The Wall Street Journal praises Hank Brown, departing president of the University of Colorado.
Mr. Brown proceeded to oversee a complete examination of Mr. [Ward] Churchill’s work, and the ethnic studies professor was eventually fired because of fraudulent scholarship, not his politics. Mr. Brown then initiated a complete review of CU’s tenure policies, making it easier for his successors to get rid of deadwood. He also took on the equally sensitive subject of grade inflation, insisting that the university disclose student class rank on transcripts. If a B average puts a student at the bottom of his class, future employers will know it.
That all sounds like a good day’s work to me. Meanwhile, the selection of incoming president Bruce Benson has ruffled some feathers. From The Denver Post:
The 69-year-old oil executive was a controversial choice from the moment he emerged as the lone finalist for the job, despite his long history as an advocate for education.
He has only a bachelor’s degree, raising concerns about his academic qualifications to lead a research university. That might have been overlooked, but he made remarks during forums at the university that raised the anger of an already skeptical audience, among them a suggestion that climate change could be an unproven theory.
We will have to wait and see how this appointment works out. Benson’s lack of academic credentials puts him at a disadvantage. On the other hand, we are now told that most college courses are being taught by non-tenure-track faculty and the majority of full-time higher-education employees are administrators, not faculty.
Universities have become top-heavy bureaucratic nightmares, and college presidents are forced to spend an inordinate percentage of their efforts on fundraising. In this environment, the regents may be justified in placing more weight on management and fundraising skills than a record of scholarly achievements.
Unfortunately, the criticism of Benson from faculty seems to degrade rapidly into complaints about his political views - not that he is partisan, but that he supports the wrong political party. This, along with Benson’s questioning of liberal orthodoxy, leads faculty to charge that the university has sold its soul to the devil.
March 24th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Education, Politics |
2 comments
“Whom are you looking for?” I couldn’t help but wince at this perfectly acceptable, but jarring translation from the Passion Gospel. There we go again, I thought. Yet another translator caving to “casual” in the desperate hope of being more effective!
The Latin Quem quaeritis - rendered best in English “Whom do you seek?” - radiates enormous power. Spoken by Jesus to those sent to arrest him, the phrase found its dramatic potential as the Angels’ question to the three women visiting Christ’s tomb. In Western music, the tri-fold exchange Quem Quaeritis became the generating nugget of Medieval liturgical drama:
Interrogatio. Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?
Responsio. Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae.
Angeli. Non est hic; surrexit, sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro
Question: Whom do ye seek in the sepulcher, O followers of Christ?
Answer: Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified, O heavenly ones.
Angels: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen from the sepulchre.
- Translation: John Gassner, editor, Medieval and Tudor Drama.
The force of this exchange, set first to simple chant, then adorned by melismatic vocal lines, is assessed in the first volume of Howard Smither’s eloquent four-volume A History of the Oratorio:
A germ from which the visitation sepulchri dramas grew was the “Quem quaeritis,” a brief dialogue that first appears in manuscripts of the early tenth century. . . . This dialogue was performed before the mass of Easter morning. A gradual process of elaborating the “Quem quaeritis” resulted in a group of extended visitatio sepulchri dramas for Easter, as well as dramas modeled on them for the feasts of Christmas, Epiphany, and the Ascension.
Although three centuries would elapse between early liturgical utterances of Quem queritis and full-blown development of Italian oratorio (and without “continuous development from the former to the latter,” in Smither’s authoritative assessment), we still do well to remember the power of the word. The closer any translation can come to reflecting the force of the original, the better. Since English-speaking moderns (especially journalists and advertisers) have fled from the use of “whom,” and lapped up the casual construct “looking for” as a substitute for the verb “seek” - I find the combination “Whom are you looking for?” as odd as a woman dressed in a sequined top and worn-out joggers.
I wonder what kind of artistic development such a loosey-goosey translation is likely to engender in future generations.
March 24th, 2008
Posted by
Professor Carol |
Music, Religion |
no comments
