588. Universities

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

The university has been a fraught space in recent years, in the midst of conflict and controversy. Far from being seen as an ivory tower, where scholars talk to each other in a language no one else could understand, it now seems to be regarded as a hotbed of the radical left, where faculty plant dangerous ideas in the minds of impressionable students. A university education, even at public institutions, has got so expensive that many students emerge heavily in debt. Also in the United States, admissions programs that sought to redress the legacy of racism that has denied so many students a university education have been overturned by the Supreme Court. But I’m going to talk about something else altogether: the way universities open up the world, both to their students and to the surrounding community.

A university education is often evaluated on its ability to secure higher-paid jobs for its graduates. And at an average of $26,000/per year for public institutions and nearly $56,000/year for private ones, students and their parents are certainly entitled to demand tangible results. However, most people who have been to college or university know that it brings as many intangible benefits as it does measurable ones. One inestimable benefit of a university education is the way it opens up the world to the student. While narrower vocational and professional programs may prepare the student for a particular job, a university education prepares the student for life in its broadest sense. I can personally attest to this. 



As a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1970s majoring in English and American literature and language, most of my classes focused on literature and culture from Britain and the U.S. However, I also had the rare opportunity to study the Sanskrit language and Vedanta philosophy. Ironically, our family had just immigrated from India, where I had not had been able to study Sanskrit in high school, but my U.S. university education allowed me to fill that gap.

Outside the classroom the university gave me the opportunity to learn about struggles for freedom unfolding around the world. In the Spring of 1972 a group of African American students occupied a building on campus calling for Harvard to divest stocks in Gulf Oil, which was providing important foreign exchange dollars for the Portuguese government in Angola. I joined other students who rallied outside the building in support of the same cause and of my courageous fellow-students.

      (photo: CBS Boston)

Fifty years later, as another U.S.-funded war rages, college campuses are again engaged in divestment campaigns. On April 5th, 2024, The Harvard Divinity School Student Association passed a resolution urging the Harvard Management Company — which oversees Harvard’s $50.7 billion endowment — to divest from “weapons manufacturers, firms, academic programs, corporations, and all other institutions that aid the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians.” The previous week, on March 29, 2024, Harvard Law School’s Student Government passed a similar resolution. Today, on university campuses around the U.S.,  students are again calling for their institutions to divest their endowments from corporations that profit from the war in Gaza. 

                       Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, c. 1974-5

I remember Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden speaking on campus back in 1974 or 1975 on behalf of their newly-formed Indochina Peace Campaign. They had both traveled to Vietnam, were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, and had taken the decision to lobby Congress to deny military funding to then-President Nixon. To this end, Tom Hayden delivered a series of six lectures on American imperialism in the Capitol building itself. In April 1974, the House voted 177-154 to deny the President’s request for funding, and the Senate followed suit.

Chinua Achebe address a group at UMass Amherst, March 1988

In the late 1980 and early 1990s, the University of Massachusetts brought the world to me. As a graduate student in postcolonial literature I had the extraordinary good fortune to study the African novel with the Nigerian “father of African literature” Chinua Achebe, while he was a visiting professor. During that time I was also able to hear the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, South African writer Miriam Tlali, just to name a few world writers and artists who came to this large public university in our small New England town. The South African writers taught me a great deal about the system of apartheid and were active in the struggle against it.

For years I taught at Worcester State in Central Massachusetts, a public university which had less funding available for bringing luminaries to campus. Nevertheless, we found ways to bring the wider world to our students, both in and out of the classroom. By this time I was a faculty member teaching world literature, postcolonial literature, and global studies. Our library housed the Dennis Brutus Collection, an archive of personal papers donated to the university by the South African poet-in-exile who came to campus more than once during my time there. Other campus visitors included the spokesperson for an indigenous tribe in Ecuador trying to save their forests and way of life, speakers on the root causes and prevention of genocide, learning from the tragedy of Rwanda, on favelas in Brazil, and on the global conflicts sparked by climate crisis. In addition to the more popular English-speaking destinations of Britain and Australia, faculty-led study abroad opportunities for our students included trips to India and to Central and South America—Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.

          Sona Jobarteh and her band

It is not only the students who benefit from a university’s portal to the wider world; the surrounding community does as well. In retirement, we live in walking distance from the university campus, and the wealth of international events—lectures, musical performances, film series, plays—is staggering. Just two weeks ago, for instance we attended a free outdoor concert by the Gambian artist Sona Jobarteh, and over the years we have also attended concerts on campus by sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, sarod virtuoso Ali Akbar Khan, the great qawaali singer and composer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the late great reggae singer Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals. The UMass faculty includes eminent scholars and public intellectuals  from around the world who give book talks and lectures, all of which are open to the public. Our own lives are enriched by the many graduate students from the Indian subcontinent.

According to 2022 campus data provided by UMass Amherst, in 2022, 7% of the 24,000 enrolled undergraduates come from outside the U.S.–1680 students; and, as of Fall 2023, 34% of the approximately 8000 graduate students—2,677 students from 101 different countries. If, in the current nativist political climate, some may balk at these figures, know that in many cases it is these students who help keep the university going. According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, “Over one million international students contributed $40.1 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2022-2023 academic year,” and their economic activity supported 368,333 U.S. jobs. Beyond numbers, the engaged presence of these students helps to create a vibrant society, infusing the communities around the country with their ideas, inventions, and expertise.

On a personal level, international students and faculty whom I have met at UMass or at other universities over the years are now my dearest friends. They mean the world to me.

 

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

524. Something Else Will Stand Beside It

                 Shadow & Light healing and coaching (Facebook)

At the end of another turbulent year, when we simultaneously look backward and forward, it is tempting to paint the picture in broad strokes. Human societies everywhere are riven by starkly opposing forces that cannot meet except in violence and war. There are no complexities, there is no compromise, which is good for the armaments industry, disastrous for ordinary people. But—thank goodness there is always a but—this is not all there is. One can almost always look differently at a dire situation without deluding oneself that things are better than they clearly are. For as the late, great writer Chinua Achebe used to say, in the words of an Igbo proverb, “Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.”

 

Achebe first quotes this proverb in an early essay, Chi in Igbo Cosmology, in his 1975 collection, Morning Yet on Creation Day. The concept of the chi is not a simple one, but Achebe introduces it here:

In a general way we may visualize a person’s chi as his other identity in spiritland – his spirit being complementing his terrestrial human being; for nothing can stand alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it.

He goes on to explore and explain the chi through the saying, “when a man says yes, his chi also says yes,” but also in situations where, no matter how hard he may try, “his chi does not agree.” If a person acts in harmony with her chi, she can achieve great things; but also, if a person works hard and persistently she may still succeed despite her chi; and then again, at times, through no fault of her own, a person may try to defy her chi and yet fail again and again. Perhaps she needs to take a different tack. In broader social terms Achebe explains that “nothing is absolute.” No matter how strongly a person or group asserts its identity, ideology, belief system, there will be another, equally strongly-held belief beside it. Because that “Something Else” will not go away however much it is sought to be expelled or exterminated, society too needs to take a different tack.

In Achebe’s modern classic, Things Fall Apart, readers are shown the main character Okonkwo’s shortcomings as well as his strengths; they are two sides of the same coin. My students often sought to damn and dismiss Okonkwo because of his character flaws, but in the spirit of the Igbo proverb, I always tried to remind them that each of these flaws also manifested themselves in an admirable quality. In the case of Okonkwo, who was such a hard worker that he saw all play as worthless, such a hypermasculine warrior that he saw all peace-making as weakness, his chi agreed with him to a point—until it did not agree. As we face a new year, let us consider Achebe’s wisdom on the personal and the global level.

One of many Igbo folktales incorporated into Things Fall Apart is the story of Mosquito and Ear, (retold in the children’s picture book Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears). A mosquito is small and pesky, and a large and powerful person may just see it as a nuisance. But in Achebe’s novel, Ear disregards Mosquito at his own peril. Chinua Achebe explains the importance of listening to other voices in a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers:

Up to a point the strong person even forgets that the weak person may have something to say, you see, because he is simply there; he is a fixture, you simply talk at him, you see. A governor, a British governor of Southern Rhodesia, once said, “The partnership between us, the whites, and the blacks, is a partnership of the horse and its rider.” And he wasn’t trying to be funny. Seriously he thought so. Now that’s what we want the West to get rid of, because we lack imagination when we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of the person we oppress. If we were able, if we had enough imagination to put ourselves in those shoes, things would begin to happen. So it is important that we listen, that we develop the ability to listen to the weak, not only in Africa but even in your own society. The strong must listen to the weak.

Back in 1990, a third of a century ago now, I had the good fortune to take a graduate seminar on the African novel with Chinua Achebe himself, who was a visiting professor at UMass Amherst that year. In one exchange, which I remember with embarrassment and not a little shame, I argued with him, challenging him quite disrespectfully. The great man kept his cool, the callow student not so much. The note accompanying my end-of-semester grade included the mild observation, “inclined to hold strong opinions.” This inclination, held through the years, has certainly dogged my progress, as has the failure to really listen.

So at this juncture, contemplating the year ahead, and considering how we can renew ourselves as well as our wounded world, let us remember the proverb, “wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.” However passionately we feel about something, woe betide us if we close our ears to that small but persistent voice in our ears that tells us what we may not want to hear, but may be the key to our very survival.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

458. Graduate School

This is the seventh entry in a month-long series, Fifty years in the United States: An immigrant’s perspective, as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Graduate School. 

In 1987, twelve years after having completed my B.A. in English, I found myself in graduate school in an English MA-PhD program. I say “found myself” because never in a million years had I considered going for a doctorate until I was actually doing it. After moving to the farm in the early 1980s and casting about for some worthwhile employment in the surrounding towns, it struck me that since the local schools were failing to teach the children to read, I might usefully get my M.A. in Teaching and become a reading specialist. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but reading had always been my passion. However, the local state college didn’t offer enough courses to enable me to complete the MAT, so they recommended that I apply to the nearest state university, some 30 miles away. With a two-year-old baby a 60-mile roundtrip commute already pushed my limit, so UMass Amherst was the only graduate school to which I applied, and the English department only had an MA-PhD program. Though initially I told myself that I could simply stop at the M.A., it was soon clear that I was going to go all the way. But if my graduate studies came about by accident, then—despite the inevitable, and not inconsiderable, costs to other areas of my life—it was a fortunate accident, because in some very important ways they brought me back to myself.

I have always been told that I talk too much. My primary school report cards said so, and so did my high-school friends’ entries in my autograph book. The move to high school in the U.S. at fifteen didn’t shut me up either, as I felt fully accepted by my small group of friends, all of whom for one reason or another were not part of the myriad cliques that divided the school. But college did silence me. My typical mode as an undergraduate was to slouch in the back with dark glasses on, metaphorically speaking, feeling completely out of place, and routinely tormenting myself at the thought of all my parents’ hard-earned money that I was wasting. I made few friends in my first two years there and spent more time wondering what I was doing there than actually doing something. It was only after taking a year off to study in London that I returned to the States with a sense of purpose, and finally learned a great deal in my final year. But most of the time I felt like an outsider in an alien environment with people who didn’t understand or include me and didn’t have the least interest in doing so. No doubt many fellow-students felt that way too, but my old gregarious self went into eclipse during those years, especially in classroom settings, where I hardly said a word unless called upon.

Merle Hodge

Returning to university for graduate school, I was a few years older than most of my cohort, and had the confidence of the intervening years of life experience. It was also very lucky for me that at the outset I met a group of young international faculty from India and South Africa, barely older than I was, who mentored and introduced me to an emergent field that I seemed to have been waiting for all my life. Looking at the course catalog for my first semester I noticed that a Dr. Ketu Katrak, a professor with an Indian-sounding name, was offering a course called “Commonwealth Literature.” Interesting, I thought, literature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? But it turned out to be literature of the British Commonwealth, the name the Britisher gave to an emergent body of writing that, in the late 1980s, was about to rename itself postcolonial literature.

Chinua Achebe

In that first course we read works by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ousmane Sembène and Ama Ata Aidoo from Africa, by Merle Hodge and George Lamming from the Caribbean, Anita Desai and Mulk Raj Anand from India, and I was hooked. Where had these works been hiding all my life? As an undergraduate I hadn’t been able to read anything other than British and American literature written well before the Second World War. A Passage to India (1924), the most recent British novel on the curriculum there and the only one set in India, had been written by an Englishman, albeit a wonderful writer deeply critical of British colonial rule. With Ketu Katrak graciously consenting to become my dissertation director, I immersed myself in the study of twentieth-century literatures from India, Africa, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora and the years just flew by, until one day Andrew gently reminded me that perhaps it was time for me to finish up, and at last I did, eight years after I had begun.

I was only taking two courses a semester because I was teaching at the same time and Nikhil was only two years old when I began my studies. Both my guys were nothing if not supportive. Andrew and I barely saw each other during those first years of grad school, because he was with Nikhil in Winchendon while I was away at UMass and I was with Nikhil while he was away at the press in Boston. Dear Andrew would occasionally nod off while reading bedtime stories to Nikhil and I would return to find the baby wide awake, beaming from ear to ear, with his dad fast asleep and snoring. Returning to Winchendon the day of my PhD qualifying exam, little Nikhil told me that he had kept all his fingers crossed for me all day. As a three-year-old he rode to the administration offices on my hip when the unionizing graduate employees were calling for family health insurance and childcare support (both of which we won). And he met many of the postcolonial writers and scholars who passed through the five-college area, including Anita Desai and her teenage daughter Kiran, who babysat for him for a semester while I was taking an African literature class with Chinua Achebe.

Shakespeare-Wallah (1965)

I’ll close with an anecdote from graduate school that exemplifies what I’ve been trying to feel my way toward. One semester I was auditing a Shakespeare class with the brilliant Normand Berlin (who at twice our age put us students to shame with his energy). My classmates knew their Shakespeare much better than I did; but of a class full of Shakespeare lovers, the two students who were head-and-shoulders above the rest came from Asia: one woman from Manila, the Philippines, and the other from India, a Bengali woman from Calcutta. My point is that in this particular context in the late 1980s, foreigners and immigrants like us were not outsiders, but at the center of an exciting new literary-cultural movement. We didn’t have to slouch in the back with dark glasses on as I had as an undergraduate. (America’s honeymoon with the Other didn’t last long; but that’s another story.)

The point is that this new field of literary studies gave me permission to delve deeply into literature and history that told my story and the stories of my parents. While the British Empire had invaded countries around the world and grown wealthy at their expense, my father had traveled to study in England, where and my mother had met and fallen in love, returning to India with her after my birth. I had grown up in newly Independent India in English-medium schools reading English children’s books (very good ones, I hasten to add). But it was only after coming to the United States that I started studying the literatures, cultures, and histories of the countries I had left behind. Now it became my mission to help students who might not have been exposed to this wealth of literature from around the world to fall in love with it as I had, and to see that the world was there to learn from rather than to dominate.

I was still talking too much, but now I had a captive audience.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents