Students have been arriving on campus these last couple of days. Some from faraway places across the globe, a few from right down the road in Connecticut. Today is Arrival Day, when the great bulk of first-year students start moving in at Wesleyan. It will be a hot one, but we’ll stay hydrated and welcome all those who’ve come to participate in this great university.
I’ll be out and about greeting students and their families and will post pics throughout the day.
This week the Wall Street Journal published my review of Vanessa Siddle Walker’s The Lost Education of Horace Tate, published by the New Press. As we prepare to start the new school year, it’s good to be reminded of the heroic efforts of black educators fighting for civil rights in the twentieth century.
It’s a historian’s dream, really: meet someone who played a crucial but mostly unsung role in a major historical development; become that person’s confidant; hear firsthand the stories of triumph, frustration and struggle; and then receive a death-bed request to rescue a trove of documents that substantiate those stories, so that future generations can better understand the historical development.
This dream became real for Emory professor Vanessa Siddle Walker, who met Horace Tate (1922-2002) at the end of his long and eventful life and then discovered the archives of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association—the vital organization of black educators that he led for more than a decade. Ms. Walker’s “The Lost Education of Horace Tate” tells the story of generations of black teachers and administrators who fought heroically over many decades for equality and justice.
For many, the struggle for civil rights in education centers on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Ms. Walker’s account makes visible a previously “unseen network of black educators” in Georgia and across the South who had been pushing for change ever since Reconstruction. They had to be persistent because the forces defending white supremacy were intransigent and often dangerous. In 1878 black educators asked for equal funding for black children; in 1920 they requested equal salaries for black teachers. By the 1960s those requests had turned into demands, and still they went unmet.
Ms. Walker’s book, which draws on the archives of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, is an important contribution to our understanding of how ordinary people found the strength to fight for equality for schoolchildren and their teachers. Asking for a bus so your kids could get from your farm to the school? For a gymnasium in which your basketball team could practice? For basic textbooks so your children could learn? Such requests to school-district authorities were generally met with disdain or worse. At times educators faced intimidation, arson, even murder. Tate received death threats and returned home one summer to find the house he rented burned to the ground.
“The Lost Education of Horace Tate” provides a granular feel for the hopes, fears and frustrations of teachers and school administrators who struggled for basic justice. Unfortunately, sometimes the detail is excessive; too much time is spent on the routine speeches and logistics of professional meetings. We learn more than enough about various officials in different teaching organizations and their subtle disagreements, but very little indeed about Horace Tate’s personal life. His first marriage deserves more than a sentence, and his family is much too far in the background for the reader to understand how his life and work were intertwined.
Later, as larger groups of educators took up the mantle of integration, black education networks sometimes had to fight to maintain influence within the movement. “Second-class integration,” Tate feared, would marginalize black professionals by making them powerless minorities within larger, mostly white, organizations.
Horace Tate was very good at his job, but this didn’t keep him from being forced out of his position as a principal when local officials suspected (rightly) that he was aligning himself with community forces aiming at equality—and, especially, with regional and national groups aiming to ensure African-American citizens could exercise their right to vote. By turning out and being counted at the polls, blacks in the South could gain at least some leverage over politicians, and so there was a concerted effort to deprive them of the franchise. As former Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge put it in 1946: “If you white people love your country, you will challenge” the black people who registered. The sentiment behind these words finds echoes wherever politicians create obstacles to voting.
Reading her book is a powerful reminder of the link between educators and the struggle for equality and justice in American history. For Horace Tate and his colleagues, teaching the lessons of democracy was never about indoctrination. It was—as it remains today—about deepening students’ awareness of the promise of American ideals and how much work is necessary to make them more than a dream.
Today the Hilton Foundation announced that an organization with deep roots at Wesleyan received the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize for 2018. Shining Hope for Communities won the $2 million prize, “the world’s largest annual humanitarian award presented to nonprofit organizations judged to have made extraordinary contributions toward alleviating human suffering.” The foundation website puts it this way: “A distinguished panel of independent international jurors selected SHOFCO, which catalyzes large-scale transformation in urban slums by providing critical services for all, community advocacy platforms, and education and leadership development for women and girls.” SHOFCO was started by two recent Wes alumni, Kennedy Odede ’12 and Jessica Posner ’09—the two were married a couple of years ago and recently added baby Oscar to the family.
I remember vividly when Kennedy, Jessica and a group of their Wesleyan friends came to my office to describe the women’s health clinic they were opening to complement the school for girls they had started in Kibera, Kenya. The clinic is named for Johanna Justin-Jinich, their fellow Wes student who had been murdered not long before. Kibera is Kennedy’s home, and it was there that he and Jessica met when she was studying abroad. Kennedy enrolled at Wesleyan and the two had long had the intention of returning to Kibera to help future generations of Kenyans receive a quality education and have access to health care.
Many of us at Wesleyan have been involved with SHOFCO and are deeply moved by this recognition from the Hilton Foundation, which will further strengthen this great organization. Congratulations!!
On Friday the New York Times Book Review published my appraisal of a new book by Roger Scruton. I was pleased to read his “invitation to the tradition” of conservatism because I think that American colleges and universities in general, and Wesleyan in particular, can do a better job of studying conservative ways of thinking — from libertarianism to religious traditions. These disparate modes of thinking are not easily held together, and I argue that Professor Scruton only manages to do so by creating a common enemy, a scapegoat. This is not an unfamiliar move, but it is not a necessary one. Studying Smith, Burke, Hegel and the other key figures he discusses, can lead in more productive directions.
CONSERVATISM
An Invitation to the Great Tradition
By Roger Scruton
164 pp. All Points Books. $24.99.
Roger Scruton has written dozens of books on subjects ranging from the philosophy of music to the perils of postmodernism, but he returns often to his core political passions. “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition” is a concise guide to European and American thinkers skeptical about the ideology of historical progress and about arguments for engineering a good society by making people conform to a rational standard. “I have written this book,” he notes, “in the hope of encouraging well-meaning liberals to take a look at what those arguments really are.” In these polarized times, his call for discussion of conservative intellectual traditions is welcome.
At the core of “Conservatism” is the idea that human beings live naturally together in communities and that we “desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity.” We may be rational beings capable of planning our future, but we also need customs and institutions to ground and sustain us over time. Good things, Scruton wisely notes, “are more easily destroyed than created.”
The philosophical wellsprings of conservatism are the defense of community associated with Edmund Burke and the defense of free markets and individual choice associated with Adam Smith. The first evolved into ways of thinking that are critical of the enormous societal changes associated with industrialization, like the destruction of the family and the village that comes along with the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of people with no social responsibility. The second evolved into ways of thinking that celebrate the benefits of industrialization and turn into heroes those who profit most from the creative destruction that comes with capitalism. The strongest thinkers for Scruton are those who strike a balance between these adverse ways of thinking. He sees the German philosopher Hegel as offering “the most systematic presentation that we have of the conservative vision of political order” because Hegel understood that political freedom evolved in relation to ongoing communities and because his theory of the state preserved a space for private property and exchange.
Scruton knows that conservatism is a reaction against the Enlightenment confidence in improving the world through the use of reason, but he is at pains to distinguish the thinkers he admires from mere reactionaries. His philosophers don’t want to return to the past, he insists. Yet he provides no clue as to how they decide which traditions are worth preserving. Burke may have protested against the cruelties of slavery and imperial domination, but there have been plenty of conservatives who defended these practices. Scruton’s account of the conservative defense of freedom includes not a word about colonialism or racism. To paraphrase what he says of the American conservative Russell Kirk, Scruton just picks the conservative flowers that appeal to him.
But how to hold together an intellectual bouquet that combines the simple blooms of village life and the hothouse hybrids of unfettered economic development? Often a common enemy provides unity, and antagonism toward the modern bureaucratic state has worked well for conservatives. Government officials have long been seen as riding roughshod over local custom as well as getting in the way of industrious entrepreneurs. Throughout the 20th century, moreover, anti-Communism unified conservatives, and they often labeled as Communist anyone who disagreed with their selective defense of freedom.
Scruton can no longer find worthy Communist adversaries, so at the end of the book he turns against Muslims, hoping for a “rediscovery of ourselves” by stoking fear and loathing against those who he says do not share “our” religious or political inheritance. He knows how this will sound to many of his readers, so he warns them against thinking he’s just being racist. But one doesn’t have to be politically correct or to participate in what Scruton calls the “culture of repudiation” to find it unfortunate that a philosopher should stoop so low. The “great tradition” Scruton describes can attract study and respect without stimulating nasty chauvinism. His “well-meaning liberal” readers will find Scruton’s deft handling of a variety of conservative thinkers enlightening (if I may use that word), but they will be appalled at the grand old tradition of scapegoating he employs to rally the troops.
