Do We Still Need the Liberal Arts? Hell, Yes.

(Please note: It has been brought to my attention that, though this medium is supposed to allow people to reply in writing to what's posted here, at least one person has been unable to do so. That stinks and I have no idea how to fix that. But if you want, you can write to me at dadofprince@gmail.com instead. You'll get a response, for sure. Thanks.)

After what is now 50 years of post-graduation experience--my class reunion took place last weekend--I think I qualify as something of an authority on the question: Do we need the liberal arts? What good are they, anyhow?

That's because I attended a small, idyllic, classic liberal arts college along the Fox River in Wisconsin, Lawrence University. The scene was, and continues to be, bucolic, engendering discussions on the meaning of life, love, and education and its meaning in the bigger picture of things (while also providing plenty of opportunity to escape from any responsibilities to develop them), holding back the hustle and bustle of daily life to engage in reflection.

It's that last concept that brings some people up short. Philosophy, or what passes for it, isn't the watchword for all those who value higher education. Deep musings about authors, scientific research, forecasting economic development here and elsewhere, how people made their food during BCE, aren't for everyone who look at education as a way to punch one's ticket into the professional world. You take the courses, you get your grades, and you might even remember some of the course work on your way to being given that piece of paper, the diploma, which gets you legitimacy on resumes and into someone's interview room, along with heaven knows how many other folks straining to do the same thing. There are plenty of universities, mainly the larger ones, that operate in such fashion because of the specificity of some of the majors.

It all has the echo of an assembly line, a formless stepping stone, which has always diminished its meaning. If you just have to endure coursework, tests, and term papers, and not have to draw from any of those experiences, aren't we all just fooling ourselves? How much and what kind of education do we need, anyway? Should college be just advanced apprenticeship?

The fall after I graduated, in 1973, I remember reading something called "My Turn," which ran on the back page of the then weekly periodical, Newsweek (To which I subscribed. I preferred it to the then more conservative, stodgy Time), written by a graduate student in engineering from the college that most people think of when considering that profession, Purdue. But having driven himself through that silo of learning, he became afflicted, apparently, with reflection about it. He asked--and I'm not quoting directly, but I have the gist of it--what good is it if we build bridges without knowing why?

That has stayed with me through half a century. I wasn't at all sold on the idea of big-picture education, designed to make one think outside their silos and boxes, at the start. Having done well in high school, I was originally intent on a career in journalism--but couldn't go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my original bellweather choice, because my Dad (who of course had the money bags) concluded that, because of the ferocious student protests of the late '60s, my education would suffer (I still believe that that was because he had never been close to college himself and in fact he couldn't have been more wrong if he tried.). Neither did I want to go somewhere within the UW system, to a "state" school. So, resentful, I applied myself to playing sports and substituting (at first) being an English major and getting into journalism that way.

As I learned quickly through doing no more than glancing at the course offerings, majoring in English had as much to do with what I originally wanted out of a college education than transplanting a calf's liver for the one that I had. But the intellectual atmosphere was, at first, overwhelming for someone who wasn't at all sure, now, where he was going and why. Lawrence isn't a good place to be if you don't know what you want from it. I floundered for much of my first two years, even going on probation for one semester. I cursed my decision to go to what seemed like a flighty, unconnected, irrelevant place. I felt trapped. With other factors combining, I thought about leaving.

There was something about the place that continued to attract me, though. It did not, for instance, require a "minor," as it's called, at least at that time. That allowed me to experiment, as it were, taking things I wouldn't otherwise have considered--like The History of Modern Painting, which I took senior year, which opened myself to the significance of artistic work. Had I been at a larger university and found it possible to narrow my studies, I would have been good at one thing but uninformed and unenlightened at several others, such as that one. I would have jettisoned an excellent opportunity at enrichment.

And, as I've told more than one fellow graduate, I would on some days enter the university's library and, in rebellion against required reading, spend an afternoon exploring books I wouldn't have ever thought were there. One of them, by a political scientist named David Easton, helped me with a course on research design that the Political Science (my chosen major) department was just getting into. It had a survey of elementary kids on how they regarded the president as compared to other authority figures. I managed to get myself into a Catholic school down the street (Appleton not being very large) and the teachers were great in allowing me to indulge. It did wonders for my confidence and sense of relevance.

At the end, I "got" it. I liked what was happening. My grades got better--not great, but better--and I knew I would miss that place when I was done. But, first--comprehensive exams, known as "comps," the ultimate showdown with what one might bring away from them and claim that they've been "educated." Diplomas would not be rewarded unless seniors managed to pass them.

One part of my college experience I was never really able to overcome was text anxiety. My initial foot-dragging, too, came back to haunt. Comps doubled down on that, and I failed my first try miserably. But the university also allowed a second taking, and there I succeeded. 

Do colleges need comps? I don't know. The concept is, literally, old school. You can make good arguments both ways. But I do know this: Part of what I dived back into to bone up on what I should far more easily have remembered the first time around was contained in a book called Power and Poverty, by Bachrach and Baratz. They broke down political relationships into, mostly, two parts: One framed by power and the other framed by influence. It re-charged my thinking and made a new kind of decent sense. I never forgot it, used it very often in my teaching, and even brought it to the table of the National Education Association Executive Committee one day. I think I stunned the rest of the group by stating that our members don't like power even though they could enhance their careers and image if they understood it; would rather that someone else in the realm (like us at that table) wield it; and would rather, because of their chosen profession, be the kind of people who displayed and extended influence (often mistakenly made into a synonym, but it's not nearly the same) instead of power. My hated comps, my feared comps, then, paid off just when they needed to, to show why the NEA always will have trouble recruiting members and why the ones we do recruit are reluctant to be strident in advocating for what they (we) have always deserved ("We have met the enemy and he is us," said Pogo).

Had I graduated without comps, I might have learned about power vs. influence by-the-by, but those would have been long odds. Ironically, I found out last weekend that we, Class of 1973, were the last ones to take comps at Lawrence. After all the angst I went through and genuine depression after failure, I'm not sure all that was worth it. On the other hand, having spent the vast majority of my career in education, I managed to pivot and make the most of what I genuinely valued. Almost in spite of myself, I had turned into a product of the liberal arts, one who reflects upon processes instead of burying oneself into them so far I couldn't have seen out. And was glad for it.

Do we need the liberal arts? Hell, yes. We need their challenge. We need their endless relevance. We need the enlightenment they bring. Enrollment in liberal arts majors--and the humanities, an important offshoot of them--are presently dropping, says The New Yorker. Not disappearing, though. We still have students who focus equally on the Why? instead of just the What? They keep asking. They keep interpreting. They believe that learning is life-long. If we are to escape from the various maladies that seem to keep us spinning our tires in the mud, the way out will be led by those who not only keep trying, but keep thinking and asking as they try.

Let us hope so.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Louis Butler's Legacy: What It Shows about Groundbreaking in Wisconsin

Lawrence University honored Louis Butler at its alumni convocation last Friday with the Lucia Russell Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award. Well it should have, on the same extended weekend as Juneteenth Day besides. He remains a groundbreaking jurist of the highest order.

He was the first Black judge to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, appointed by then-Governor Jim Doyle in 2004. In 2009, he was appointed by President Barack Obama to be a U.S. Court judge for the Western District, likewise the first Black judge to be accorded that honor.

What happened in-between, though, should bring people up short if they think that this state has taken strides great enough to overcome racial discord. Because, though what he's accomplished is simply awesome, Louis Butler should have become even more than what he was. It's what the convocation program didn't mention that should also be remembered.

Butler filled a position once occupied by a retiring justice, so in 2008 he tried to be elected to a full ten-year term. He lost, but it's the way he lost that was groundbreaking, too, in its own way. It foreshadowed the emergence, or perhaps the re-emergence, of race-baiting politics that we now see coming--but then didn't.

His opponent was none other than Michael Gableman, the fairly recent grifter carrying out implicit (who knows, even explicit) orders from ex- to gum up the works surrounding the 2020 presidential election as much as he could. He cajoled--threatened by obvious implication--the gerrymandered Republican-dominated state legislature to fund his "investigation" behind "irregularities" in vote-counting for president in Wisconsin, hope to create momentum and declare the election, somehow, invalid. He failed, but not before his empty bluster frustrated and embarrassed the whole state. His "report" which led to nothing substantive had nothing substantive in it, a major waste of taxpayer funding.

In that supreme court election campaign, Gableman smeared Butler with disingenuous accusations of being soft on crime, one of which implied that he had freed a child molester who quickly struck again (demonstrably false; the man was put back in jail and did not commit any such acts until he had served his term. Gableman's campaign knew this.). It would be predictive, too, of the shock smearing to come in later elections. Butler struck back but never sank to Gableman's level of insults. Besides, this was a state supreme court election, one in which such political shenanigans were supposed to be deeply frowned upon and avoided--one of those guardrails which were shattered by Gableman's actions. Butler didn't "go there." He couldn't. That's not who he is.

This was a prelude, as it turned out, to the vapid attacks and scorched earth, absolutist tactics created by Republicans in the years to quickly come, such as the Tea Party's temper tantrum, Scott Walker's legislative muting of collecting bargaining in Act 10, and of course, ex-'s attacks on "political correctness," otherwise known as tact and civility, that appeared in 2016.

Gableman got there first. Once on the court, he also refused to recuse himself when confronted with obvious conflicts of interest, for which Clarence Thomas has also branded himself on the U.S. Supreme Court (though he isn't the first who's had this issue; the liberal William O. Douglas was also accused of it, and not without justification.).

Butler went back to his private practice. He became an adjunct law professor at UW-Madison. Then, with a new president, Obama, in 2009, he was nominated to a federal district court judgeship for the Western District of Wisconsin.

Political forces undermined him there, too. Corporate influences surged to object as his nomination was considered. While on the state Supreme Court, Butler had written two decisions which the business sector found unacceptable: holding manufacturers responsible for the making of lead paint; and lifting restrictions on compensation for litigation victims. For those two, he was considered "too far left" to be accepted onto the federal bench. (Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

But that's Louis in a nutshell. He hasn't, and will never, bend for personal expediency. Good is good and bad is bad, and he has always been there to underscore the difference. On the Lawrence campus, he was one of those who tied up the administration building in the spring of 1972, demanding more attention to the needs of Black students. Someone with a view toward a possible future might have played that a different way, maybe standing astride and cheering people on without getting on camera. Not Louis; he stood strong and would be happy to tell you why. The Black students won significant advancements. Maybe that's what prevented him, in the end, from accomplishing a more "official" set of titles for his career; he didn't compromise himself.

Practically from the start of his presidency, Obama had been plagued with backlogs of his nominations for a variety of federal positions. A deal needed to be cut to get most of them moving along the required path, and Butler's nomination fell victim to the kind of political compromise that a divided Congress sometimes needs to enact. After a second discussion, he was frozen, and that spelled doom.

Butler finished his career as a teacher who spread his influence among both younger legal candidates and those who had accomplished their goals, going to the National Judicial College in Reno, NV to instruct people who had already been practicing judgeships. Adding to that, he also:

• was the first public defender in state history to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court (1988);
• argued before the state Supreme Court more than 20 times;
• was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities from Lawrence in 2007.

Not a bad career, that. Yes, he came up short about two things he badly wanted, but both times, he has pivoted and made plenty of good with what was left. He has been an instructor in his craft, but his life has instructed others, too.

We were both Government majors at Lawrence, but really started to know each other in a hospital recovery room in late 1969, he for his knee and I for my big toe. We laugh about that whenever we see each other. As we turn the corner toward life's last horizon, I am glad and proud to call this groundbreaking jurist my friend. And, here, I congratulate him not only for what he's done, but for who he has always been.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

History Told Straight: Will It Find the Light of Day?

I had no idea. I bet you didn't, either.

I just read a book called The Mosquito Bowl, by Buzz Bissinger. He's also the author of Friday Night Lights, written as a warning to us about how high school football, such as in upstate Texas, can get out of control. More than 30 years later, he's been proven right.

In The Mosquito Bowl, he has unearthed research that shines devastating light upon one of the great battles of World War II, Okinawa--one that the U.S. had to win, but paid an incredible price to do so. It's history written the way it should be: Unsparing and thorough in its detail, unbiased about those who made it. Facts can be devastating written straightforwardly, especially if it shatters previously established myths that we've managed to gloss over in the name of heroism.

We associate Vietnam, for instance, with the use of napalm against enemies and civilians on the wrong side. But its first use was against Tokyo in the great firebombing of March, 1945. Nothing I've ever read, and I've read plenty on World War II, describes the horror of those upon whom napalm has been spread. That we even considered it against Vietnamese people, already knowing what it can do, says plenty about our inhumanity, about our coldness, about the sociopathic consideration of inflicting maximum pain upon others. Four years after we withdrew from Vietnam, someone finally grew a conscience and banned napalm.

In the meantime, though, we used it against Japanese soldiers dug into tunnels and concrete bunkers. There was no other way to get at them in their hidden enclaves, so maybe that justifies it. Those Americans who survived remembered their screams. You mean to tell me there was no PTSD in this war? Try sleeping with that. But it saved some American lives, since surrender was beyond consideration for an overwhelming majority all of Japan's defenders.

Those defenders fought hard and well. They knew their fate. They knew it would be the last place they would exist. Some ten thousand actually surrendered, though--far beyond the numbers of others on other Japanese-held islands that Americans had to root out, one at a time, like Saipan.

But denizens of Okinawa also suffered. They were propagandized that Americans would torture them, so many committed suicide, some after murdering their families. Thing is, some of the Marines on Okinawa were good to that promise.

Yup. Some of them raped women, writes Bizzinger. Some willfully shot children. You can put this in the slot that defines the inhumanity that war often foments, and you'd be right, of course. But you then also have to dismiss the myth of American exceptionalism--that we've always been, somehow, a touch above "normal" human beings.

"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," said General William Sherman, and he should know. On his army's "march through Georgia," he directed the utter destruction of the South's entire willingness to resist, destroying properties as well as troops to reduce the Confederacy's base of production. Fire enveloped acres of farmland. Livestock was devastated.

Somehow, this has been lost amidst the South's Lost Cause. The image of a gentile culture stubbornly survived. But that's not what happened. Slavery wasn't the only thing that was wrecked; an entire way of life got ruined by Sherman, Grant and others.

If you tell history straight, if you want people to understand, you have to deliver the bad news as well as the good. This is the danger of what Ron DeSantis. governor of one of those Confederate states, wants. He wants America to look pristine and well-preserved when in fact it is still constructing itself to overcome myths and nonsense.

He'd rather not face that and would rather our children not face it, either. If it's not broke, there's no need to fix it. If it can be made to look like it didn't happen or can be categorized as inconsequential, there's no need to spend time on it. He wants to enforce that kind of thinking in Florida and he thinks he can do it within the whole United States by banning books and guiding universities away from "woke" thinking as he defines it. Having infested Florida with that thinking, he now wants to try that on all of us as our president, as if we can gain something important from it.

He seems to think that democracy can continue with those bannings, to stop people he doesn't like from thinking in ways he'd rather not support. It can't. He can't maintain the roles of victim and perpetrator. He can't fake being tortured by publication of things he'd rather not concern himself with. He can condemn a society that features such things, but getting at them by ending free speech destroys speech he might be able to utilize. That he can't figure this out should be an enormous red flag for the rest of us, all of whom would rather live and let live, the real theme of the Bill of Rights of which the First Amendment is perhaps the most important part.

He's one of those who's afraid of the facts, afraid of more of them, afraid of the ones that make him uncomfortable. If that guarantee's so vital, if what he wants us to think is so superior, let me ask this: Is his state, Florida, free of poverty? Of underfunded, overcrowded schools? Of people who died from Covid? Of racism? Only someone in complete denial would answer yes to those questions or deny their significance.

Denial: It's the central theme of what we must strive against. It is the underlying backbone of those who ban books. Facing problems is the first hurdle toward fixing them, not walking past them. And that is defeated by knowing what our history offers, to encourage historians and other writers to continue to investigate them. Our history must be faced straight on. Fact-finding should be encouraged, not smoothed over. Its results must be delivered with creative honesty to make it attractive to be absorbed and acted upon.

Above all, it must overcome authoritarians like Ron DeSantis (and his major opponent for his party's nomination, our awful ex-president) who believe in their control above all others. Not everything that is in print should be, but the exceptions are far outweighed by the majority of those who write and draw and paint and sculpt and sing and make statements about humanity for the rest of us to consider and comment upon. Yes, kids should be protected against pornography and obscenity, but parents, not government, should do the overwhelming bulk of that protection.

If we allow too many to have guns to protect those who have a few (a supposition to which I object but I'll allow its discussion), so too we have to have things in print that some of us find objectionable to allow those who have something more constructive to say. It only makes sense. Buzz Bissinger gave us that reminder in his newly researched account of the horrors of Okinawa. Maybe, someday, we'll utilize that information to stop those battles altogether. Wouldn't that be constructive?

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark