Latest news with #Time-TravelThursdays
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Long Goodbye to College
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. The month of May marks the first anniversary of my college graduation—or, as I call it, the inevitable and dreaded start of my adulthood. This time last year, I questioned what I wanted from my future, endured the implosion of a close-knit social life, parted ways with a failed situationship, and tried to scrub a stubborn beer stain out of my baby-blue graduation gown. I remember the endless parties, cigars that smelled like chocolate but tasted like ash, cheap champagne that we shook and sprayed but hardly drank, all that beer and wine we did drink. Now, as I watch videos of underclassmen donning their own robes, I face the unwelcome reminder that grass grows atop the grave of my college days. The morning of my graduation, I struggled to follow a TikTok tutorial on how to tie a tie (eventually enlisting my roommate's help) and ate just a bag of Cheez-Its for breakfast. I walked across the stage for all of eight seconds, waving at the crowd without a clue where my family was seated. But none of those gripes mattered, because my dean winked at me as we shook hands and the school's anthem sounded better through Bluetooth speakers than it ever had through brass. At graduations, even the slightest pageantry is enchanting. One 1923 Atlantic article remarked that merely being asked 'Are you going to Commencement?' provoked joy: 'Commencement had a meaning,' the writer Carroll Perry explained. 'It meant that the Governor of the Commonwealth was coming to Williamstown, and the sheriff of the County of Berkshire, with bell-crown and cockade, in buff waistcoat, carrying a staff. It meant wearing your Sunday suit all day Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday; it meant pretty girls from big cities; pretty girls, in stylish dresses, with wonderful parasols—girls who lived in New York.' But all of that pomp can be punctured by reality. At my alma mater, Columbia, there was confusion over whether the ceremony would happen at all, because of the campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza. (Ultimately, commencement was canceled and smaller graduation events, including mine, were moved off campus.) Matriculating into adulthood too often means entering a world plagued by conflict. In 1917, amid the throes of World War I, a father wrote a letter to his daughter for her graduation: 'That, my daughter with your sheepskin in your hand, is the world into which you have graduated. It is a world in crisis; a world struggling toward a salvation only to be won by bitter effort,' he wrote. 'No one of us is exempt from contributing what we have and what we are to that endeavor.' Uncertainty is the word that defines the waning months of college and beyond. Finding a post-grad path is hard, not least because of the pressure to select one that may determine your career forever. Graduate school delays the job hunt by a few years, but the outcomes can vary. 'Now, four years after having obtained an M. A. and a Ph. D., I am seemingly permanently unemployed,' an anonymous graduate, with the byline of 'Ph. D.,' complained in 1940. And the pressure to keep up with your peers, especially financially, never goes away. One writer who was working as a carpenter went to dinner with old college friends, who all made substantially more money than he did, in white-collar positions. 'I think it cheered them somewhat to learn that my hands had not been able to keep pace with their heads, commercially,' he wrote in 1929. Any recent graduate will tell you that their head felt heaviest after the cap came off. The night after graduation, my friends and I snuck into our freshman-year dorm. We reminisced about our four years together and wrote a message for the dorm's future inhabitants inside an electrical box in the same living room where we first met. And then the sun came up. I loaded my life into cardboard and loaded that cardboard into a minivan and slid my car window down to wave goodbye to it all. 'Thus we launch the schoolboy upon life. Commencement meant commencement; it was the beginning of responsibility. He had to make his own chance now,' the minister Edward E. Hale lamented in an 1893 essay. 'His boyhood was over.' At some point after the blur of my victory lap, I suddenly found myself back at home, all alone. I'd been asked What's next? by some 20 people by then, but for the first time, I was forced to actually confront the question. I had no answer. I just mourned my boyhood. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
In Defense of Academic Freedom
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Why defend academic freedom even when the ideas in question are wrongheaded or harmful? 'It is precisely because any kind of purge opens the gate to all kinds of purge, that freedom of thought necessarily means the freedom to think bad thoughts as well as good.' Those words, written in 1953 by Joseph Alsop, an alumnus of Harvard who later served on its Board of Overseers, are relevant today, as the Trump administration cancels the visas of foreign students for viewpoints that it deems 'bad.' And they were relevant in recent years as institutions of higher education investigated and disciplined members of their communities for expressing views that ran afoul of various progressive social-justice orthodoxies. But Alsop wrote them in response to the McCarthy era's efforts to identify and punish Communists who were working in academia. Hundreds of professors were summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, forced to appear as witnesses, and pressured to name names––that is, to identify fellow academics with ties to the Communist Party. Many were then censured or fired and blacklisted by their employers. 'I have been profoundly and actively anti-Communist all my life,' Alsop declared in a letter to the president and fellows of Harvard, published in The Atlantic. 'Unfortunately, however, the question that confronts us is not how we feel about Communists and ex-Communists. The question is, rather, how we feel about the three great principles which have run, like threads of gold, through the long, proud Harvard story.' The first principle he listed was the freedom to make personal choices within the limits of the law. The second principle was 'unrestricted freedom of thought.' And the third principle was one's right to due process when accused of breaking the law. 'A member of our faculty is not to be penalized for any legal choice he may make, however eccentric or controversial,' Alsop wrote. 'He may become a nudist or a Zoroastrian, imitate Origen or adopt the Pythagorean rules of diet. If called before a Congressional investigating committee, he may seek the protection of the Fifth Amendment, and refuse to testify on grounds of possible self-incrimination. However much we disapprove, we may not interfere.' By standing for 'unrestricted free trade in ideas,' Alsop sought to conserve the university's ability to extend the frontiers of human thought and knowledge at a moment that has long been regarded as one of the darkest in the history of American academia. But as Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), documented in a 2023 Atlantic article, the threat to academic freedom today arguably surpasses the threat that existed in the 1950s. 'According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties,' he wrote. 'We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200.' More recently, FIRE has objected to the Trump administration's infringements on academic freedom, including the unprecedented demands that it sent to Harvard last month. Supporters of academic freedom have every reason to fear that more colleges will be similarly targeted in coming months. One defense should involve consulting similar situations from bygone eras. Doing so can help identify principles and arguments that have stood the test of time—and it can be a source of hope. After all, the authoritarian excesses of McCarthyism, which intimidated so many, did not long endure. 'From the perspective of the sixties, the whole period has an air of unreality' for many students, a 1965 Harvard Crimson article—written in an era of 'sit-ins, summer projects, and full page ads criticizing U.S. foreign policy placed in the Times by hundreds of academics'—declared. But just several years prior, it pointed out, 'tenured professors thought long and hard before risking a statement on public issues; teaching fellows, fearful of antagonizing Governing Boards, were politically inert; and students retreated into silence and inactivity.' I hope that, circa 2030, incoming college students will have trouble understanding the mounting attacks on academic freedom that began about a decade ago. Perhaps this period, echoing the Red Scare's aftermath, may yet be followed by a new flourishing of academic freedom. A renaissance of that sort will require defending people's rights—no matter how abhorrent one may find a given opinion. As Alsop put it, 'In these cases the individuals are nothing and the principles are everything.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
In Defense of Academic Freedom
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Why defend academic freedom even when the ideas in question are wrongheaded or harmful? 'It is precisely because any kind of purge opens the gate to all kinds of purge, that freedom of thought necessarily means the freedom to think bad thoughts as well as good.' Those words, written in 1953 by Joseph Alsop, an alumnus of Harvard who later served on its Board of Overseers, are relevant today, as the Trump administration cancels the visas of foreign students for viewpoints that it deems 'bad.' And they were relevant in recent years as institutions of higher education investigated and disciplined members of their communities for expressing views that ran afoul of various progressive social-justice orthodoxies. But Alsop wrote them in response to the McCarthy era's efforts to identify and punish Communists who were working in academia. Hundreds of professors were summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, forced to appear as witnesses, and pressured to name names––that is, to identify fellow academics with ties to the Communist Party. Many were then censured or fired and blacklisted by their employers. 'I have been profoundly and actively anti-Communist all my life,' Alsop declared in a letter to the president and fellows of Harvard, published in The Atlantic. 'Unfortunately, however, the question that confronts us is not how we feel about Communists and ex-Communists. The question is, rather, how we feel about the three great principles which have run, like threads of gold, through the long, proud Harvard story.' The first principle he listed was the freedom to make personal choices within the limits of the law. The second principle was 'unrestricted freedom of thought.' And the third principle was one's right to due process when accused of breaking the law. 'A member of our faculty is not to be penalized for any legal choice he may make, however eccentric or controversial,' Alsop wrote. 'He may become a nudist or a Zoroastrian, imitate Origen or adopt the Pythagorean rules of diet. If called before a Congressional investigating committee, he may seek the protection of the Fifth Amendment, and refuse to testify on grounds of possible self-incrimination. However much we disapprove, we may not interfere.' By standing for 'unrestricted free trade in ideas,' Alsop sought to conserve the university's ability to extend the frontiers of human thought and knowledge at a moment that has long been regarded as one of the darkest in the history of American academia. But as Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), documented in a 2023 Atlantic article, the threat to academic freedom today arguably surpasses the threat that existed in the 1950s. 'According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties,' he wrote. 'We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200.' More recently, FIRE has objected to the Trump administration's infringements on academic freedom, including the unprecedented demands that it sent to Harvard last month. Supporters of academic freedom have every reason to fear that more colleges will be similarly targeted in coming months. One defense should involve consulting similar situations from bygone eras. Doing so can help identify principles and arguments that have stood the test of time—and it can be a source of hope. After all, the authoritarian excesses of McCarthyism, which intimidated so many, did not long endure. 'From the perspective of the sixties, the whole period has an air of unreality' for many students, a 1965 Harvard Crimson article —written in an era of 'sit-ins, summer projects, and full page ads criticizing U.S. foreign policy placed in the Times by hundreds of academics'—declared. But just several years prior, it pointed out, 'tenured professors thought long and hard before risking a statement on public issues; teaching fellows, fearful of antagonizing Governing Boards, were politically inert; and students retreated into silence and inactivity.' I hope that, circa 2030, incoming college students will have trouble understanding the mounting attacks on academic freedom that began about a decade ago. Perhaps this period, echoing the Red Scare's aftermath, may yet be followed by a new flourishing of academic freedom. A renaissance of that sort will require defending people's rights—no matter how abhorrent one may find a given opinion. As Alsop put it, 'In these cases the individuals are nothing and the principles are everything.'
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Should Children's Literature Have Rules?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, the writer Samuel Osgood considered one question above all others: 'What shall we do with our children?' More specifically, how should we 'train and teach them in body and mind, by schools and books, by play and work, for that marvellous American life that is now opening to us its new and eventful chapter in the history of man?' He had plenty of reason to wonder. Children's literature was a burgeoning genre, and public libraries, which hadn't existed in America until the 1850s, wouldn't include children's sections until four decades later. Fast-forward through time—and The Atlantic's archives—and the question of what children should be reading has become a constant refrain. In 1900, the children's author Everett T. Tomlinson observed that a 'demand of the young reader is for action rather than for contemplation … Analysis and introspection are words outside his vocabulary.' In 1902, the librarian Hiller C. Wellman was convinced that a novel could irrevocably change a child's morals: 'If in a book—as sometimes happens—trickiness and deceit are exhibited as excusable or 'smart,' his ideal of honor is exposed to serious injury.' Should kids be offered only fairy tales and fables? Can they handle Shakespeare? Would teenagers be more inclined to pick up the classics if their covers teased sex? How much horror can they take? And what's the difference between education and entertainment anyway? In 1888, the librarian C. M. Hewins argued that the last thing adults should do is oversimplify stories for children; they'll 'know nothing in later years of great originals' if they start out reading watered-down tales. Wellman, a decade-plus afterward, insisted that children's books should impart on kids 'the standards of right and wrong.' More than a century later, the Goosebumps author R. L. Stine would refute the notion that there should be any rules at all for kids' literature. 'Adults are allowed to read anything they want. Adults don't have to have characters learn and grow. Adults can read all kinds of trash and no one criticizes them. Why do kids have to have that?' he told my colleague Adrienne LaFrance in 2018. 'I thought it would be great to write a bunch of kids' books where no one learns and no one grows.' The result, for Stine, has been a massively successful series of novels that has spawned a hit show and multiple film adaptations. Popularity doesn't indicate approval from children and adults alike, of course—even some of the most acclaimed titles have been subject to scrutiny, with the number of banned books ballooning year over year. When a Virginia school board added The Handmaid's Tale to a list of titles to be removed, Margaret Atwood echoed Stine's sentiments about the strict limitations set on kids. 'Should parents have a say in what their kids are taught in public schools? Certainly: a democratic vote on the matter,' she wrote in 2023. 'Should young people—high-school juniors and seniors, for starters—also have a say? Why not?' In the meantime, kids are reading less. A 2020 study revealed that the number of children reading for fun had hit its lowest point since 1984, and reading skills are on the decline across America. Many factors could be behind this slump, including demographic shifts in schools, education-policy changes, and the rise of smartphones and screen time. But one of the most compelling explanations, according to the children's author Katherine Marsh, 'is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.' She detailed one educator's suggestion for third-grade English teachers following Common Core requirements: to first walk students through the difference between nonliteral and literal language, and then have them read a passage from Amelia Bedelia, the classic series in which the protagonist takes everything literally. Afterward, the students would answer written questions. 'The focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment,' Marsh explained. 'Critical reading is an important skill … But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.' Perhaps, in order for children to fall back in love with reading, adults have to get out of the way—a conclusion Osgood reached himself, all the way back in 1865. He argued that understanding children requires taking them seriously, and that a developing mind isn't necessarily a weak one. The best children's books must present stories and images that 'the young reader's mind can easily appreciate and enjoy,' he wrote. But at the same time, why not also introduce children to the best writers 'and their earth and heaven of earthly sense and starry wisdom'? Now there's a question to ponder. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Should Children's Literature Have Rules?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, the writer Samuel Osgood considered one question above all others: 'What shall we do with our children?' More specifically, how should we 'train and teach them in body and mind, by schools and books, by play and work, for that marvellous American life that is now opening to us its new and eventful chapter in the history of man?' He had plenty of reason to wonder. Children's literature was a burgeoning genre, and public libraries, which hadn't existed in America until the 1850s, wouldn't include children's sections until four decades later. Fast-forward through time—and The Atlantic 's archives—and the question of what children should be reading has become a constant refrain. In 1900, the children's author Everett T. Tomlinson observed that a 'demand of the young reader is for action rather than for contemplation … Analysis and introspection are words outside his vocabulary.' In 1902, the librarian Hiller C. Wellman was convinced that a novel could irrevocably change a child's morals: 'If in a book—as sometimes happens—trickiness and deceit are exhibited as excusable or 'smart,' his ideal of honor is exposed to serious injury.' Should kids be offered only fairy tales and fables? Can they handle Shakespeare? Would teenagers be more inclined to pick up the classics if their covers teased sex? How much horror can they take? And what's the difference between education and entertainment anyway? In 1888, the librarian C. M. Hewins argued that the last thing adults should do is oversimplify stories for children; they'll 'know nothing in later years of great originals' if they start out reading watered-down tales. Wellman, a decade-plus afterward, insisted that children's books should impart on kids 'the standards of right and wrong.' More than a century later, the Goosebumps author R. L. Stine would refute the notion that there should be any rules at all for kids' literature. 'Adults are allowed to read anything they want. Adults don't have to have characters learn and grow. Adults can read all kinds of trash and no one criticizes them. Why do kids have to have that?' he told my colleague Adrienne LaFrance in 2018. 'I thought it would be great to write a bunch of kids' books where no one learns and no one grows.' The result, for Stine, has been a massively successful series of novels that has spawned a hit show and multiple film adaptations. Popularity doesn't indicate approval from children and adults alike, of course—even some of the most acclaimed titles have been subject to scrutiny, with the number of banned books ballooning year over year. When a Virginia school board added The Handmaid's Tale to a list of titles to be removed, Margaret Atwood echoed Stine's sentiments about the strict limitations set on kids. 'Should parents have a say in what their kids are taught in public schools? Certainly: a democratic vote on the matter,' she wrote in 2023. 'Should young people—high-school juniors and seniors, for starters—also have a say? Why not?' In the meantime, kids are reading less. A 2020 study revealed that the number of children reading for fun had hit its lowest point since 1984, and reading skills are on the decline across America. Many factors could be behind this slump, including demographic shifts in schools, education-policy changes, and the rise of smartphones and screen time. But one of the most compelling explanations, according to the children's author Katherine Marsh, 'is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.' She detailed one educator's suggestion for third-grade English teachers following Common Core requirements: to first walk students through the difference between nonliteral and literal language, and then have them read a passage from Amelia Bedelia, the classic series in which the protagonist takes everything literally. Afterward, the students would answer written questions. 'The focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment,' Marsh explained. 'Critical reading is an important skill … But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.' Perhaps, in order for children to fall back in love with reading, adults have to get out of the way—a conclusion Osgood reached himself, all the way back in 1865. He argued that understanding children requires taking them seriously, and that a developing mind isn't necessarily a weak one. The best children's books must present stories and images that 'the young reader's mind can easily appreciate and enjoy,' he wrote. But at the same time, why not also introduce children to the best writers 'and their earth and heaven of earthly sense and starry wisdom'? Now there's a question to ponder.
