Death and Tennyson on a conservative podcast

I somehow found myself watching an hour-long podcast with two conservatives. Yes, I know I should have been shocked, appalled even, but it was a conservation between a gray-haired Hoover Institution host and a bearded guy in a ballcap who looked fresh from a Nebraska farm, and was.

The host was Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge. The guest was Ben Saase, Harvard and Yale grad, former Nebraska congressman, and short-time president of my university, UF in Gainesville. They obviously knew one another to judge by their opening friendly banter. My first question: How do they know each other?

Old colleagues, it turns out, friends, maybe. “Ben Sasse on Mortaliity, Meaning, and the Future of America.” Subjects that affect all of us, conservatives and liberals alike. I found out quickly that Sasse was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer that has spread to other organs and his spine. He says that he is doped up on morphine and winces in pain on camera. But he’s starting a new podcast, “Not Dead Yet.” And he isn’t. He even recites some poetry to close out the hour.

Two intelligent people talking about big issues. I like that. I miss it. Reminds me of watching William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” with my Dad. I now live frantic over the latest outrage. I stopped that for an hour. It was more than an hour. I interrupted the dialogue to go on the nightly walk with my wife and son. They walk, I drive my Golden scooter. It’s brisk outside, brisk for Florida, a cold wind from the north. We loop the neighborhood, trade greetings with neighbors, and we return, my wife to bed, my son to a rewatch of “Batman Forever,” and me for a snack and a return to the podcast.

Sasse is pretty fly for a white guy from Arlington, Nebraska. He jokes, testifies, gets clinical a few times but remains interesting throughout. His short tenure at UF was marked by controversy. Not sure if I can sum it up. I will leave it to the irascible Independent Florida Alligator to do that (full disclosure: I read the Alligator, support it, and spent two semesters there as a reporter in 1976).

The Alligator announced Sasse’s diagnosis on Dec. 23. That’s a usual calm time in the campus (off-campus in the Alligator’s case) newsroom, with student home for Christmas break. Sasse had this quote during the press conference: “Cancer is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.” If Sasse sounds more academic than legislative, he closes out the interview with a poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ring out, Wild Bells.” Tennyson is a particularly good poet to choose for memorization due to his rhyme schemes and repetitions. An example:

Cannon to right of them,/Cannon to left of them,/Cannon behind them/Volleyed and thundered;/Stormed at with shot and shell,/While horse and hero fell.

“Charge of the Light Brigade.” I had to memorize it during seventh grade after-school detention. The nuns punished us in 1963 with poems but I discovered it was a way to store away lines from the masters to blog about in 2026. Bless you sisters.

Tennyson wrote “Wild Bells” in a tribute to a friend who died at 22. It ends with these two stanzas as Sasse recites:

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

 

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Sasse is a Christian. He talks about it in ways we used to hear more often. Light on judgements, heavy on redemption. But it was his comments on academia that spoke to me. At UF, he brought in colleagues to establish the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Campus ground-breaking for its building was held last month. Sasse has been teaching courses there and was scheduled to teach in the spring (don’t see him on the current course list).

I am suspicious of conservatives taking over universities and screwing around with them. We saw what happened when Gov. DeSantis set out to de-woke New College in Sarasota. DeSantis liked Sasse and was instrumental in his hiring. The search for a replacement at UF has gone on forever. One great candidate was rejected already due to his alleged interest in diversity programs at Penn State. Nobody with Gov D’s mindset has yet been found. Whether that’s because word has spread among potential candidates that they will be stepping into a minefield or whether the search committee is inept. Or a combination of those.

But, watching the Hoover podcast with Sasse, I agreed with some of the things the man said. He is disturbed by students deserting majors in humanities for more “practical” majors, majors that will lead to jobs. Sasse is akin to his liberal colleagues when he bemoans that and his arguments for the humanities is nearly the same. The humanities teach us to be good citizens. Sasse’s course title for this semester was “American Life.” A civics class? Perhaps. Here’s his quote from the podcast:

“We haven’t done basic civics for a really long time.”

Educators have been complaining about that for a long time.

Why don’t kids want to major in history or English? Not practical. But also, those classes have been “niche-efied,’ narrowed down to appeal to small slices of the humanities that narrow the focus of the major. I know from my three years in a state university MFA program that those niches and biases exist and it isn’t healthy for the system as a whole.

Our children and grandchildren are looking at the shifting swirling job market and want to know how to deal with that chaos and the one that’s coming. We don’t know what the jobs will be in 10 or 20 years. We don’t know if there will be jobs. Elon Musk says everyone will be rich so don’t worry about it. OK, Elon, go play with your rocket ships. To make sure we have a good grounding on the world, and to ensure we can keep a functioning democracy, we need better future prospects that Elon provides.

To get back to humanities. Learning the classics isn’t a right-wing plot. It’s something that will ensure our future. If we’re going to get Middle Americans to buy into college educations, we have to make some changes. Here’s Sasse:

“There’s no reason the taxpayers of the state of Texas or the state of Nebraska or Florida should subsidize somebody to teach in a discipline that isn’t wrestling with the big questions and isn’t preparing people for work.”

The humanities do that. It makes us wrestle with big questions and prepares us for work. Some of those questions and careers we don’t know yet. But the humanities will give us the tools to grapple with them.

Life on campus, 1969 to the present

When I left the dog-eat-dog arena of corporate America in 1988 for the ivy-covered halls of academe, I imagined a long life of teaching and writing and pondering. Plenty of pondering. Never mind that my corporate pals sent me off with a cake and a real bullwhip as a farewell gift. "You’ll need the whip for the little darlings you’re going to teach," they joked. I could have said LOL but it was 1988 and that expression had yet to be invented. I just laughed and replied: “At least I won’t have to deal with you SOBs anymore,” using an expression that was sort-of acceptable in the guy-oriented workplace of the late-20^th century.

I learned several lessons during three years in grad school at CSU in FoCo, CO. If I landed a job as an academic, I would get paid peanuts for teaching five sections of freshman composition at a community college in East Jesus, Nowhere. I interviewed for jobs at universities, but my impending MFA didn’t stack up against all the young PhDs running loose all over the place. So I switched gears and got into the lucrative field of arts administration, a career I will be retiring from in 2016.

I have taught on a part-time basis over the last couple decades. Composition, yes, but also creative writing, business writing, memoir writing and so on. I’ve taught in classrooms and online, for community colleges and universities. My students have ranged in age from 18 to 85. I’ve enjoyed most of those experiences.

But deep inside of me resides a dapper gentleman who wears a tan blazer with patches on the elbows. He walks campus like Mr. Chips, saying good morning and hale well met to all the students who greet him as he passes. These young people are all above average and bound for careers where they will praise the lessons they learned under the tutelage of Mr. Chips, I mean, Mr. Shay. Maybe that’s why I can’t resist a walk around any campus I happen across. I wax nostalgic on campus, which is odd because I never really experienced an idyllic campus life. I’ve blogged about some of my college experiences and will blog more about them later. Let’s just say I seem to learn everything the hard way. Add to that the fact that neither of my children have let me live through their idyllic campus experiences because, well, they haven’t had those either. Still, my nostalgia remains about college life.

Here we are in the 20-teens. Life on campus seems more complicated than ever. And strange. I only know what I read in the papers and online and see on the TV news. Students, apparently, want campus to be a “safe place.” Free from racism and violence and sexism and all kinds of –isms. Damn. Campus is where learned about all of those because I ran headlong into them. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? The college experience is supposed to be about experimentation and freedom of expression and encounters with new and possibly dangerous ideas. You try on new ideas and experiences like a new outfit, and you can shed it willy-nilly and go on to the next thing. If you are too afraid of giving offense, you will probably be less willing to give it the old college try.

As a liberal, I gleefully criticize those on the right. They often bring up political correctness. In their eyes, political correctness prohibits their freedom of expression. They no longer can use the N-word in public or discriminate against LGBTQ people or call immigrants wetbacks or worse. I am politically correct by writing the previous sentence. Problem is, I am 64 years old and grew up in an era where we casually used all of those terms and practiced casual (and formal) racism. I’ve been in a steep learning curve ever since. The Civil Rights struggle caused thinking people to reassess their priorities and behaviors. The battle over the Vietnam War caused us to reassess the blind obedience to country we learned in the church and in Boy Scouts and ROTC. The women’s movement forced us men to look differently at relationships with the other 50 percent of the human race. In the West, we had Latino/a Power and the American Indian Movement. The sixties and seventies were hard on us white males, even those of us who weren’t Ivy League or Wall Street privileged. You could attempt to get out of changing by pleading that your forebears were poor white trash from Ireland and that your great-granddaddy didn’t own any slaves or kill any Indians. That never got me very far. White privilege is a real thing, like it or not.

I was impressed by the recent stand taken by the Mizzou football team. Nothing will cause white folks to stand up and take notice than threatening tailgate Saturdays at the old alma mater. Think about it. When I entered the University of South Carolina in 1969, the Gamecocks had not one black football player. Their first black athlete was future NBA star Alex English, the poetry-writing power forward from Columbia. He joined the basketball team in 1970. B-ball and football squads in the South are now comprised mainly of black athletes. Think of how much power they possess to determine the course of their universities. Is it PC when they flex that power? Isn’t power-flexing more of a conservative value? More reminiscent of corporate takeovers and police actions in third world countries than progressive politics? You’d think that The Donald and Bill O’Reilly would be singing the praises of the Mizzou football team. Flex those collegiate muscles, you middle linebacker! What better prepares you for a corporate job once those knees give out?

My collegiate dreams faded over time. A good thing too. I’m not sure how welcomed I would be if my Baby Boomer patriarchal self showed up in class smoking a pipe, wearing a corduroy blazer, carrying a bullwhip and barking out orders to my young charges. Not PC, Mr. Chips. Not PC at all.