Co-op College

 

According to their web site, 2024, at University of Chicago 43% of the teachers are professors. This is better than most schools. By third or fourth year an undergraduate will be taking instruction from a professor. Again, the site says the average pay of a professor at University of Chicago is $165,000. Nonetheless, most tuition money does not go to instruction.

At the old Columbia College in Chicago graduation was a great shame. Nowadays Columbia is more collegiate. It used to be more vocational.  The instructors were professionals in their fields. Graduation meant you hadn’t been hired. If schools are training professionals, their graduation rate should suffer, just as in sports. Conversely why take training from people who can’t find work? Corporate training can be adversarial: how would you train your competition?

I propose a new form of institution. Rather than a degree I propose an open transcript. Everyone can see your grades. Enrolling in the Co-operative College means sacrificing the privacy of your transcript and the student course reviews. If it takes you three tries to pass Calculus, that will be recorded. If you write a critical review of a great professor, everyone will know. Likewise, if Professor Kokoris gives you an A, everyone will know what that means and recognize the achievement.

This will be a return to Adam Smith’s Scottish model, instructors will post their rates. A teacher can refuse a student. Some instructors may bundle various courses together to give certificates. The institution may rent temporary space for certain necessities. The teacher, not the school, will be the brand.  

At the risk of mysticism, who taught you signifies more than what you were taught. The information is available. What you get in school, that you don’t get in real life is a grade. Real life is pass/fail.

Schools justify privilege. People are disappointed to realize that a degree doesn’t entitle the position and the position alone doesn’t get advancement. Privilege will find its way. Let us deny it institutional escort.   Our natural quest for autonomy inevitably leads to endowment. Once the cooperative college achieves endowment, it is time to found a new one.

Friends With the Mayor

Brandon Johnson has just been elected mayor of Chicago. Except Byrne we have always elected lawyers, even prosecutors, in the hope that they would avoid indictment. So far, they have. Johnson is the first schoolteacher. As a teacher Johnson is trying to approach crime from a Confucious perspective, systemically. Here are some obvious concerns:

A court clerk just made the mistake of self-publishing a book about a recent case. In general police, prosecutors, judges and even clerks should be cautious publicly expressing opinions that could be thrown back at them, endangering testimony, and convictions. It is unfortunate that people closest to issues are precisely the ones constrained from public discussion.

Police are not screened for clerical aptitude. Clerical tasks are a major part of police work, especially investigations. Back in the 90’s the federal government confronted domestic violence. Their solution was the development of a form that must be filed if the husband was not arrested and removed from the incident. This had the consequence of saving a lot of men’s lives. The legislators understood full well that police will do anything to avoid filling out a form.

You may be puzzled that police sometimes ventilate suspects. Imagine you are a responsible person training police. You are not training multi $100,000 SOCOM warriors who wound their opponents to entice their comrades into further casualties. Hopefully, it is unlikely that a police officer will ever be in a gun battle. You train to the exception. Your officer will undergo inquiry and may lose their job. Your objective is that the officer survives. You will train said officer to start shooting the moment they clear the holster, correct as they go, keep shooting and don’t stop till they drop. It is not common, but there are people who when shot pull out their gun and kill you. It is not a good look, but police should also receive baton training. Police should have options.

It used to be that police were the biggest street gang, they coordinated with each other, set it up and take it down. Just as Catholic school graduates make the worst public-school teachers, military are the worst police. Warrior mentality is dangerous to police survival. Running to the gun fire didn’t work against one way glass at the Tennessee bank shooting.

I don’t know if they are intentionally disingenuous, but the best argument for gun control is the You tube video channels Garand Thumb and She Equips Herself. If you have any critical faculty watching man children play in the desert, shoot hogs from helicopters, and practice with grenade launchers should give pause. I don’t mind people who are raised having guns. Trained isn’t raised. Stavroula from She Equips Herself may not be raised but she is being trained by people who were. She considers serious issues. At some point you may wonder why you need to conceal carry:

-Everyone else is.

Hmmm.

The underlying justification for all this is crime. Why are people so prejudiced against criminals? You may need a criminal someday. Boosters get shot; gangsters pardoned.

In Chicago, teachers won against police in the mayoral election. This is another click in the Officer Krupke cycle from West Side Story.  They are even considering sending social workers instead of police. Department of Children and Family Services does not have a good reputation. Every time a child dies, a social worker should be killed. It is true that criminals are created. Once they are created, they are dangerous.

Crime is intrinsic to society. Take the Barbary pirates. British and American tribute stopped any other competition with their trade. Saudi ransoms to Somali pirates encourage instability and forestall oil development. Developers encourage street gangs to clear neighborhoods. Without crime there would be no police. Wildings could not occur without police encouragement. The various prohibitions are gang subsidies. Recently Oregon tried drug legalization with dubious consequences. I was disappointed. The lesson is that legalization alone is not sufficient in America. The snap back is too great.

Most people are not carrying cash. The only people worth sticking up are poor people who can’t qualify for credit. Using stolen credit cards gets you caught. The only way violent personal crime can be profitable is if it is receiving subsidy.

I am terrified of nostalgia. In the past minority populations were deprived of police services. Even when minorities were arrested, they would likely be released unless they had violated social order and murdering each other didn’t qualify. If you didn’t deal justice on the spot it didn’t happen. I don’t want to return to two-gun Pete, and we stomp drunk drivers. I have seen social justice; I am not a fan.

Part of the difficulty is that we have seen the man behind the curtain. I don’t know how many have been freed because of DNA, records aren’t kept, but they are coming out of jail like popcorn. Circumstantial evidence, ha, eyewitness, chortle, confession, horse laugh, doesn’t leave much. In Oak Park IL most murders are unsolved. Just don’t park wrong.

People like charter schools because they don’t want their kids in class with Huck Finn. It has little to do with parental control, values, uniforms, quality… Huck Finn is a nuisance. There is no charter school for the bad kids. We used to kid Huck Finn along until he was 18 and his brain had slightly congealed. We had social promotion, outposts, tracking… He probably didn’t get a degree, but we had kept him somewhere. Now, not only is Huck Finn out on the street but we told him he was worthless. Please don’t be shocked at the consequence. From the news reports it would appear that it is often the shining kids, college bound, athletes, adept who get shot. Think Huck might have a grudge?

Whenever you get confused, ask yourself:

-What would happen if those kids were white?

Resources would be found. The children would be placed in structured environments. Chicago has an abundance of lawyers. Huck is making videos. His sponsors are violating laws against delinquency and RICO. Put the lawyers on commission.

The right has suddenly discovered mental health. It is fun to see the ill take umbrage. The right wants mental health without national health care.

We are a military imperial nation. Violence abroad reflects as violence at home. Rather than excusing military adventures we should have treated terrorism as a police concern. FBI is far more vicious than marines.  

This is a lot to put on a mayor. It would be good to get our mental health centers restored.

Lower Test Scores

 

Previously, for many decades intelligence test scores increased. For the last two decades, test scores have decreased. Whenever intelligence is at issue, consider demographic. Intelligence score “discoveries” are a consequence of sampling. How has the demographic changed? In the earlier decades the educated population increased. By definition, the people tested are the educated. With increase a greater proportion of the population was tested. Throttling back reduced the population tested. The impact on scores is apparent when you see how the population changed. The answer is grades and privilege. There are four possibilities:

Good test scores, good grades	Good test scores, poor grades
Poor test scores, good grades	Poor test scores, poor grades

 

People with poor scores and grades, except for the privileged, do not persist in school.

If the unprivileged with good scores and grades are also smart, they may recognize that continuing in school is not an opportunity. Learning is the antidote to idealism.

I had good test scores and poor grades. Due to various pressures and expectations of the time such as the draft and social promotion, people like me hung in a little longer. Today that is not the case. We are not going into debt on a losing cause. Teachers resent us. Regardless of our behavior, we are a disruption.

Privileged students get coaching, often by the teacher doing the grading.

It used to be that unprivileged students with good grades and poor test scores left. Lately teacher’s pet demands more consideration.

Until the Second World War, education was a bastion of privilege. Returning to serving privilege and with schools going out of business, we see decline in scores.

Read Aloud

 One of the first instructions you get in school is to read to yourself. This makes sense in a classroom. But it is a mistake. If you want to remember your lines in a script always read your portion aloud. If you want to remember your lines, never read them to yourself, always read them aloud. If you are having difficulty with a text, read it aloud. If you are working a difficult problem, read it aloud. I don’t know why it is, but we process differently when we voice the words. You will be more successful reading aloud.

Fuck Flash Cards

 Next time you see some little darling tormented with multiplication tables, have them make up a grid and fill it in themselves. It is easier to remember with context and seeing the relations between numbers. Be sure to point out the square’s diagonal. They can also build grids for the other operations, just for fun.

Rates

Any time someone gives you a rate for anything, it’s been jiggered.  The unemployment rate is a well-known example. In 2012 the reported unemployment rate was around 8%. If I take the total reported employment of around 134,000,000 then apply it to the total population between 20 and 64 of about 162,000,000 I get around 17%. That seems a little high for 2012 but it gives you an idea of the variance. At this point economists start throwing smoke.  Most economics seems to be disputes about rates.  Disability, yadda yadda, looking for work, employability, underemployment, I’ve known a lot of deranged people who have jobs.  A good rule of thumb seems to be double the reported rate. Google real unemployment and double the rate seems the general conclusion.

Given the tremendous amount of data available and studied we should have immediate, accurate and complete information segmented across any desired index of our unemployment.  Given that we don’t it is obvious that we don’t want this information. We have national job search sites, Monster, LinkedIn, Dice, which should be able to show employment rates and active job searchers by profession. Why aren't these numbers publicly available?

Earnings are another notorious quagmire. Security Analysis, the legendary book by Graham and Dodd, is essentially a diatribe on the difficulty of reading company reports. Investors want to see a smooth earnings curve, so management spends most of its time trying to fit its real revenue into that form.  Inevitably there is a disaster, the company takes a bath, reveals all its bad news and then goes back to building its earnings curve.  Knowing this, are you more likely to trust a company reporting gyrating earnings-or would you regard it as management not being smart enough to play the game?

Inflation is also difficult. Adam Smith proposed animal feed as the benchmark for determining the value of your paycheck. Nowadays this would correspond to gasoline. Recently, the price of gas dropped but the value of the dollar as measured against gold has not yet responded.  This is probably because we have hollowed out so much of our industry. Galbraith argued that inflation was the consequence of business requiring a rate of return for investment.  I think we all intuitively recognize that there is always a real, constant and underlying rate of inflation despite particular market events. Underneath all the various currency gyrations and trade imbalances currency value has an intrinsic depreciation.

What got me started on this article were college acceptance rates.  I was startled at how selective colleges had become. Then it was explained that students are sending out far more applications than they had in the past.  What the schools are not reporting is student acceptance rates, how many students turn down the school after they have been accepted.

Everyone recognizes a drop in crime statistics. Credit has been taken by the police. Contraception and abortion have been recognized.  Cell phones help with reporting and solving crimes. The prevalence of video cameras is significant. 1984 is real. Videophilia, the prevalence of video games, is linked with drops in pregnancy, recreational activity and crime. Improvements in medical care reduce the number of successful homicides. Some of the decrease is municipalities’ jiggering the reporting. These causes explain the drop in reported crime. But the nature of criminal activity has changed. Banks and businesses have supplanted organized crime.

In the past murder rates were in inverse ratio to construction. As Sam Destafano said:

-You will never catch me; you’ll never dig up the Dan Ryan.

I have noticed a number of articles mentioning bodies found in dumpsters.  At first this method of disposal seemed foolish to me. The bodies were being discovered.  Then it occurred to me that maybe a lot of other bodies were not being discovered.  The garbage disposal process is so automated. Now that it is easy to dispose of bodies, the true murder rate is hiding in missing persons.  How can anyone stay missing nowadays? It is more difficult to hide your identity than it is to dispose of a body.

Countable

In second grade our teacher Ms. Bowers introduced us to Cantor’s diagonal proofs.  You are already familiar with this, of course.  The rational numbers, the fractions, are listed with 1/1, ½, 1/3… on the top row, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1… in the first column and the diagonals always equal to 1: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3… and all the fractions in between. Then Cantor counts them by going up and down diagonally, zig-zagging between them.  All the second graders accepted that.  Then she showed us that the real numbers, say all the real numbers between .0000… and .9999…., were uncountable because no matter which way we listed them, she could generate a new one by going down the diagonal going on to infinity and generating a new one.  Cantor liked diagonals.

I may have lost some of you.  I think the reason we got this as second graders is because we knew that if Ms. Bowers was explaining this to us, it couldn’t be that complicated.  But adults believe that this stuff should be difficult.  So if you don’t get this, don’t feel bad, it just means you are old.

She then told us that it is impossible to prove that there is not an order of infinity between the countable and uncountable.  It turns out that almost anytime you can’t prove anything in mathematics it is equivalent to this continuum hypothesis.  So after all this work, we are left with yet another metaphor for life.  Which seems like a lot of work to get there and it isn’t like there is a shortage of metaphors for life.

Back in second grade a kid came up to me and said:

-If you take all the real numbers of one decimal place, .0 through .9, there aren’t any others. You can’t insert any.  Then if you go up by number of decimal places, .00 through .99 and so on, you will get to infinity which makes the real numbers countable.

-Those aren’t numbers, they are parts of numbers.

I told him.

-Then I will pad them with zeroes.

-Then I will insert a new one.

-Not if you follow my rules.  It is just a matter of definition.

-Is not.

-Is so.

If you want to make a mathematician uncomfortable, tell them about this assertion made back in second grade. Part of the reason that they will be uncomfortable is that the foundations are shaky. I believe that this assertion is not equivalent to the continuum hypothesis, because it obviates the hypothesis. I suppose it would be boring if the real numbers were countable.

If one day this assertion is proven, proven would mean that most mathematicians agreed with it, which might happen if countable real numbers solved some other problem. If that happened it doesn’t mean that something else isn’t uncountable. But another reason that they would be uncomfortable is that it suggests that most of the high level mathematics done in the last century was a huge waste of time.  My girlfriend Christine could have told you that in the first place.

The Difference between an Academic and a Scholar

Some years ago, after many academic adventures I found myself taking an introductory programming course as a general requirement for graduation. The best part of the course was the computer problems book.  It encapsulated all the uses for a computer up to the undergraduate senior level.  I wanted to get my computer programs out of the way at the beginning of the semester so I could clear the decks for the important courses I was taking in mathematics. Several computer program problems were required, but some were electives; they were ranked in order of difficulty.  In the back of the book, there was a list of how many lines of code each problem took.  Cross referencing each list to get the most credit for the least lines of code lead to the problem called partitions.  Partitions was defined as the number of different ways to sum integers to reach another integer.  For instance 2 is 1 + 1, 3 is 1 +  1 + 1, 2 +  1, 1 + 2 and so on.  The problem was to list the number of partitions for each integer up to twelve.

 After a few minutes struggling with pencil and paper, I was back cross referencing the two lists to find a different problem that would maximize my grade with minimal effort.  Then I remembered. For I had attended Kenwood High School, Shimer College, Oxford University, University of Chicago, and now I was at Illinois Institute of Technology. So I knew that often books had an index.  Looking up partitions in the index, I found a further discussion that gave me the algorithm I needed.  I finished my problems, turned them in before the teaching assistants had been coached to be fussy about comments and style, and went on to the rest of my classes. I remember thinking,

-Glad I’ll never have to do that again.

Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that I was missing my good friend Jeremy. We usually met in the cafeteria. He was majoring in biochemistry.  I was concerned enough to go to his room and there I found him surrounded by pencils and scraps of paper looking more like a biochemistry major than I had ever seen him before.

-Jeremy, I asked, what are you doing?

At IIT, the most common discussion was “how do you do this problem” so I was not surprised when he held up a book.  I was surprised that it was the computer problem book.

-Have you seen this one?

It was partitions.

-Oh Jeremy, the algorithm is further on in the book.

Jeremy’s reaction was inappropriate.  He was not filled with joy that he could finish his requirements and go on to make his fortune in bioengineering. Instead, he was angry.

-No, it’s not.

Jeremy was being a scholar.  I was being an academic.

Many years later I was the lead computer programmer on a report generation system written by the ancient ones with hairy knuckles.  It was in Assembler and used macros to create a user language that generated marketing reports. Some of the reports had gotten so big that they broke the assembler. It used execute channel program (EXCP) processing which was unusual for an application system.  The major hog in the system was the newly developed library maintenance system so I used a minor requirement as a justification for cleaning that out.  Then I kicked, screamed and pleaded until I received enough resource to foreground test the report system, stepping through it as it ran, rather than trying to puzzle out what it was doing.  This allowed us to tackle several issues, opening the door to a rewrite.

We had yet another management change and the new manager who had once worked in our group came to me with an idea of consolidating some of the report functions.  I said:

-What’s the cost benefit?

So, one of my junior people became the new project leader. I was being the scholar rather than the academic.

I first noticed this distinction at Shimer in the course Natural Sciences II.  We read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Evolution is not a straight forward subject.  For instance here I am the product of thousands of years of sexual selection. Obviously something isn't quite working.  Or take the fact that I require glasses.  You would think that poor vision would select out very quickly.  Toward the end of the semester my roommate Carl gave me a quick lesson in how not to read a book.  He flipped through the syllabus and said:

-The only thing they can test us on is the Scientific American reprints. 

He spent a little under an hour reviewing those and aced the class.

The life of the mind is a dangerous place; it is easy to lose your way, difficult to know where to focus.  The academic survives in that world and recognizes the pitfalls and snares. Survival forces him to narrow his focus and search for the payoff.  In that sense, trying to learn scholarship from an academic is like trying to learn love from a prostitute.

Real Estate Tax Deduction

The greatest and most difficult issue facing humanity is social segregation. This issue allows all other issues to fester unaddressed. The fictional town of Pottersville has one significant advantage over our real civic arrangements: Potter lives in Pottersville. The cost per student at The Cairo IL high school is $8,817. In Highland Park IL it is $17,636.  That is because education, security, maintenance and recreation are funded by real estate taxes.  The corporate ghetto, Oak Brook IL, is organized to minimize services in order to benefit the companies that reside there.  Other suburbs minimize their education expenses because only the servants use those schools or the residents are old.

The real estate tax itself could be very progressive. But using it to locally fund our services maximizes the benefits of social segregation.

The cherry on top, isn’t it great to live in America, is that social segregation is then subsidized by our income tax code.  Because the real estate tax is deductible I get to pay more in taxes, or we borrow the difference, to encourage the stratification of our society. 

The real estate tax deduction is the most vicious and depraved regulation of our entire tax code.

Ms. Bowers

I was tormenting Tiquan.  This was right and proper, as he was smaller than I was.  We were in second grade at Ray School.  Suddenly Tiquan turned around in his seat and screamed at me.

-Oh Tiquan, that’s wonderful, you yelled, Ms. Bowers said.

Ms. Bowers seized every opportunity to pass on a life’s lesson.  Embarrassed, we both shrank in our seats. If someone is picking on you, you should stand up to them.  Once when someone did something she said:

-Who did that? Look at you, you all turned to look, you dummies; you gave him away.  Raymond, are you proud of yourself?  All these friends of yours that you are showing off for gave you away.

Thereby she imparted the important lessons of group cohesion and honor. 

-I can see your lips moving, I know you’re talking.

Don’t be caught was the number one lesson.Each day was a new challenge. One morning the principal, Ms. Kenause, lay in wait for us and rounded us up as we came in late.  Then she marched us all into class and told Ms. Bowers to mark us down late.

-You let that old lady catch you, how pathetic.

-What could we have done?

-Wait for her to leave.

On Fridays, she would give us a word problem that was too hard for us; we would get frustrated and wander around the class looking for someone who had made some progress.

One day she got really mad and slammed the pointer on the desk and yelled.  A circle of plaster, about three feet in diameter, dropped from the ceiling on her head.  We had classes in the auditorium while they fixed the ceiling.

Sometimes you hear a teacher say they are on the kids’ side.   Ms. Bowers was the real deal.  She had come over to the dark side. Every other teacher and the principal hated her.  I was in love, I asked my mom:

-Why isn’t Ms. Bowers married?

-Remember that question when you are older, mom answered.

At the end of the school year, they took us to our third grade classroom to meet the teacher for next year, Ms. Reid.  She spent the next hour yelling at us. I was scared, but I guess we should have been proud.

In Defense of Privilege

The Supreme Court decision striking down quotas, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, is such woeful denial of their entire history of honoring precedent that the decision itself becomes an agonized ironic scream.

Back in the sixties, it had finally come down to the question of merit. This is what everyone had been fighting for and the civil rights movement finally came to its senses.  There was no way we could have merit, so we got quotas.  The actual law said, in admittedly protracted convoluted language, that if you could demonstrate merit, and not very strictly, I might add, you didn't have to have quotas. The fact that we have quotas means very few were able to even give a pretense of merit selection.

To understand the deep bitterness aroused by affirmative action in the 70’s you have to recognize that the essential function of middle management is to avoid responsibility.  What this meant is that every difficult personnel decision could then be explained as a consequence of affirmative action.

 

Now that we have done away with quotas, if we do not enforce merit, all that remains is privilege. Is this a bad thing?  In England, for instance, they use tests to determine who is admitted to government paid Universities.  This requires them to carefully construct the tests so that only privileged students who have been properly instructed can pass them.  It also requires them to destructively instruct the unprivileged students so they do not pass the tests.  I wonder if our privileged classes would be able to remember their instruction well enough to get through their tests.

In America such merit requirements as we have had, particularly for entry-level positions has forced our privileged into MBA programs. This means they have skipped the entry-level jobs for middle management positions, a disastrous consequence. 

Does it make sense to fight privilege?  Do we want merit?  I argue that we don’t want to see ourselves as balls in a chute, dropping into our natural place in the bell curve.  What we desperately want is to belong, to be part of something.  We want to be special and we want to think we got a break.  We certainly don’t want what’s coming to us; we want to be in.  To fight privilege is to fight human nature. 

Take the bum in an alley, he may seem hopeless to you, but that’s his alley, he knows that alley, that’s how he survives and how he belongs.  

In your minds eye visualize your favorite educational institution. Walk through the quadrangle, the courtyard, whatever, to the admissions office.  How big is it?  How many people does it employ? Why is that?  Is your institution the kind that recklessly spends money?  Does it have gold-plated manholes, outrageous landscaping? Allow me a suggestion. Have an administrative assistant build a word merge application to take the Princeton testing service scores with their addresses, majors and self-reported GPA, sort them up in score, major sequence and send out the acceptance letters and financial packets.  The reported SAT scores would stand in lieu of an application.  I believe that applications would increase dramatically. Everyone admitted would know they deserve to be there.  The classes may be less diverse within a particular year, but I believe that over time the school would have far greater diversity than it has today.  The school would save hundreds of thousands in salary.

I don’t know how rich your school’s endowment is, but my guess is that it would go out of business within a decade if not sooner. Imagine Biddle-Barrows, or Johnson, or Goldblatt staring across the frozen lake.  Chutney Tech did not admit young Lemuel.  Does Sally-Ann need a donation?  That’s why those people are working in that office, so young Lemuel, and his friends, get in.

When we legislate against drugs, campaign donations, or privilege we stand against the overwhelming hydraulic force of human need and desire; we force it to find other channels. 

More importantly, we have expectations for the privileged.  It may sound trivial but a president of the United States isn’t going to take it into his head to resign in order to study under the Maharishi. (Although that can’t be said for the governor of Alaska and a television contract.) At each level, there is an accumulated wisdom, an accretion of manner and behavior.  Despite their pretensions, this knowledge doesn’t arrive from a preparatory school, college, or graduate program, although such things can provide validation.  It takes generations.  One hard earned lesson after another passed on and impressed into their very marrow.  

The essential issue is that it is so difficult to distinguish between authentic privilege and mere pretension. The difference between the heroic privilege of George Herbert Walker Bush and the pretension of George Walker Bush seems obvious to me but apparently not to enough.  When the common man recognized W as one of us, they failed to recognize the implications; you don’t want one of us running things. 

What we disdain is the git, over reaching their station.  When politicians expect the privilege of donors, as at the University of Illinois, it arouses our ire. 

There are some wonderful counter examples: the Lodge’s, the Cabot’s, Wittgenstein, but even they announce themselves.  Always on the wrong side, never right about anything, at least they are predictable.  

Defending privilege is unnecessary.  It is its own defense.  The Human primate’s drive for hierarchy requires it.  Who stands for merit?  Who claims that arbitrary criteria lead to superior selection? Even communists don’t believe in merit.

Bowdlerized Melville

Just recently, there was a school shooting and all the children interviewed used the word surreal.   I actually did have a surreal experience in college.  It was a liberal arts college called Shimer, based on the great books where we used original sources except for a few textbooks and this one instance: Moby Dick.  Moby Dick is a young people’s adventure story.  Why out of all the books assigned, including Ulysses, was this the only abridged version?  I had read Moby Dick before and something was nagging at me throughout the class.  It wasn't until later when I happened across a cheap version of the book that I realized that not only was our version abridged, it was bowdlerized.

They had replaced all the Voudun imagery with Christian themes.  For instance, the ending where a bird is smashed against the mast with a hammer instead had three masts sinking into the ocean.   I still remember Professor Andy Armstrong, the Marlboro man who allowed us to smoke in class as long as they were Marlboros; he had been in advertising and had been used in the first mock up of the ad, pontificating over the three masts descending into the ocean, with feeling.

Melville had never written that.  We were required to write long essays on the religious themes of Moby Dick. I wish I could tell you that we took poor old Andy to task.  I wish I could tell you that any of us remembered our child hood reading and were horrified.  I wish I could tell you that Andy himself was in on the joke.  I don’t think so.

I had met C. L. R. James a few years before; he had written a book of criticism on Moby Dick when he was interred by immigration called Mariners Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World He Lived In. I even bought a copy.  He pointed out that  the Pequod represented the ship of state.  I’m sure he recognized the Voudun imagery but was disinterested. 

Years later I began to realize just how wondrously subversive Melville is. He holds every tenet of accepted teenage belief up to ridicule; what better use of an adventure story?  People talk about the relationship between Jim and Huck Finn, in the start of the book, Melville has Ishmael and Queeqeq sharing a bed, hey no big deal.  There are three great American novels: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Natural.  In all three, our great sin is naivete and we are duly punished for it.  In order for a book to be popular, it must have a happy ending.  In Moby Dick the whale wins, he was minding his own business; they were looking for him. 

If Shimer didn’t like the book why include it?  If they did, why gut it?  I have this vision of some secret stipend dictating the syllabus, ala Pynchon.  More realistically, I have to believe that even as they love the story, the great mediocrity recognize a threat, and in this peculiar way validate Melville’s vision.

 I did try to bring up the idea of the degeneration of the ship into fascism.  Andy said

 -You’re putting me on. 

Which even then I thought, was grossly unfair.