Our friend Dale Nelson sent me this nearly a year-old link to the Times (UK) obituary for his friend Benedikt Benedikz, an Icelandic-born English librarian and scholar who sounds like the kind of intellectual character they just don’t manufacture anymore. Singer, linguist, Viking scholar, and other valuable things too numerous to mention.
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I’m afraid you’re right, Lars, about no more such men.
Go to your library and pick up the April 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, and read the one-page article by Anthony Grafton about British universities (much applies to US ones, too). And think of what these changes would mean for a young Tolkien or Lewis if he was starting his university career now. Please do read this.
Dale
April 8 this year?
Yes, the April 8, 2010, issue of the New York Review of Books. Read that article and sit back and think what Jack Lewis and Ronald Tolkien would’ve felt. I think they’d have been angry, frightened, and depressed.
Read that one-page article by Grafton, and then read a couple of pieces about Lewis as a teacher. I wish everyone reading this blog item would make the effort to do that, to gain a sense of what is lost and is being lost. The pieces are:
“Lewis Lecturing” by Roger Poole, in We Remember C. S. Lewis, ed. David Graham
and
“Encounters with Lewis: An Interim Report” by Paul Piehler, in C. S. Lewis Remembered, ed. Harry Lee Poe and Rebecca Poe
Read these things. I don’t think, humanly speaking, that there is much we can do, but let’s at least be wounded afresh from time to time.
As I type this, I am sitting with photocopied pages of a 2002 report that was submitted to the then-president of my university by the Vice President for Academic Affairs. This VPAA is now the university president. The document discusses the dropping of the English major from this four-year state university. Obviously my little university is no flagship British university. But it is of a piece with what Grafton relates when the elimination of English is proposed as part of a “strategic plan.” The document I mentioned just now is dated 2002. But my former division chair gave me a copy because she believes our division meeting next week may revive its ideas.
That’ll be quite a legacy for a university teacher, won’t it? that under his tenure, English was eliminated.
But the Grafton article mentions Stateside discussion of such things.
I will say that I think the universities are partly to blame for this in that they have taught so much rubbish for a generation. Still, it’s one thing to have failed in one’s mission often, and another for that mission simply to be excised.
Sorry, I meant “university president.” Quite a legacy. But in fact he may be praised by many for his boldness, etc.
Heartbreaking, Dale.
If you were to write a revised and “updated” version of WOLF TIME, Lars, with its university locale…!
But read the three articles, everybody! — as well as WOLF TIME by Lars, if you haven’t already…