Apropos of reflections on retirement last year, I forgot
to mention the reaction of a long-time wise-acre faculty friend when I told him
I was retiring: he immediately responded
by laughing and asking if that meant my Christmas letter would get longer. As you know, instead it got shorter. But that was last year. . . .
I told a friend that I've developed "rules of doing
things" in retirement.
1. Must it be done? Yes.
Will I have fun doing it? It
doesn't matter, it has to be done. Then
I'll do it, even if I don't particularly want to (e.g., laundry, dishes).
1a. Maybe it can be done later.
2. Must it be done? No.
Will I have fun doing it?
No. Then I won't do it.
3. Must it be done? No.
Will I have fun doing it?
Yes. Then I'll do it.
"Must it be done? Yes" admits of a wide range of
possibilities, alas. The signal modifier
is probably "today." Much must
be done, but not always today. That is
the other outcome of retirement, I find:
most things can be "tomorrow."
* * *
The website
fivethirtyeight.com had an article early in the year titled "Shut Up About
Harvard." Of course it's of
interest to me, having spent my career at a university, but it speaks to public
perceptions (in many quarters, anyway) about going to college. The reporter, Ben Casselman, points out that
much public attention has been paid to the admissions process and the lengths
to which students (and their parents) will go to get admitted to a
high-prestige school. In the real world,
however, the modal college applicant never writes an entrance essay, tries to
beef up a resume, or seek letters of support from influential family
friends. He notes that according to the
Department of Education, over 75% of students apply to colleges that accept at
least half of those who apply. Only 4%
apply to school that accept 25% or fewer, and well under 1% of students apply
to places that accept fewer than 10% (such as Harvard, Yale, etc.).
The
misconceptions continue, often reinforced by movie depictions. College students are 18-early 20s, living in
dorms, partying, and studying "useless" fields like English. That vision has little connection with the
reality of most college students. About
half attend 2-year community/technical colleges, which almost never have dorms,
so those students are either living at home with parents or have a room or
apartment somewhere. Even among those
who attend 4-year institutions, Casselman reports, 25% attend part-time and
about 25% are over the age of 24. So
fewer than one-third of college students in the U.S. are full-time,
degree-seeking students at 4-year institutions.
(Note: 4-year includes places
that also offer a vast array of graduate and professional programs; the
University of Minnesota is, in this context, a 4-year institution because it
offers the baccalaureate degree.)
So the
idealized version, the leafy quad and kids throwing around footballs or
frisbies, just ain't what college is for the vast majority of students. Even those who do attend traditional 4-year
institutions, whether the U of Minnesota or Macalester or St. Olaf, often also
have jobs to help pay expenses. A large
portion, probably a large majority (I don't have the statistics at hand) of
those who attend the 2-year schools and the 4-year non-selective public schools
must work too many hours—and they may also have spouse/children/family
obligations, and frequently attend only part-time.
So why is that
idyllic version of college so often portrayed?
Casselman contends, probably correctly, that the readers of national
publications are often the ones who've gone to an Ivy, elite 4-year school, or
a high-status public research university—as have many of the reporters doing
the writing. He cites a higher-education
journalist to make the point that most reporters went to selective private
colleges—which "is exactly the opposite of the experience for the bulk of
American students."
One potential
side effect of this widespread attention to the mythical (for most) campus
experience is that the important issues are given less attention by the
media. The ballyhoo is about luxurious
dorms and climbing walls and a hook-up culture and political correctness, but
for the vast majority of college students those are irrelevant issues. The result, however, is that the critical
issues, especially funding, recede into the background. Private institutions don't depend on public
funds; most students are at public institutions that do—and with nationwide
reductions in public funding for public higher education, both quality and
access suffer. There's even a difference
among the public institutions: places
like Minnesota and Michigan have substantial resources and revenue from
non-public sources, so to some extent they can moderate the effect of cuts in
state funds on students. The
institutions that have the least flexibility, the greatest dependence on public
funding, are those that educate the most students: the community and technical colleges and the
state universities (that aren't research intensive, places in Minnesota like
Mankato and Winona and Bemidji). So
those schools that take on the largest number of undergraduates, and often
those who are most in need of help and guidance, are the schools that have seen
the greatest reduction in financial support from legislatures. That is the kind of issue that many in the
general public miss.
Another issue
is student debt. That one does get attention,
but the coverage often isn't evenhanded.
There are repeated stories of students with astronomical debt loads—but
those are typically people who went on to advanced graduate or professional
degrees, many of whom will make plenty of money. The greater problem is the many students with
smaller amounts of debt who cannot find a job and who haven't finished their
degree, especially those who attended for-profit institutions (which are one of
the biggest ripoffs in the American economy).
Yet another issue
is differentiation by ethnic group in terms of who attends what kind of
school. Over 80% of new white students
(that is, freshmen) enrolled at selective 4-year schools; only 13% of Hispanics
and 9% of African-Americans did so. Over
two-thirds of students of color went to open-access schools (largely community
and technical colleges). It is the
latter students who also take on debt that they frequently are unable to repay
because they cannot finish college—or if they do, they obtain associate (two-year)
degrees that don't lead to the kind of jobs that enjoy an income sufficient to
repay the debt and advance in life and careers.
We've thus been heading toward a two-track system: whites go to the selective schools and
students of color don't.
So if you're
going to try to picture the average college student, picture someone in their
mid-20s at a community college who's struggling to find time to take classes,
work, and raise a family. Some of the
time you're doing this imagining, make it a student of color. It's not a pretty picture. And it sure isn't Harvard.
As if to add an exclamation point to my little essay,
this came out in March.
A report released today . . . reveals that many
community college students are dealing with a lack of basic needs.
The report -- "Hungry and Homeless in College"
-- surveyed more than 33,000 students at 70 two-year institutions in 24 states
and found that two-thirds struggle with food insecurity, half are housing
insecure, one-third are regularly hungry and 14 percent are homeless.
[According to one of the authors] "These students
do have financial aid and they are working and they're still not able to make
ends meet. It's not like they're lazy or sleeping a lot of the time. . . . What we see is a portrait of a group of
people who are trying hard and still falling short."
The report found that there was very little variation
in homelessness and hunger between community college students in urban, rural
or suburban areas of the country. One-third of students who identified as food
or housing insecure were both working and receiving financial aid.
Those students who identified as homeless were also
more likely to work longer hours at their jobs.
Hard to imagine being successful in college under these
circumstances.
And this in April:
"Of those dependent primary family members reporting attaining a
bachelor's degree by age 24 in 2014, 54 percent were in the top family-income
quartile and 10 percent were in the bottom family-income quartile."
* * *
A short digression on etymology. During an evening cocktail hour, Elliott was
reading aloud to us from The Dord, the
Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The
hidden lives and strange origins of common and not-so-common words. Given my career in higher education, one of
them I found quite funny.
The origin of the word "seminar," "plot
where plants are raised from seeds," is the Latin seminarium, "plant
nursery, seed plot," or figuratively, "breeding ground." That in turn is from seminarius, "of
seed," from semen. Which means "school
for training priests." In English,
from about the 13th Century, semen was seed, and "a seminary
was a place where students were developed and cultivated. It was a place for learning anything, not
necessarily theology." So seminar
is from semen. What an odd but amusing evolution
in modern English.
* * *
While entertaining friends at dinner late last year, we
were accused of "radical hospitality." It was definitely a compliment, said with
emphasis, but I wasn't then certain what the phrase means, or encompassed. I'm still not, but I think we're pleased that
someone enjoys our hospitality sufficiently to call it radical.
* * *
The New York Review
of Books had an article about architecture and began by observing that
there are predictable cycles of what is admired and what is dismissed. Art Deco was dismissed in the 1930s but
revived in the 1970s. Similarly with
Victorian architecture in the 1890s and the 1920s. The author then went on to comment on new
books on brutalism and concrete buildings, noting a revival of interest in and
an appreciation for brutalism.
On
brutalism in architecture:
This
was never a style that attempted to convey warmth, comfort, intimacy, or other
qualities we tend to associate with an enjoyable way of life, and thus it never
won much love except from architectural specialists. Brutalism posited an
unsentimental, not to say harsh, view of the modern world, and however heroic
its unflinching embodiment of hard realities may have been, most people do not
enjoy a daily diet of architectural anxiety and alienation, especially in
northern climates under cloudy skies.
Although
it's all over the world, I tend to associate brutalism with the Soviet Union
and eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.
And no matter how much architectural specialists laud brutalism, I think
it's just plain ugly in every way. The
University of Minnesota has a few buildings that are close to brutalism; the
environment of the campus would be improved if the University just demolished
them and replaced them with green space.
(One of my professors, when I was an undergraduate, referred to two of
the buildings on the West Bank campus as "neo-penitentiary." That's a branch of brutalism—or it should be
so considered, if it isn't.) Ugh.
While
I'm on an architecture theme: I've found
it interesting to watch the rapid and proliferating construction of apartments
around the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota (and, as the year
progressed, elsewhere around the cities).
These buildings have sprung up like mushrooms over the last few years;
they're everywhere on the perimeter of the east bank of the campus. One can presume that developers, who are
running a business, know what they're doing, right? The people in that business clearly believe
(1) there is significant unmet need for housing near the University, or (2)
there will be a large influx of people—students?—who will need housing that
they will otherwise be unable to find, or (3) both. I had my doubts about both (1) and (2), but
presumably developers have done sophisticated market analyses before they
invest millions of dollars in an enterprise on which they expect to make
money. Presumably.
It
may be that developers do know what they're doing. Mid-year there was an article in the Star-Tribune reporting the demand for
apartments.
More
than 17,000 rental apartments have been built in the Twin Cities metro since
2010, but that's far from enough to satisfy future demand.
How
many more are needed?
A
new report from the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) and the
National Apartment Association (NAA) said that the Twin Cities needs 70,783 new
apartments by 2030 to keep pace with demand, assuming current social and
demographic trends continue unabated.
Elliott was looking for an apartment at this same time
and finding rents to be higher than he liked.
We had both assumed the market was being overbuilt. When I read this little excerpt from the
newspaper to him, he responded, "where are all these people coming from?" Kathy and I had the same reaction. (It appears that there is an increased demand
for rental units rather than homes for purchase primarily because of
immigration—immigrants tend to rent for long periods—and delayed marriage on
the part of Millenials. The very same
day, however, the newspaper had an article on how home buyers are in a tough
position because there are far fewer homes for sale than there are buyers. Kathy and I keep reading this information and
thinking we should sell now!)
The
architectural point, however, is that these apartment buildings (at least the
ones around the campus) reflect what I'll call a "colored rectangle"
style. Many if not most of the buildings
have colored rectangles as exterior decoration.
Light/dark greens, red/tans, and so on.
I wonder how well this style will age over decades; my guess is "not
well." It will certainly mark the
buildings' period, the mid-20-teens. I
will give it this: the colored
rectangles are more attractive than the enormous walls of concrete gray that
typifies brutalism and its offspring.
* * *
While still on the subject of architecture, I've come to
realize that I don't particularly care for a residence, the most prominent
architectural feature of which (from the front) is the garage. In the neighborhoods that I and my friends
grew up in in south Minneapolis, the front of the house was the front of the
house; the garage, especially in neighborhoods that had alleys, was tucked away
in back, out of sight. The prominence of
garages, in general, strikes me as a post-war phenomenon, when suburbs were
growing fast and alleys weren't as widespread.
If you think about it, if you drive through a townhouse
development or many newer neighborhoods, what you see, driving down the street,
is a long row of garages (to which there is attached a residence). This doesn't seem to me to be an attractive
neighborhood ambience.
After I wrote the previous two paragraphs, it occurred to
me to consult my long-time friend and geography guru, Professor (emeritus, but
only in title) John Adams. I asked him
if what I'd written were on the mark. He
wrote back.
As a matter of fact, I have thought about this.
When
I once took groups on bus tours of the twin cities, I would invoke some of
these ideas to help tour members "read the housing landscape" as a
record of our social history of households and neighborhoods.
In
an earlier time, the front of the house and the yard were part of a display.
Think of the houses along Summit Ave in St. Paul. They were not about a place to live. They were about display to the neighbors ("I
belong here") and to the community ("Look at us!!).
Today,
and for the past 15-20 years or so, the attention to house design is what's
inside it, not what it looks like from the outside. Putnam's Bowling
Alone explains much of this as individuals and households can live in a
house for years and never have a conversation with their next door
neighbors. Why should they?
Meanwhile,
inside the house, new housing designs feature "entertainment and media
centers" so that members of the households can watch their 120" flat
screen TV alone or with household members.
And
the kitchens—extravagant elements designed to reflect a nostalgia-based
hoped-for time when household members might actually prepare a meal for
themselves. Meanwhile, far more than
half of all food consumed these days is consumed away from home or prepared
elsewhere and delivered to the home.
Bottom
line . . . your observations are on the mark . . . society continues to change
. . . as our housing landscape changes . . . in a reciprocal dynamic of cause
and effect.
I confess I was pleased with myself for having made an
original observation (at least original to me!).
* * *
Back to cold noses.
A couple of months after we returned from Arizona, I happened across a
study out of Penn State on noses, "Investigating the case of human nose
shape and climate adaptation." We
all know that "humans inherit their nose shape from their parents, but
ultimately, the shape of someone's nose and that of their parents was formed by
a long process of adaptation to our local climate."
The authors looked at a number of nose measurements in
different populations groups in combination with "geographical variation
with respect to temperature and humidity."
Something called "genetic drift" accounts for any number of
variations between humans on all sorts of measures, but the researchers found
that the nose differences were more than what genetic drift would explain. So natural selection likely played a role.
"Wider noses are more common in warm-humid climates,
while narrower noses are more common in cold-dry climates." This isn't a new claim; in the late 19th
Century some guy named Arthur Thompson proposed that "long and thin noses
occurred in dry, cold areas, while short and wide noses occurred in hot, humid
areas"—but no one had actually done the measurements. There may be a reason for the difference.
One
purpose of the nose is to condition inhaled air so that it is warm and moist. The narrower nostrils seem to alter the
airflow so that the mucous-covered inside of the nose can humidify and warm the
air more efficiently. It was probably more essential to have this trait in cold
and dry
climates.
. . . People with narrower nostrils
probably fared better and had more offspring than people with wider nostrils,
in colder climates. This led to a
gradual decrease in nose width in populations living far away from the equator.
There is also the possibility of a cultural effect. "People may choose mates simply because
they find a smaller or larger nose more attractive. If an entire group thinks small is better,
then those with large noses will have less success in reproducing and fewer
large-nosed people will be in the group.
Over time, the nose size in the group will shrink relative to other
groups where large noses are favored."
It's also possible that "notions of beauty may be linked to how
well-adapted the nose is to the local climate."
So now you may know why your nose has the shape it
does. Where'd your forebears come from?
* * *
Several
of you have suggested that I should write a blog, including as recently as by a
classmate at my dining room table last week and another classmate in an email
to me yesterday. And Kathy has suggested
it from time to time. To demonstrate
that I'm only stubborn 90% of the time, I looked into blogs and general
understandings and informal rules for writing them.
There
are drawbacks: I'd have to set it up or
get it set up, and since I am technologically challenged under the best of
circumstances, that's a high hurdle; I don't believe one can restrict access to
a blog, and I'm not sure I'm willing to put everything I write out for the
world to see (assuming any part of the world would ever look at it, which is
probably not the case); relatedly, I write for fun, primarily for myself and my
friends, and welcome comments or rejoinders at any time, and I think I would
have less fun if I knew everything would be out on the web because I'd be
inclined to be more guarded in what I write; I frequently revise and edit what
I write, which I could also do with a blog, but sometimes edits don't occur to
me until weeks after my original draft; one "rule" I saw on several
blog guides was to have a theme, which is something I surely lack; and I'd have
to be much more careful about citations and quoting people, something I don't
have to do in non-public, non-published communications.
So—while
I appreciate the suggestion, which is not without merit, to be sure—I think a
blog just isn't right for what I like and want to do. As many of you know, however, I'm not the
least hesitant to quote you, usually anonymously, in a future narrative or
story, either because you responded to something I wrote or because I want to
crib from something you've written elsewhere.
In that respect, my practice turns it into a quasi-blog.
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