben. They thought that moral education was essential for teaching students good personal habits including good hygiene, good character, and good citizenship (as they narrowly defined this).

By the early 20th century, writes Reuben, universities were in full departmental and specialisation mode. There were departments of natural science, departments of social science, and departments of the arts and humanities. The faculty, and particularly the new faculty, were now specialists in these various disciplines. There were, for instance, faculty members who specialised in some aspect of chemistry, physics, biology (which at one time saw itself as the scientific branch that could unify all the other disciplines), sociology, political economy, and literature. This fragmentation was, for them, progress, a progression toward greater and greater knowledge. At this point, writes Reuben, it was faculty in the arts and sciences who claimed the ability to unify all truth and to teach moral education to students if in a more impressionistic way than the natural and social sciences.

By the 1910s and 1920s, claims Reuben, the fragmentation of the sciences and the departmentalisation of knowledge led many university reformers to conclude that the unification of all scientific truth was impossible. University leaders attempted to stop this fragmentation by taking over college athletics, intramural and intercollegiate, from the students, building dormitories, and offering an array of services to students. For academic bureaucrats, says Reuben, this created a sense of school spirit and school community. Morality, writes Reuben, had now evolved into morale. The age of seemingly ever increasing academic bureaucracies and academic non-teaching bureaucrats was born.

Here endeth Reuben’s lesson on the decline of the old religious college and the rise of the modern secular university. This lesson adds some wrinkles to those of previous explorers of this transformation, specifically the tripartite stages of new university evolution and the claim that, at least in the first two stages, reformers did not want to jettison religion, specifically a Liberal Protestant Christianity which was harmonisable with evolutionary science. One can argue that they never did in fact jettison either religion or morals from the academic curriculum in that Liberal Protestantism was replaced by a kind of utopian religion of science and moral education became morale education, claims Reuben.

I quite liked Reuben's The Transformation of the Modern University. I found her argument quite compelling. That said, I did have a few but moments. Wouldn’t it have been helpful to add a few land grant state universities into the mix say Cornell, Michigan State, Ohio State, or Purdue? Was the secular revolution more “advanced” at those schools given their emphasis on science and particularly agricultural science? Shouldn’t there have been greater regional balance in the universities studied? No Southern or Intermountain West university found a place on Reuben’s study list. What was happening at Alabama and Alabama’s land grant school Auburn? What was happening at Texas or Texas’s land grant university, Texas A&M. What was happening at Utah, Utah’s land grant institution Utah State, or at BYU, a Mormon owned school that also taught agriculture? As for the sources, are they too skewed in the direction of academic leaders? And why was there no discussion of American anthropology, that mixture of evolutionary science and humanities cultural studies that, in its structure—biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeological anthropology, and cultural anthropology—claimed to be oriented toward a wholistic understanding of humans and their environments? Wholism institutionalised? Despite these buts I highly recommend Reuben's study of the rise of the new universities.

Life as Crisis Management: An Open Letter to the UUP

You know, I like the idea of unions, particularly American unions, more in theory than in practise. But hey, isn't that true of so many things in life including social engineering plans? 

The reason I like unions and particularly American unions more in theory (though lesser in theory than European unions) than in practise is because I have been, as Nick Lowe puts it, nutted by reality. 

Let me explain. As a graduate student I was wrongly dismissed by a kind of vanity project (Project Renaissance) that was already carbon dated before it began and my union rep did little to help. Another union rep, in fact, later told my closest friend that I had indeed been screwed over by the union and that my case had been poorly handled by the union rep (who is still, I am told, still the union rep; nice job if you can get it). Then when I was an adjunct at Oneonta, where I joined the union, the same union that represented the full-time faculty and their "interests" (which were not always those of the part-time adjuncts) I was informed by a union official of what later became a clear reality, the powers that be were hiding classes of adjuncts so that no one could sign up for them in order to limit adjuncts to one class and, as a consequence, no health care since you had to teach two classes at the same college or university in a term to get the health insurance. The union basically took the powers that be party line (now what again is the labour theory of aristocracy?). 

After I retired I initially thought about joining the union largely for the benefits (the single reason many joined the union before retirement). I rolled over in my mind whether to join and eventually I did. So I sent my fifty dollars into the union, asked for a member card, and asked for information on vision and dental benefits which were available only through the union before retirement. The only thing I got was a no to getting a member card and no information on benefits. I responded with an up yours and turned in my card not card and got vision and health insurance through the state instead. 

I have recently written to the union because I want the vision benefit once again, twice. And this time, twice this time, I have gotten no reply. I have also recently re-signed my union card and made a confession of faith (“I recognise the need for a strong union and I believe everyone represented by a union should pay their fair share to support the union’s activities") as a part of it. Amen. Apparently, one thing the union is really good at, however, is Amish style shunning of dissidents like me. No union membership for me.

I am going to try again to get the unions attention by sending them this letter because I may not like unions in practise but I do like benefits in both theory and practise. So hey UUP can you send me an application for union membership form and information on benefits including their cost and where you send the dough for said benefits? If you can't do that can you please (I said please) tell me why and where I can go to file a complaint against you (AG?, Departments of Labour?)? 

Thank you. Have a nice day.

Postscript: I did finally get a parcel of material from the UUP. Sadly, some of it was irrelevant and there was once again (time number three) no form for the vision and dental insurance. I requested the latter again and will let you know when and if I get it.

Yet another postscript: So I finally got the materials I have been asking for since I retired the other day. It only took me five years to get the form to sign up for UUP vision and dental benefits. It is a relief to finally get this material. WooHoo!

Life as Crisis Management: The Presto Classical Meets FedEx Kiada

I have been buying classical CDs from Presto Classical in England for a number of years now. My experience with the company has been good, quite good, that is until recently. 

Let me tell you how my experience with Presto recently took a downturn. Last month Presto had a half off selected Hyperion releases sale and I bit. I bit hard. I bought 33 discs during the sale because I have been collecting Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto, Classical Piano Concerto, Romantic Violin Concerto, and French Song series for a number of years and a number of discs I wanted to get were part of the sale. 

As I mentioned earlier I had never had any problem with Presto. This time, however, I had a problem, a big problem, with the condition of the discs when they arrived. In the past discs I received from Presto were packed carefully and packed carefully in bubble wrap protecting the jewel cases from damage. This time was different, however, different in a number of ways. First off this time the default for shipping from Presto in England to the US, which is pricey but is generally more than offset by sales deductions if you buy enough discs and the quality of the packing, was FedEx. I admit I thought about paying the higher charge for shipping via USPS since my experience previously with FedEx was not good but I didn’t. In retrospect I should have.

Why is that? Well to begin with FedEx failed to get the measurements of the package which they needed to get in order to get the package through US Customs. They apparently did not get them from Presto and Presto did not make sure they had them on the manifest because, I was told, this was only a recent mandate and FedEx was not consistent at getting them. FedEx, in an act that was truly surreal, called me to ask me for the measurements. At first I though it was a prank call since obviously I could not give the measurements of the package to them since I did not pack the package or post the package and thus did not know the measurements of the package. Duh. I could only speculate about how tall, long, and wide it was.

Eventually the package did get out of customs gaol and made it through US Customs thanks to my emails and those particularly of Presto. Once the package was released from customs, however, FedEx, of course—and why would they since they are FedEx!—did not try to make up for their incompetence by getting the package to me as quickly as possible. It took several days before it arrived at its destination.

When the package finally did arrive nine days after FedEx said it would I got another big surprise. The discs arrived in a box that was 11 inches wide, 1l inches long, and a little over 11 inches tall, in a box, in a box, that was way too big to hold them tightly and thus protect them. The 33 disc, of course, bounced around in the box at will. When I opened the box, which took me aback given its size, it looked as if the discs had simply been thrown into the too big box with one piece of bubble wrap around them. That one piece of bubble wrap, of course, was not ample enough to protect the discs and was also slashed in several places. As a result 30 of the 33 discs had damaged jewel cases, severely damaged jewel cases in some instances. I gave the benefit of the doubt to Presto concerning this "packaging" since Presto items typically arrive in boxes that have their logo on the package. This box did not have that logo. It  thus appears that the package was damaged in transit and that the workers at FedEx simply dumped the CDs into an oversized box, yet more evidence of FedEx incompetence and their seemingly we don't give a shite mentality. 

I, of course, wrote Presto immediately. I sent them pictures of the box and sent them a picture of one of the damaged discs. I was not about to take pictures of all 30. I asked for a return label so I could return all the discs since I had and have no interest in purchasing a bunch of discs that look like they have been attacked by plastic eating mice or rats. 

So, what have a learned from this fiasco? I have learned yet again that FedEx is crap when it comes to shipping product and packing product. I have learned once again that capitalist efficiency and effectiveness is a crock. I have learned once again that I probably will have to file a complaint concerning FedEx with the New York Attorney General’s office of consumer issues and fraud.

Postscript: After sending two emails to Presto and getting no response I finally posted about the case of the mystery of the box that was too big for the CDs on the Presto Facebook page. I got an immediate response. Presto said they would look into the issue and also said they had done a search of emails sent to them via keywords and finally found my emails to them. They also asked me for more pictures which they could send to FedEx in order to confirm the damage FedEx did to the discs.

What I have done in the interim is buy CD jewel cases to replace the 30 that were broken and in some cases massacred by FedEx. That cost me fifty bucks. Presto offered to send me some but, of course since Murphy's Law is almost always in effect, they did so only after I had already purchased replacement jewel cases viaAmazon. I would prefer instead a reduction in my bill since it is very likely that Presto will get some remuneration from FedEx for this fiasco as I assume they had insurance on the package, or a gift card, preferably a gift car. No word on either yet..

Postscript Two: So, I sent two emails to Presto noting the damage done to the discs I ordered from them and which they sent via FedEx (30 of 33 jewel cases damaged; 1 disc with a foreign substance on it; 1 of the back inserts torn; 5 disc holders damaged). I told Presto I spent--let me be more specific--almost $52.00 dollars for jewel cases to replace the damaged ones as the two emails I sent to them were unanswered. I suggested they give me a partial refund or a gift card for the damaged items. Let me be more specific here. I would like a $1.00 dollar refund or gift card for each of the damaged jewel cases (approximately what I spent) which amounts to $30.00 dollars. I have not heard from Presto about this or about how their case against FedEx, who damaged the items, is going. One would hope for better communication from them about this. Anyway, I am contemplating filing a consumer fraud claim about Presto and FedEx with the NY AG's office and I am, not surprisingly, thinking about never buying from Presto again. 

 

The Books of My Life: Radical Campus

I don’t recall when I first heard about Simon Fraser University. It had to be sometime in the 1970s. I knew that it was one of the new universities being created and built around the globe in the post-World War II period in places like Great Britain (the most interesting of the bunch on new universities in the UK for me was the University of Sussex thanks to its interdisciplinarity), the United States (SUNY Albany), Canada (SFU, Lethbridge, Trent), Australia (La Trobe, Flinders, New South Wales, Macquarie), New Zealand (Waikato), and France (Nanterre). I also knew that Tom Bottomore, whose work on the history of sociological thought I admired, was there. What I did not know was that Bottomore had come and gone by the time I considered applying to Simon Fraser and that he came and went because of Simon Fraser's growing pains.

I thought about applying to Simon Fraser when I began applying to university in the 1970s. I ended up not applying, however, for some reason, probably because of the rain which I had had more than enough of when I visited my mum's England. Instead I ended up matriculating at Indiana University in Bloomington, something that, in retrospect, I regret given the humidity of the area and what has happened to that “university” in recent years. I now wish I had applied to SFU, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Texas, where I was going to finish my Indiana undergraduate degree anyway because of the health problems I had as a consequence of the climate in Bloomington, Indiana.

When it came time to apply for a postgraduate degree I once again considered applying to Simon Fraser. I ended up not doing so though I applied to several other universities in Canada including the University of Toronto,  the university closest to my heart in North America, and Queen’s University in Kingston, where Klaus Hansen and George Rawlyk, both of whom I wanted to study with. I also applied to the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, and La Trobe University in Australia where I wanted to work with Rhys Isaac. I was admitted to all of them though none of them worked out for various reasons most of them revolving around money. I did not have it and I did not get the necessary financial aid in the form of teaching or research assistantships at any of them. I did get into a snail mail shouting match with the graduate chair at Kansas who eventually told me that perhaps I was not a University of Kansas kind of guy. I guess I wasn't. Oh well, such is academic life.

I never forgot SFU, however. Given my interest in the history of higher education and particularly in the history of higher education in Canada, the US, and, to a lesser extent, England and Australia, I never forgot that Simon Fraser was one of the new universities and I was interested in these new universities and if they really were that different from the old ones. For these reasons I wanted to learn more about the history of Simon Fraser. When the opportunity arose I picked up a copy of SFU historian Hugh Johnston’s history of the early years of Canada's “experimental” and “radical” (I would prefer the term “progressive” instead here) university Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005).

Simon Fraser University, as Johnston makes clear, is historically important, for more than simply being one of the new universities being built across the globe in the post-World War II era. Along with the University of Victoria (initially a satellite campus of McGill University in Montreal and later a satellite campus of University of British Columbia) in the BC provincial capital, SFU, and importantly so, broke the monopoly on higher education UBC long had in the province of British Columbia. The government of Social Credit premier W.A.C Bennett decided, in the early 1960s, thanks in particular to demographic pressures, to break UBC’s monopoly on higher education in the province, and he did. As a consequence Simon Fraser offered to BC’s growing student population an alternative to UBC, as did the community colleges established in the province around the same time.

Though Simon Fraser was the brainchild of the Bennett government SFU was and is, as Johnston tells us, Gordon Shrum’s university. Shrum, who had been a physics professor at UBC, head of BC Hydro, which the Social Credit government had also created, and first chancellor of SFU, was, to a large extent, the creation of Shrum, It was he who, with the help of SFU’s first president Patrick McTaggert-Cohen and its first academic planner Ron Baker, both of whom Shrum hired, built this “instant university” from scratch between 1963 and 1965, the year the campus, which was still partly under construction, opened on the top of Burnaby Mountain east of Vancouver.

Shrum, McTaggert-Cohen, and Baker, Johnston tells us, established SFU’s character, its curriculum, hired its administrative staff, hired the initial heads of faculties at the university, and hired its architect and designer, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey (yes one of those Masseys). The modernist campus Ericson and Massey built (one similar to the campuses of the new US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs Colorado, the new SUNY Albany campus in the capital of New York, and a host of other modernist campuses across the globe), reflects Shrum’s vision for SFU, one that drew on English elements and American elements. The massive Academic Quadrangle simulates, for example, if in miniature the quads and courts of Oxford and Cambridge while Shrum’s establishment of a board of governors for the university reflects a more US style of academic governance, a style of governance adopted by the University of Toronto and other Canadian universities in the early twentieth century and after. One might argue that this mixture of the English and the American is what makes English language Canadian universities Canadian and part of what, at least in part, makes English Canada, English Canada.

Shrum's academic vision for his university, one that was somewhat English, was one of curricular interdisciplinarity, a curricular interdisciplinarity dominated by the humanities, the arts, and education (the only other “practical”professional schooling for employment after graduation, commerce, was added at the last minute at the behest of one of the members of the board of governors Arnold Hean). His was a vision of a university with a small cadre of administrators, of a university with active faculty heads initially appointed by him and his staff, and of a university with an active faculty association (which never really got off the ground in the early years of the school given that limited numbers of faculty joined it).

Shrum’s vision for SFU was initially something that drew interested faculty and students to it in its early years. Many of them were fascinated by the university's “experimental” and “radical” or interdisciplinary aspect and character. Some will see this fact, namely that it was this “experimental” and “radical” in character, also, at least in SFU"s early years, Simon Fraser's Achilles heal. Much about the workings of process and power at SFU was not spelled out or addressed by its founder. Initially the play of power within the university had a more informal collegial English like character, hence the importance of faculty heads and the small administrative staff. Once issues of hiring, promotion, and tenure (something that was more important in American universities at the time) came into play, however, the struggle over who had the power became of great important.

The fact that SFU got up and running just as the student movement was becoming prominent, Johnston reminds us, all across the globe, also complicated the battle over process and power at SFU. This was exacerbated by the fact that one of the things the student movement and its faculty allies were concerned with was who had the power in universities. Many students and many faculty at SFU wanted more "democratic” universities in general and a more “democratic” Simon Fraser in particular. An additional aspect that complicated this struggle for power in at SFU was the fact that as Canadian universities were created and grew in the 1960s the differences between British, American, and Canadian conceptions of power and process, particularly amongst its nationally varied faculty, became increasingly important.

The issue of who had the power, as Johnston points out, became problematic at SFU when the questions of how faculty heads were chosen and when hiring, promotion, ant tenure issues and procedures reared their ugly heads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many faculty (culture wars within the faculty are quite common) and students (culture wars amongst students are quite common) preferred elected to appointed heads seeing the election of heads as more “democratic”. They soon got what they wished for, and as a consequence, this gave meany the heady sense that, as Johnston notes, further “democratisation” of the university (not to mention Canadian society) was possible (the heady air of reform and revolution). As Johnston notes, these debates and disagreements, disagreements that eventually led to a strike by some Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology faculty, an increase in paranoia and misreadings on all sides, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) censuring SFU twice for limiting academic freedom, if to little real effect, were the result of this battle for power and control of Simon Fraser University. That the battles in this culture war resulted in what was and is the original sin at the heart of American, Canadian, and increasingly British universities, the establishment of boards of governors made up of non-faculty elements who had a monopoly on power and who appointed the president and chancellors of their universities, will likely be read as a paradox by many. This original sin was aided and abetted by the BC legal system when a judge ruled that the power to hire and fire at SFU lay exclusively with the board of governors and that, as a consequence, whatever procedures there were for hiring, promoting, and firing of faculty was theirs.

Long story short, a long short story Johnston is more implicit about than explicit about (he is a historian after all), SFU became what it appears Shrum and many faculty who came to SFU in the early years of the school did not want it to become, a corporate university run by a board of governors and its appointed president. The history of the once “experimental” and “radical" SFU, in other words, was like that of other Canadian, American, and British universities in the post World War II period. SFU’s story, even if it began as something different, was the same as that of other universities in North America and Britain. It is a story of increasing bureaucratisation (see Max Weber), of increases in administrative personnel particularly in the middle and lower echelons of the administrative bureaucracy. It is the story of the bureaucratisation of faculties and the story of the increasing use of part-time quasi- faculty (sessionals, adjuncts),. It is the story of the need for more monies, monies that were increasingly raised via fundraising and wealthy donors as public support for education has not kept up fully with increasing numbers of students matriculating in universities. It is the story, of ever more pressure for “practical" professional programmes and the presence of more “practical" professional schools as the ideology of education for a job became more and more predominant and dominant (see Thorstein Veblen on this), a decline in the importance of the humanities, and the bureaucratisation of the interdisciplinarity that made SFU somewhat unique as it became a faculty with specific emphases rather than a mode of general operation. It is the story of more campuses, and, in turn, an even greater need for administrative personnel and the need—the circle of university life—to raise even more monies via fundraising and from wealthy donors who want their cut of “practical” and professional flesh as a consequence, and Americanisation. It is the story of isomorphism in action.

Life as Crisis Management: This Time it is UPS, or the UPS Kiada

 

It was only a few days ago that I wrote a blog about the Sisyphean task of dealing with FedEx, a private postal agency for those of you who don’t know. Today I am writing about my kafkaesque dealings with another private postal agency, UPS.

Both FedEx and UPS, along with a public postal agency the United States Post Office, USPS, can be difficult to to deal with as was proved to me once again this week when FedEx failed to get critical information from a company I bought CDs from in England before the package left England and it has been, as a consequence, stuck in customs in New Jersey since Monday of this week. 

As for UPS they were supposed to deliver a package to me yesterday between, they said, sometime in the morning, this sometime in the morning being left deliberately ambiguous, and 9 pm. So I did as you have to do when you deal with these postal corporations, I waited. I waited and waited and waited. Around 1 pm local time I looked at the tracking and saw that the package was stuck in Bayonne, New Jersey and that it would, UPS said, be delivered. What time or even what day it was supposed to be delivered was, as it always is with these bureaucracies and intentionally so, unclear.

So, I called UPS. It took me three to five minutes to finally convince the labyrinthian UPS automated answering system to give me a real living breathing customer representative. I asked the representative when the package was supposed to be delivered and he told me a thick accent that it would be delivered sometime tomorrow, Saturday. I told him I would not be home on Saturday and asked him to have it delivered on Monday. Stupidly, it appears in retrospect, I assumed everything was set. I even went to the grocery store and credit union afterwards.

When I looked at tracking this morning, the morning after, however, I saw that the item was loaded on the truck and is supposed to be delivered to me today. I ticked the box to change delivery times, as guest, but was met with a request for an almost $12 dollar charge for the honour of changing the time of delivery. That, that charge, which I regarded as emblematic of the sickness at the heart of vampire capitalism, was a no go for me. I ain't gonna pay to do something I already did via the telephone and which I or anyone else should not be charged for in the first place.

What I learned from all this is that the customer always gets screwed. UPS fucks us over in terms of delivery dates, fucks us over even when we call to change the delivery date, and it wants us to pay to change a delivery date online. This is the world we live in, I guess.

Life as Crisis Management: FedEx, Again

 

It happens like clock work. Every month I am reminded that we live in Franz Kafka’s world, that we live in Vladimir Voinovich’s world, that we live in a postmodernist world of bureaucratic absurdity. I was reminded of this yet again this week thanks to FedEx.

As some of you may know I love classical music. As some of you may also know I hate Amazon. Given this I try to order classical CDs from another source. Usually that other source is Presto Classical, an independent music store in England.

A week ago Presto Classical was having a half price clearance sale on Hyperion CDs, a classical label I admire and love. Time to buy alert. I bit. I ordered a tonne or a slew of Hyperion CD’s from Presto, so many, in fact, that I got the express FedEx delivery rather than the slower USPS one. Everything went swimmingly until the package of CDs got to US customs.

On Monday, American Memorial Day, I got a call from FedEx that took me aback (I initially thought it might be fake) because I had never experienced such a thing. They asked me how large the package of CDs I ordered from Presto was. As I had not packed the package I had no idea what its measurements were. I told them to contact Presto, they who actually packaged the package or to simply measure it themselves (the common sense approach). But that, of course, to paraphrase Faith in Buffy's body, would be wrong.

I tried to get hold of Presto but Monday was a holiday in Britain too. So, I estimated the size of the package (two rows of 5.5 inch CDs with safety packing material equals 14 inches wide. On Wednesday I finally head from Presto. They told me they send the measurements to FedEx and that my package would move through customs soon. As of [Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday...) morning it has not moved at all. Fingers are, however crossed.

Anyway short story short, this is the second time I have been screwed by FedEx. I am sure time number three will be coming soon. Why? Because, to put it colloquially, FedEx sucks. Oh and another thing, the FedEx representatives I spoke to had very thick accents something that proved problematic for a 71 year old without 18 year old hearing. 

In the end I am left to ask why the package was allowed to move from England to the US without the dimensions of the package if FedEx needed the dimensions of the package? The answer, I must assume, is because we live in the world of Franz Kafka and Vladimir Voinovich. 

Update: My CD's finely arrived nine days after they were supposed to thanks to FedEx. The morons at FedEx, however, had one more surprise for me. FedEx had somewhere along the line transferred my CD's from the package they were sent in to one that was far too big for the items. You can probably guess what happened. If you guess the discs arrived damaged you would be right. I immediately contacted the seller and sender, sent them pictures of the damaged discs ,and told them they should claim insurance for the damage and/or sue FedEx for their incompetence and idiocies. Let's hear it for American capitalism.

The Books of My Life: Demons/Devils/The Possessed (Dostoyevsky)

 

One of the things I wanted to do in my retirement is read or reread the great “big book” classics of Russian literature. Though the best laid plans of Ron don’t always come out as he intended, I have been able to largely do what I intended to do over the last several years. 

Since I have more in the way of cultural capital now then I had when I initially read some of Russian literature it has been an interesting experience reading or rereading the hefty Russian classics in my elderly years. The "big books" of Russian literature I have recently been able to get through or to get through again include Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblamov, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksander Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers, The Idiot, and The Adolescent. I enjoyed them all immensely. They are, I discovered and re-discovered, classics for good reasons.

Recently I finished the last of the Dostoyevsky “big books” I have long wanted to read, Demons/Devils/The Possessed. I read two translations of this superb book simultaneously, the Penguin edition translated by Robert Maguire and the Alma edition translated by Roger Cockrell. Both were excellent though I think I preferred the Cockrell translation if by a very small margin. 

There were things I preferred in each of these translations, I preferred the notes in the Maguire edition. I found the notes in the Maguire, which were much more extensive and explanatory than in the Cockrell, superior to those in the Cockrell translation by a large margin. I preferred the Cockrell for its placement of the “At Tikhon's" chapter where Dostoevsky wanted it before his editor told him it would not make it past the censor. Maguire puts it in an appendix. 

There were also things I did not like in each translation. I did not like the use of country bumpkinish in the Maguire translation. It seems too mannered and fake to me. I did not like the use of Western measurements like miles in the Cockrell translation. I prefer that the Russian originals. I suppose that is the cultural anthropologist in me.

Finally, one thing I did not like about both translations was the fact that both placed their translations of the French, which in some chapters is extensive, in the endnotes. They should have been, in my opinion, at the bottom of the page a la the Oxford World Classics Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Footnotes make it much easier to read for those of us who have little French (like me) or no competency in French at all.

The American Health Care Kiada: Rolling the Boulder Up that Hill for Infinity, Continued...

 

The United States health care system is the worst I have ever encountered and I lived for awhile in Russia. I was reminded of this empirical fact again recently when I wanted to transfer my rheumatological care from the Centre for Rheumatology in Albany to Albany Medical Centre.

Why did I want to transfer care? Well for several reasons. The Centre for Rheumatology uses an online portal system devised by the minions of one Jamie Dimon and it is awful. Why is it awful? Well the Centre did not do the obvious thing to do, namely ti set up a pay system through our already existing portal accounts. They set up one which we had to go through a series of puzzles to finally get to a level and a point to pay them for services rendered. When the Centre did try to do what should have been done in the first place (setting up a pay system allowing us to pay through the portal—and remember the portal has all the necessary information so we don’t have to go through a series of puzzles to get to a point when we can pay—it messed up the accounts system and sent us bills for services we had already paid for. In response I threw up my hands and decided to go back to my GP to get a referral to rheumatology at Albany Med.

Actually, this was the second referral to rheumatology at Albany Med my GP sent to them. She initially referred me to rheumatology at Albany Med but Albany Med denied the referral claiming that my insurance denied coverage. This had to be a mistake since my insurance (Medicare and employment pension) did not deny me coverage at the Centre for Rheumatology which I got a referral to because I did not want to deal with the bureaucracy at Albany Med anymore given the incompetence (something inherent to bureaucracies since humans are inevitably involved in the processes related to them). 

To make a long story even longer I was denied care for my fibromyalgia at Albany Med again but this time for a different reason than the insurance. Interestingly, I never received a call or a text message from Albany Med saying that that there was a message in my Albany Med portal saying that I was denied care for my infirmity. Given this I called to make an appointment for rheumatological care at Albany Med. The customer service operative I talked to told me that she had no referral so making an appointment was a no go. 

So, thanks to the bureaucratic unmerry-go round I contacted my GP’s office again assuming that the referral did not go through for some reason. Another referral was sent. The person helping me informed me through all this informed me of another relevant bureaucratic puzzle level in Albany Med referral process. All referrals to Albany Med, I was told, have to go through a central referral office which takes a look at them and passes them on if they pass go in the game of health care cartel life.

Anyway, I thought I have better look in my Albany Med portal to see if there was anything there. And there it was. There was a document relating to the referral sitting there waiting for me to read it. And read it I did. The document said that I needed to print out said document and bring it with me. 

There was a problem, however. I don’t have a printer. So, I called Albany Med was again. The person in rheumatology I was transferred to by Albany Med’s general customer service operative told me the referral had been denied. This time it had apparently been denied not for insurance reasons as before but it was denied because Albany Med’s rheumatology department does not treat patients with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

Why Albany Med could not have sent me a text message saying this or sent a message in my portal saying this instead of the download allowing me to avoid the download document prompt in the first place is beyond me. Well, on second thought, it is not beyond me. This is how bureaucracies, public or private, work. Computers and the internet have made it all worse. Their motto seems to be why save the “consumer” time and aggravation when you can have them go round and round in the unmerry-go-round that is bureaucracies?

The Books of My Life: The Perpetual Dream

 

Gerald Grant and David Reisman explore the variety of attempts to reform the liberal arts in American higher education since the 1920s in their award winning book The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Taking a page from Max Weber Grant and Reisman argue that these various attempts at reform (Grant and Reisman call them telic reforms or reforms pointing toward different endings for undergraduate education than those that dominated the world of undergraduate education at the time the book was written) can be conceptualised in terms of three broad ideal type forms: the neo-classical, the communal-expressive, and the activist-radical.

After defining what they mean by telic reforms Grant and Reisman flesh out their three ideal types of telic reforms in three subsequent chapters. In chapter three they explore the neo-classical great books programme at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and to a lesser extent at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with its we want to create the carriers and bearers of Western civilisation at its heart. In chapter four Grant and Reisman explore the communal-expressive ideal type of reform using Kresge College which was, at the time, part of the new University of California Santa Cruz, as its example. Kresge, according to Grant and Reisman, adopted their reform model of change me and I can change my world from social psychologist Carl Rogers. In chapter five Grant and Reisman explore the activist-radical type of telic reform using Audrey Cohen’s The College for Human Services (now the Metropolitan College of New York), as its prime example. The College for Human Services adopted a type of reform whose battle call was change the student and he or she can change the world making it a much better place in the process.

In later chapters Grant and Reisman explore similar reform attempts at and in other colleges and universities across the United States, all of which sought to bring engaged faculty and engaged students together in engaged and engaging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary colleges and universities. Chapter seven focuses on New College in Sarasota, Florida. Chapter eight focuses on the colleges at the University of California of Santa Cruz. Chapter nine focuses on the two new colleges, at the time, in the university system of the state of New Jersey, Ramapo College and Stockton State College (now Stockton University).

I quite enjoyed Grant's and Reisman’s book. I was somewhat familiar with attempts to reform American undergraduate higher education but The Perpetual Dream added immensely to my previous knowledge of attempts to reform American undergraduate education. There were a number of things I found interesting about the book. I think that Grant and Reisman were correct in arguing that one of the central things these reforms wanted to do was to create a sense of community. I liked that Grant and Reisman took a historical, sociological, and ethnographic approach to higher education reforms. I liked that The Perpetual Dream was in large part ethnographic in that Grant and Reisman individually and collectively spent time interviewing those at colleges and in schools undertaking telic reforms. 

One of the disappointments I had with the book is that Grant and Reisman aren't as explicit in tying these reforms to the economic, political, cultural, and demographic change the US was going through in the 20th century. That said, one gets the sense that Grant and Reisman are arguing that the ideal type reforms they explore were attempts to counter the anomie unleashed by modernity. In this context I found it interesting and, in hindsight, obvious, that money, economics, was central to these experiments in American higher education. Monies seem to be an eternal problem for experimenting colleges particularly of the private variety. They aren’t mainstream after all. They are more akin to institutionalised bohemias. Antioch College, for example, perhaps the example of the activist-radical type, seems to have been almost always be cash strapped. The Metropolitan College of New York is facing financial problems as I type. 

Political realities have also impacted the longevity of American reform colleges and reform within colleges and universities. Recently New College has been in the news thanks to the successful attempt of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his merry men to remake the college in their own politically and ideologically correct image. They want to make it, they have said, the HIllsdale College of the South. Hillsdale is a favoured college of some segments of the American right What is happening to New College reflects the broader reality that since the administration of Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s the US has become increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and right wing populism. Note of interest, one of the other telic colleges of the countercultural era, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, agreed to accept New College students who did not wish to attend the Hillsdale of the South. Paradoxically Hampshire has recently decided to close because of economic difficulties.

There were other things I found less troubling about the book. I found, for example, Grant’s and Reisman’s contention that unionisation efforts by faculty in American universities added a layer of centralisation and bureaucratisation to American colleges and universities spot on but wondered why they did not pay as much attention to something else that added centralisation and bureaucratisation to American universities, the increase in administrative staff. From the vantage point of 2026 it is clear that not only has there been an exponential increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities since the time Grant and Reisman wrote, but that these bureaucrats, because they are addicted to federal dollars and the ties of research dollars to college and university rankings, are undercutting faculty co-governance and faculty freedom of speech and research. Perhaps the faculty unionisation efforts Grant and Reisman criticise, were a  necessary countervailing force even if it has proved to be ineffective in pushing back against increasing administrative authoritarianism in America's major research universities.

Grant and Reisman rightly note that the increasingly consumerist model of American higher education and its need for student consumers has impacted reform efforts. It is, as they also note, not easy to convince students who have an increasingly I go to school so I can get a job mentality that a liberal arts reform college or programme is worth their while. Needless to say, many of the business types that serve on college and university boards of governance have a similar "pragmatic" attitutde.

Finally, I was intrigued by the fact that one might possibly and profitably apply another Weberian proposition to the reform movements in American higher education, namely, Weber's conception of authority. Many if not most of these reform efforts began with a charismatic reform figure and, increasingly, over time, became tradition bound and bureaucratic after the charismatic figure leaves or dies. At St. John’s, for instance, Scott Buchanan eventually came to the conclusion that books, including books outside the Western canon, needed to be added to the great books reading list. By that time, however, he had left St. John’s and St. John’s curriculum had been fossilised and sanctified, had been, in other words, turned into a tradition by those who followed in his wake and any effort to change that tradition was seen as a profanation.

As Grant and Reisman note academic reform is a perpetual dream, something that never ends and something that is often grounded in and founded on utopian ideologies. In my academic life I have been privy to several attempts to reform the curriculum all of which involved the reinvention of the metaphoric wheel. When I was at the University of Albany, for instance, there was Project Renaissance, an attempt to develop a living-learning interdisciplinary programme for selected students at the University (Grant and Reisman ignore these living learning reform efforts). It was actually hardly interdisciplinary at all. It was comparative. When I was at RPI there was an attempt to create an interdisciplinary curriculum with classes of over one hundred students, something hardly likely, in my opinion, to create a sense of community let alone a helpful learning environment. That "reform" effort seems to have ended as well. And so it goes and so it will likely continue to go.

Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

 

Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposedly has and has had a separation of religion and state, church and state. How did I manage that? Well once upon a time I once lived in a place where religion, in this instance the Christian religion, and politics, in this instance conservative and right wing populist politics, were intertwined.

When I say I lived in a theocracy I don’t mean that I lived in Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam is intertwined with the monarchical Saudi state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Iran where Shia Islam is intertwined with the Iranian state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Russia where once again the Orthodox Church and the Russian state commingle. I mean that I lived in Mormon Utah.

When I lived in Utah between 1991 to 1993 some 72% plus of the state was Mormon. The legislature of the state of Utah was dominated by Latter-day Saints. Some 90% of Utah legislators were Mormon. While the Mormon population of Utah has declined since 1993, in 2021 it was around 60%, the number of Latter-day Saints in the state legislature has remained about the same, around 86% in 2021. The Mormon theocracy that dominated the Utah of the early 1990s, in other words, remains intact.

Many will tell you that when I lived in Utah Zion was not a theocracy. That would be, they point out and despite many who believe the contrary, unconstitutional. It would be a violation of the US Constitution, the founding document of the American state. And while I agree that Utah was not a Mormon theocracy officially, it was one in practise. In this it parallels nineteenth century America, an era when the United States was unofficially (and illegally) a theocracy.

I say that Mormon Utah was a theocracy for a number of reasons. I had, to backtrack a bit, moved to Provo, Utah to do research on Mormons (Provo is to Mormondom what the South is to the US religiously, it is, thanks to Brigham Young University,  the LDS Church run university, the buckle of the Mormon Bible Belt).  When I lived in Provo the city was around 95% LDS. BYU was around 97% LDS. BYU had rules that everyone, student, faculty, and staff alike, had to abide by. Men could not have hair below their ears or their necks. Beards were forbidden for males. Women could not have dresses or skirts that rose more than one inch above their knees. Alcohol was forbidden. Caffeinated beverages, whether coffee, tea, or soda pop, were verboten. Smoking was prohibited. Unmarried men or women could not live together in "sin" on campus or off.

Of course, one might wonder whether these rules were followed. After all couldn’t I get 3:2 beer at local grocery stores in Provo if I wanted? Couldn’t one go to Provo’s one pub? Couldn’t one get coffee and tea at one of the few local coffee houses? The answer, of course, is yes. I would point out, however, that according to information I heard though the samizdat mill the police force of Provo and the BYU Police, which could operate state wide, kept an eye out for BYU students who violated the “honour code”. The Provo cops supposedly even kept an eye out for students coming out of the lone pub. 

I would also note anecdotally (ethnographically) that when I was on campus everyone I saw was following the dress and grooming standards the Church commanded. I did run into “Jack Mormons”, those who were only nominally LDS, in Salt Lake City. I saw "Jack Mormons" who smoked. I saw some Jack Mormon males with long hair. I saw all this during one of my monthly visits there to bookstores (Sam Weller’s Zion’s Bookstore, in particular) and to Squatters, where one could get a beer for a reasonable price since they brewed their own (I sometimes, I have to admit, went to Temple Square after getting a beer buzz at Squatters and listened to the sister missionaries there; Gentle entertainment in Utah). I could do all this because Salt Lake City was only barely dominated by Mormons at the time and thus was, despite the presence of the Church bureaucracy there, a less theocratic place (less not absent) than Provo or the rural towns in the state where nearly everyone was LDS and nearly everyone practised what the Church preached (the plan of salvation or eternal progression, the ideology around which all Mormon practise flows).

I would describe the unofficial Mormon theocracy as a kindler and gentler version of a theocratic state. No one was burned at the stake when I was in Zion, No one was tortured on the rack. No one was killed for their beliefs of lack of beliefs. Mormondom, in other words, was different in these regards from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theocracies in Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (ironically Christians had been killed for their beliefs in the Roman Empire but then the group persecuted often replicates what happened to it in kind) and beyond. On the other hand, there were some of the feminist variety who taught at BYU who were fired. There were people, including Mormon historians, who were excommunicated from the Church. And there were individuals, Mormon historians, for instance, whose scholarly work and published presentations drew the ire of true believers who threatened them with bodily harm and even death via email and the telephone. Again, kindler and gentler theocracy.

I have been thinking about my life in theocratic Utah because the United States, thanks to right wing populist "Christian" nationalists who worship at the altar of the American state rather than the Christian god ignoring, in the process, almost every aspect of Jesus’ supposed Sermon on the Mount (so-called in one of its two versions), not to mention the prohibition against having gods other than YHWH, are on the verge of turning the United States again into a theocracy, though this time an official theocracy. One can reasonably argue that they have already established theocracies in certain US states. And that is scary given the history of religious intolerance.

It is scary because these theocrats are people convinced of their own absolute rightness. They, they believe, after all have god on their side. They are people who, because of this, are inherently intolerant and inherently fascist (fascism goes back to authoritarian monarchs who claimed that they were god or the representative of god; theocracy). They cannot be reasoned with because of this holier than thou attitude. Backed by Big Money, particularly from big oil sources, they are taking over school boards and cleansing school libraries of books which they regard as pornographic (meaning books characterised by sympathy toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other "outcasts") and which don't fit with their narrow and narrow minded ideology, and they are actively working for the firings of those who speak out against those they regard as saints (according to Reuters and the Guardian over 600 people were fired for freely speaking their piece about the theocratic and intolerant Charlie Kirk, for example). They are running for local offices, state offices, and federal offices. And they have an ally in that multi-divorced, bully, misogynist, arrogant, narcissist, and mentally ill bloke named Donald Trump. Their theocracy, I suspect, won’t be as kind and gentle as that of the Mormon Utah in which I lived. I only hope I can get out before the stone age horror begins yet again.

Is yet another Civil War in the American future? Should states like New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey form a union of their own? Should California, Oregon, and Washington do the same? Should all of these explore union with Canada, a nation, like any nation, with flaws but nowhere  near the flaws of the theocratising United States)? Should Margaret Atwood be considered a secular prophet? Time, as always, will tell.