My favorite St Mary's Professor

My favorite St. Mary's professor  has become a sort of distant pal over time.  He's in the theatre and teaches history at St. Mary's College in South Bend.  His insights into the current cultural scene may seem a bit biased to many folks.. but they make  sense to me and twisting the dagger a little.. seems like an okay idea to me.

This is Bill's latest take that points up what we al lmay susect but may not articulate quite as well. Thanks, Bill.. 

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From the fertile mind of Bill Svelmoe. 

South Bend, Indiana

"I’m enjoying a few lingering moments on the deck before heading into the office with a purpose for the first time since May 2021. Got to print off some syllabi.

But it probably won’t be this version. Yesterday, after a matinee of “Unnecessary Farce,” and then a cast party during which many glasses of my jalapeno-cucumber margaritas were, how to put it, enjoyed, I wrote a syllabus for my freshman survey.

Below are the “Course Objectives.” I’ll probably have to rip this up and start over. Don’t want to scare the newbies before they even make it to their first football game.

Course Objectives

1. For many of you, this is the first semester of your first year in college, often billed as the greatest four years of your life. The classroom should be part of that word “greatest.” It’s not, “greatest four years going to parties and football games, and then, oh yeah, I have to go to class.” Class should be something you look forward to. History is a discipline that is inherently interesting. It’s my challenge to have you thinking, when you get out of bed on TTh, “Cool. I get to start my day with some history!”

2. But let’s be honest. We are living through a very dangerous time in history. Before you graduate, you may see the end of the American experiment in democracy. It may end in violence. You may see nuclear weapons used on battlefields in Europe and Asia. If you live a normal life span, you will almost certainly see the destruction of large sections of our world through fire, storm, and flood. A vast human tide will move away from coastal regions and march north, as unbearable heat blankets much of the globe. I want to help you learn to think historically about the moment through which you are living. This course will help you understand how we got here. Yes, actions and attitudes from centuries ago launched us on this path. Early American history is the gateway drug to all that follows.

3. There is simply no way to talk about American history in 2022 without “being political.” I am genuinely sorry about that. For my entire career at St. Mary’s, I have avoided, at least in introductory courses, engaging with students in a way that would seem to favor one side of our political divide over the other. That is impossible to do going forward. I cannot honestly talk to you about American history without candidly addressing the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and the current iteration of the Republican party. History is about the pursuit of truth and fact. Truth and fact are not priorities for Donald Trump and most of the Republican party today. One of the objectives of this course is to show you the roots of what I will call “Trumpism” in our early history. I would not be a responsible historian if I did not do this. It won’t come up every day. It probably won’t come up most days. But I’m telling you this on day one, so that you know what is coming.

I understand conservatism in my bones. My family is very conservative. The community I grew up in is very conservative. I voted Republican for most of my life. And, although Trumpism is not conservatism, I understand why conservatives have embraced him. And I understand how emotionally taxing it can be to engage in conversations like this. I have lost close friends. I have family that doesn’t speak to me. So I don’t make this decision lightly. But it is a decision I must make. And now you have a decision to make.

4. At the end of the course the student should have a comfortable grasp of the foundational incidents, accidents, and themes pertaining to the history of America through the Civil War. That is the goal of any American history survey course.

It may seem difficult to apply a history so remote to your life today. I make you this promise. After taking this course, you will understand better why this “city on a hill” had the worst response of any western nation to the global pandemic. You will understand better why religion is so deeply entwined with the politics of our nation, for good and/or ill. And you will understand better why the simple declaration that “Black Lives Matter” still arouses such resentment in so many Americans. Why a vice president of the United States could not bring himself to utter those words on national television. Our earliest history still echoes today.

Make no mistake. This will not be a comfortable course. If you’re looking for comfort in 2022, a study of American history is not the place to find it. Yes, there is much in American history to inspire. This is the nation that declared “all men are created equal.” This is the nation, the first in human history, to write a path of hope for regular folk, those not born into privilege. But don’t think for a second that those who were born into privilege really meant what they said. It fell to women, to African Americans, to the vast human tide of immigrants to insist that such words must have meaning beyond parchment promises. A genuine study of American history must focus on that struggle.

Finally, the study of history is one of the paths to wisdom, and wisdom is perhaps the most important quality of a person who can successfully claim to have lived a good life. Wisdom, at least in part, is the ability to make decisions based on an understanding of similar human experience in the past (including of course your own), as well as a capacity to deeply reflect upon one’s own self and identity. History follows no invariable laws, which is why history books are filled with stories about human beings, not formulas and equations. Individuals, strong and weak, good and bad, wise and foolish, have often made a direct impact on the course of history. Understanding another time will assist us as we strive to live well within our own.

Huh, I wonder if I could teach this in Florida???"