The largely ceremonial and usually useless State of The Union (SOTU) speech finally lived up to expectations. It was a surprisingly accurate assessment of the state of our ever-more tenuous union.
Steve Nelson-- I agree with your assessment of President Biden's State of the Union Address, but I write to ask a question: What do you hope to accomplish with your pessimistic title and confusion. I'm thinking especially of your young readers. I just found an essay I wrote a couple years ago about Stuart Stritzler-Levine, whose view of relationship between democracy and education differed from yours. I wonder, too, what you would think of his profound trust in us. --Bill Nichols
Thanks for the comment and question, Bill. The title seems more accurate than pessimistic and I assume you meant "conclusion," not "confusion." I wish I had young readers! I'd be glad to see your essay. I wonder how Stritzler-Levine's view differs from mine. I think education is the only hope for democracy, but not as Republicans would distort it.
Steve-- I meant to send the essay but got interrupted. It's something I started a couple years ago and just rediscovered in trying to collaborate with Francois Rochat, who appears in the essay. He wants to write something about Stuart's approach to education as an approach to fostering democracy.
Thanks for your kind response to my "confusioning" email. --Bill Nichols
Stuart Stritzler-Levine
Our friendship began when I was 78 years old and Stuart was somewhat older. I suspect those fortunate enough to have had longer friendships with him have memories in common with my story.
On March 17, 2016, my first email from Stuart arrived. He addressed me as “Dean Nichols” although I’d been back in the classroom since 1987. And though we were soon using first names, he continued to call me “William” even though I signed my emails “Bill.” Stuart wrote initially to say he’d long appreciated an essay I published in 1975, critical of Stanley Milgram’s book Obedience to Authority (1974) and the experiments described in it. It was my single contribution to the domain of psychology, as Stuart would have put it. He’d just found my email address, and this was the heart of his first email: “For many years I have been inclined to reach out to you for some conversation about the work you did a long time ago.” So began conversations that continued until April 27, 2020. They never lost completely the formality and the warmth I found in that first email, and our conversations taught me a good deal about many things, including the mystery, wonder, and complexity of friendship.
Not long before he died, Stuart invited me to join a correspondence with him and Professor Francois Rochat of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Medicine at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he studies the interactions between science and society. In the spring of 2017 Stuart brought Professor Rochat to give a paper and meet with students and faculty at Bard College, and he invited me to join several scholars for a dinner with the Swiss professor. The next day my wife, Nancy, and I heard Professor Rochat deliver a paper, titled “When Brutalization Fails to Contaminate Common Decency: From Milgram’s Disobedient Subjects to Rescuers During the Holocaust.” The talk raises issues instructive for people all over the world who seek ways to protest and reform the unjust, often lethal treatment of marginalized people.
Our correspondence led to another friendship and, in February of 2021, a newspaper column, “What Stories Will We Tell Ourselves About Jan. 6.” Francois and I wrote the column for the Valley News, a local paper in New Hampshire and Vermont. The column begins with a reference to our correspondence with Stuart: “Early last year, three friends were exchanging ideas on how to teach and keep in touch with undergraduate students during a pandemic that required most of us to stay at home. They had similar expectations about how people would cooperate in fighting the virus to protect the common good, hoping governments would take the lead in that fight. In early May, one of the friends died unexpectedly and left two of us sharing our sadness.”
What brought us together was a shared interest in learning about people who disobey brutal authority, including those in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments. In the talk Francois delivered at Bard, he spoke of the beauty of the rescuer’s deeds in Le Chambon, France, where a whole community protected Jews from Nazi death camps. He described their “human generosity” and said, “Rescuers teach us that small deeds are the most important of all.” As I listened to Francois, I was reminded of biologist Mary E. Clark’s book In Search of Human Nature (2002). “To entice you into this huge tome,” she says at the beginning, “I will tell you now that I believe our true natures are far more lovable and positive than we in the West currently believe them to be. There is indeed hope for us after all.”
Stuart and Francois shared a scholarly commitment to identifying the best possibilities in “our true natures,” as Mary Clark put it. Both Stuart and Francois were teaching online during the time we corresponded. Stuart had told me stories of trusting students in his classes, adding that when he fished in Lake Michigan during summers, he deliberately left his fishing rods in his boat overnight for the same reason he gave assignments to students that relied on their honesty. If people are trusted, he suggested, they are likely to be trustworthy. Visiting three of his Milgram seminars in different years, I witnessed the profound mutual affection he was able to cultivate in his classroom.
Francois was skeptical about online teaching. Gathered in a room, he wrote, we can respond to each other in a way “analogous to a group dance: we do it together, laughing at our clumsiness or smiling at someone’s gracious move, but this all happens because we are together. Screens don’t adjust well to that sort of dancing together.” Stuart’s response was brief. He insisted on their fundamental agreement about teaching, adding his feeling that “there can be found ways to share the ‘dance’ and the conveyed laugh or smile and have it be received and understood and connectively experienced.”
Stuart’s radical emphasis on the power of trust in a time of growing mistrust and anger seemed to me a surprising virtue for a man who was Dean of Bard College for 21 years and then Dean of Studies at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan for six more years. His emphasis on much that is “lovable and positive” in human nature persisted through years when many colleges and universities were adopting corporate management styles and our nation’s politics were polarizing. My guess is that much of the creativity evident in programs at Bard and in the work of its faculty was nurtured by that trust.
In January of 2020 Stuart arranged for me to bring a prison reform documentary to Bard’s Lifetime Learning Institute, one of many Bard programs he encouraged. The film, Invisible Chess: The Jason Goudlock Story, which Samuel Crow directed and I produced, had been difficult to promote in Ohio, where it takes place, and the turnout for our screening at Bard was the largest we had experienced so far. The justified fame of the Bard Prison Initiative, another program supported by Stuart, probably accounted for it, as well as affection for Stuart, which was as palpable at our screening, where he introduced us, as it was in his Milgram seminar. He was clearly beloved by both old and young.
Stuart was beloved by me too. We had many shared interests, including fishing. He was delighted to know I worked for the Oregon Fish Commission in my college summers, and he introduced me to Dan Egan’s fine book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which leads to what is surely a typical Stuart Stritzler-Levine story. His interest in Egan’s book led him to drive to Carey Arboretum, near Poughkeepsie, to meet Egan and hear him talk, and he tried to arrange for Egan to give a talk in Charlevoix, Michigan, where Stuart lived during his summer fishing expeditions.
Stuart was intensely interested in many things, and looking through my journal, I see that during the four years of our friendship we talked of more than I remembered. But I found in Leon Botstein’s statement to the Bard community after Stuart’s passing a subject we missed. Bard’s president mentions Stuart’s “passion for sports,” including his having coached the basketball team for several years. We didn’t talk about sports at all. Now I wish I’d mentioned having played basketball in college. Stuart would probably have been delighted, and he might have given me a new way to think about it, as he did with nearly every subject we discussed.
I didn’t expect to find my way into such a sustaining friendship as I eased into my eighties, and I’m particularly grateful for the timing in another way. Stuart’s insistent emphasis on our human capacity for good and our “common decency” is an alternative to the fear, despair, and anger that threaten now to poison our politics and damage our culture. His deeply informed confidence in our “true natures” gives me hope.
Steve Nelson-- I agree with your assessment of President Biden's State of the Union Address, but I write to ask a question: What do you hope to accomplish with your pessimistic title and confusion. I'm thinking especially of your young readers. I just found an essay I wrote a couple years ago about Stuart Stritzler-Levine, whose view of relationship between democracy and education differed from yours. I wonder, too, what you would think of his profound trust in us. --Bill Nichols
Thanks for the comment and question, Bill. The title seems more accurate than pessimistic and I assume you meant "conclusion," not "confusion." I wish I had young readers! I'd be glad to see your essay. I wonder how Stritzler-Levine's view differs from mine. I think education is the only hope for democracy, but not as Republicans would distort it.
Steve-- I meant to send the essay but got interrupted. It's something I started a couple years ago and just rediscovered in trying to collaborate with Francois Rochat, who appears in the essay. He wants to write something about Stuart's approach to education as an approach to fostering democracy.
Thanks for your kind response to my "confusioning" email. --Bill Nichols
Stuart Stritzler-Levine
Our friendship began when I was 78 years old and Stuart was somewhat older. I suspect those fortunate enough to have had longer friendships with him have memories in common with my story.
On March 17, 2016, my first email from Stuart arrived. He addressed me as “Dean Nichols” although I’d been back in the classroom since 1987. And though we were soon using first names, he continued to call me “William” even though I signed my emails “Bill.” Stuart wrote initially to say he’d long appreciated an essay I published in 1975, critical of Stanley Milgram’s book Obedience to Authority (1974) and the experiments described in it. It was my single contribution to the domain of psychology, as Stuart would have put it. He’d just found my email address, and this was the heart of his first email: “For many years I have been inclined to reach out to you for some conversation about the work you did a long time ago.” So began conversations that continued until April 27, 2020. They never lost completely the formality and the warmth I found in that first email, and our conversations taught me a good deal about many things, including the mystery, wonder, and complexity of friendship.
Not long before he died, Stuart invited me to join a correspondence with him and Professor Francois Rochat of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Medicine at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he studies the interactions between science and society. In the spring of 2017 Stuart brought Professor Rochat to give a paper and meet with students and faculty at Bard College, and he invited me to join several scholars for a dinner with the Swiss professor. The next day my wife, Nancy, and I heard Professor Rochat deliver a paper, titled “When Brutalization Fails to Contaminate Common Decency: From Milgram’s Disobedient Subjects to Rescuers During the Holocaust.” The talk raises issues instructive for people all over the world who seek ways to protest and reform the unjust, often lethal treatment of marginalized people.
Our correspondence led to another friendship and, in February of 2021, a newspaper column, “What Stories Will We Tell Ourselves About Jan. 6.” Francois and I wrote the column for the Valley News, a local paper in New Hampshire and Vermont. The column begins with a reference to our correspondence with Stuart: “Early last year, three friends were exchanging ideas on how to teach and keep in touch with undergraduate students during a pandemic that required most of us to stay at home. They had similar expectations about how people would cooperate in fighting the virus to protect the common good, hoping governments would take the lead in that fight. In early May, one of the friends died unexpectedly and left two of us sharing our sadness.”
What brought us together was a shared interest in learning about people who disobey brutal authority, including those in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments. In the talk Francois delivered at Bard, he spoke of the beauty of the rescuer’s deeds in Le Chambon, France, where a whole community protected Jews from Nazi death camps. He described their “human generosity” and said, “Rescuers teach us that small deeds are the most important of all.” As I listened to Francois, I was reminded of biologist Mary E. Clark’s book In Search of Human Nature (2002). “To entice you into this huge tome,” she says at the beginning, “I will tell you now that I believe our true natures are far more lovable and positive than we in the West currently believe them to be. There is indeed hope for us after all.”
Stuart and Francois shared a scholarly commitment to identifying the best possibilities in “our true natures,” as Mary Clark put it. Both Stuart and Francois were teaching online during the time we corresponded. Stuart had told me stories of trusting students in his classes, adding that when he fished in Lake Michigan during summers, he deliberately left his fishing rods in his boat overnight for the same reason he gave assignments to students that relied on their honesty. If people are trusted, he suggested, they are likely to be trustworthy. Visiting three of his Milgram seminars in different years, I witnessed the profound mutual affection he was able to cultivate in his classroom.
Francois was skeptical about online teaching. Gathered in a room, he wrote, we can respond to each other in a way “analogous to a group dance: we do it together, laughing at our clumsiness or smiling at someone’s gracious move, but this all happens because we are together. Screens don’t adjust well to that sort of dancing together.” Stuart’s response was brief. He insisted on their fundamental agreement about teaching, adding his feeling that “there can be found ways to share the ‘dance’ and the conveyed laugh or smile and have it be received and understood and connectively experienced.”
Stuart’s radical emphasis on the power of trust in a time of growing mistrust and anger seemed to me a surprising virtue for a man who was Dean of Bard College for 21 years and then Dean of Studies at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan for six more years. His emphasis on much that is “lovable and positive” in human nature persisted through years when many colleges and universities were adopting corporate management styles and our nation’s politics were polarizing. My guess is that much of the creativity evident in programs at Bard and in the work of its faculty was nurtured by that trust.
In January of 2020 Stuart arranged for me to bring a prison reform documentary to Bard’s Lifetime Learning Institute, one of many Bard programs he encouraged. The film, Invisible Chess: The Jason Goudlock Story, which Samuel Crow directed and I produced, had been difficult to promote in Ohio, where it takes place, and the turnout for our screening at Bard was the largest we had experienced so far. The justified fame of the Bard Prison Initiative, another program supported by Stuart, probably accounted for it, as well as affection for Stuart, which was as palpable at our screening, where he introduced us, as it was in his Milgram seminar. He was clearly beloved by both old and young.
Stuart was beloved by me too. We had many shared interests, including fishing. He was delighted to know I worked for the Oregon Fish Commission in my college summers, and he introduced me to Dan Egan’s fine book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which leads to what is surely a typical Stuart Stritzler-Levine story. His interest in Egan’s book led him to drive to Carey Arboretum, near Poughkeepsie, to meet Egan and hear him talk, and he tried to arrange for Egan to give a talk in Charlevoix, Michigan, where Stuart lived during his summer fishing expeditions.
Stuart was intensely interested in many things, and looking through my journal, I see that during the four years of our friendship we talked of more than I remembered. But I found in Leon Botstein’s statement to the Bard community after Stuart’s passing a subject we missed. Bard’s president mentions Stuart’s “passion for sports,” including his having coached the basketball team for several years. We didn’t talk about sports at all. Now I wish I’d mentioned having played basketball in college. Stuart would probably have been delighted, and he might have given me a new way to think about it, as he did with nearly every subject we discussed.
I didn’t expect to find my way into such a sustaining friendship as I eased into my eighties, and I’m particularly grateful for the timing in another way. Stuart’s insistent emphasis on our human capacity for good and our “common decency” is an alternative to the fear, despair, and anger that threaten now to poison our politics and damage our culture. His deeply informed confidence in our “true natures” gives me hope.