* John Ciardi's Egalitarian Gift to Us at Ithaca, 1968 : An Intellectual is . . .

A classic Richardson piece of  19th century architecture, 2 Fountain Place is the President's Mansion at Ithaca College. In 1968 I lived in the servants' quarters, attached at back .

Mr. Ciardi's Gift to Us: Ithaca's Gift to Me

In 1968 I entertained John Ciardi in the president's mansion (2 Fountain Place) at Ithaca College. I lived there when I was a Senior and he was their guest for a day. I was also student head of the College's Speaker's Bureau, so I had to ferry the distinguished guests around and bring them back to Fountain Place for cocktails, etc.  http://oceansorange.blogspot.com/

Ciardi told me his definition of an intellectual in person in late night drinks in Fountain Place's library. 



I had been asked to entertain Mr. Ciardi until President  and Mrs. Dillingham arrived home from another engagement.

There were only five of us there, so I heard it quite clearly.(President and Mrs. Dillingham, Lee Spangler, Director of the Egbert Student Union, Mr. Ciardi, and myself.)  

I have never seen it published anywhere. 

But I have used it as a personal compass for the last 44-years as I traveled the dangerous waters of snobbery and elitism in our world.

"An intellectual is someone who is CAPABLE of being EXCITED by ideas."

He also made it clear that he translated the three works of The Divine Comedy  separately.

In fact, I studied them as separate paperback volumes in Ithaca College's exceptional Triplum curriculum, and they were called The Inferno, The Purgatoro, The Paradiso, etc. (I believe that to be the order in which he translated them.  The Paradiso took ten years !)

In honor of that occasion and my own  Triplum training I refer to them  each separately, not as The Divine Comedy.

Others I had occasion to host included  Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd). This was a heartbreaker because his son, a Cornell student, had recently been killed in a mountain climbing accident and the circumstances of their relationship, revealed in one of Mr. Goodman's own writings, approached scandal by contemporary mores.

I also chauffeured Sidney Hook and Irving Howe around. Howe is the one who told me, personally, not to go to Viet Nam. 

At 88, Leopold Stokowski  conducted the College's choir in a rehearsal open to the public, for an appearance at Carnegie Hall: 
  "You must learn to concentrate. It is the secret to everything," he said.

I just missed a personal encounter with Leopold Stokowski, who also stayed at Fountain Place, but watching him rehearse the College’s choir inspired me for the next four decades of my life. 

At one point the then 88 year old conductor clapped his faamous hands together and  called the choir to silence:

  "You must learn to concentrate. It is the secret to everything," he said.

He had to be chauffeured from Manhattan  to Ithaca and back because he refused to travel by air his entire 95 years, even when conducting in Europe.


I'm  not sure I was ready for the responsibility of five  hours of that bit of chauffeur work in 1968,  because ten years later I had to drive Henry Steele Commager from a Yale Political Union event to the Century Club in Manhattan, only a two hour drive from New Haven , but one that got me in a a bit of a puckersnatch when I dared to mention my objection to the Club's all-male membership policy.

The Anti-Yale was only a seminarian  and  the editor of Holy Smoke  at Yale Divinity School at that time, but he still couldn't keep his mouth shut-------even then.

Historian Henry Steele Commager

Paul. D. Keane,
B.A. '68 (magna cum laude)
M.A., M.Div., M.Ed

_____________________________________

LEVINE: A more intellectual Yale

BY GABRIEL LEVINE
The Yale Daily News

GUEST COLUMNIST

Friday, September 21, 2012

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We’ve been seduced: by a 6.8 percent acceptance rate, by the extracurricular bazaar and by the career fair. Most of all, we’ve been seduced by Tony Blair and Stanley McChrystal. We’ve been convinced, whether we ever think of ourselves in these terms or not, that we are, to use a phrase once employed to describe my high school, the “joyful elite;” that we are engaged, that we are passionate and that we are on our way to careers of real worth and standing.

We’ve been seduced — and we’ve been silenced.

Yesterday afternoon, Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in the Political Science Department, spoke to a seminar-sized group of students about what he terms “the corporatization of Yale.”

In Sleeper’s account, the University, in pursuing legitimate ends such as global engagement and fundraising, has been caught in a tide overwhelming all academia. Yale has been carried away from the values that undergird its educational mission, towards a model of opaque authority that treats students as customers.

While Sleeper’s critique focuses on the Yale administration, he contends that corporatization has also crept into the student body. Students ingratiate themselves to authority figures and take care not to jeopardize their eventual senatorial prospects. But the confusion about the purpose of the University runs deeper: Too often, we at Yale forget that we came here because we are intellectual omnivores.

We prioritize the extracurricular over the curricular. We are overwhelmed as freshmen by the number of organizations in Payne Whitney — most genuinely interesting, most of genuine value. Nothing wrong with that: Yale really is one of the few places on Earth where so many smart, motivated people are together in one place.

Yet somewhere between being swept away by the energy of our peers and the feeling of obligation to do great things with our lives, we develop unctuous habits of mind and action. We seek to distinguish ourselves within a narrow conception of professional success, prizing high grades over challenging courses, default subjects of study over those that might truly interest us and e-board meetings over office hours. These habits draw us away from the very reason Yale attracts us in the first place: academic excellence.

In short, we come to feel that what sets us apart from the rest of the world — those who didn’t get in — isn’t our intellectual prowess but what we surely will accomplish as alumni. Intrinsic motivation is crowded out by the extrinsic. Who, after all, remembers what Tony Blair studied in his Oxford days?

Hopefully, some among us will do great things in and for the world. But for many, the price of that opportunity is too dear: How many of us would say that, above all else, we are seeking out the kind of first-rate education Yale can still offer?

The Yale administration abets this. It hires with pride world leaders who bring titles with enough sheen to surpass the blemishes of their blunders on the world stage, including such gems as the Iraq War. It gestures towards educational principle by instituting distributional requirements and then abandons all pretense of rigor by offering An Issues Approach to Biology and Planets and Stars.

Even Provost Peter Salovey’s signature class, Great Big Ideas, is based on the premise that intellectual exploration is something students can’t be bothered to do outside a class.

Perhaps worst of all, the Admissions Office fails to emphasize — the way, say, the University of Chicago or Swarthmore does — that one comes to Yale to learn.

It’s easy to treat education solely as a path to gainful employment, especially when that’s so hard to find. But Yale can provide haven from those practical pressures. These are the only four years in our lives when we can devote ourselves to thinking.

As the University selects its 23rd president, we students must do everything in our power to ensure that the first priority of those who lead our institution is to rejuvenate its intellectual climate. Of course, President Levin, over the last two decades, has been invaluable in ensuring that the facilities and faculty are of the highest caliber. But those efforts will have been wasted on Yale College if we take no joy in the life of the mind. Now, from the bottom of this University, we must reclaim our highest intellectual ideals and demand that those at the top do the same.

Gabriel Levine is a junior in Trumbull College. Contact him at gabriel.levine@yale.edu.