Brian Boyd, the admirable annotator of Nabokov's Ada:

Dear All,

I was amused to see this blog from June 24 at http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2004_06_24.html while surfing the net. Note the accurate judgment of Brian Boyd's "sometimes too-complete notes" (but what can I do? better to over-explain and prompt readers to skip than under-explain and have readers think VN has slipped) and the confident rating of ADA.

Brian Boyd

The very first time I ever thought seriously about how to interpret the 1st Amendment's religious clauses, I was in Dennis Hutchinson's First Amendment Class almost two years ago, considering the case of a Utah student who had religious objections to using the F-word, and therefore wanted (and was not getting) permission to not say it in her acting classes.

As I recall, the class's consensus after reading Employment Division v. Smith, which we thought applicable, was that the student had no case (an analysis that I'm no longer sure was correct). Some time ago, the Tenth Circuit disagreed with us (even aside from the compelled speech issue, which we put aside, the Tenth Circuit thought she had legitimate arguments under both Yoder and Sherbert, two cases we had thought more-or-less overruled by Smith).

I see now, via Howard Bashman, that Utah has settled the case (she has since gone elsewhere), thus bringing to a close my very first misguided stab at religious constitutional law.

[When considering the Free Speech clause in the same class, I would also proceed to muff both Virginia v. Black and Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition as well.]

Timothy Burke, who has recently emerged from his too-long blog-slumber, has given us not just a long musing on Third Party Infantilism, but also this essay on designing the 21st Century University from scratch.

The essay is quite fascinating and well-written, but I lack the institutional competence to comment intelligently on most of it. Still, I'm particularly intrigued by the shortest of Burke's three main sections, the idea that universities ought to abandon their role in dorms, dining halls, student organizations, student counseling, health services, and gyms. (Although he will let us keep the IT infrastructure and libraries). In other words, Burke advocates, "that the college would commit in a very aggressive way to rejecting in loco parentis."

I'm intrigued.

As Burke concedes, the move may well cut down on the appropriate places his university could be located (he suggests parts of California, Boston, New York, Chicago, or the North Carolina Research Triangle; he may have reasons for suggesting the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia metro area, but I'm not positive what they are).

We also should question-- though Burke doesn't deal with this, since this idea is still very... ideal-- whether the elimination of "in loco parentis" would be sufficiently popular with, well, parents. Since Burke calls for such an overhaul of the educational system, one shouldn't intrude too many practical considerations into his plan, but even in a Burkean overhaul it doesn't seem like we'll change the fact that college undergraduates are 18-year-olds who have some dependence-- emotional, financial, or both-- on their parents, who therefore exert considerable influence over where those undergraduates will go.

Many parents feel nervous about shipping newly-formed adults off to deal with the newness of a new type of school at the same time as they have to deal with managing life for the first time on their own. (When I left to start school at Chicago, my mother said she wasn't worried about my classes, where she was sure I would be fine, but she was nervous about where and how I would do my laundry. In retrospect, her worries were in the right place.)

It might well be true that A) these concerns are unfounded and B) parents and 18-year-olds could be convinced that these concernes were unfounded, but I'm not at all sure of that, and it's something important for us to grapple with if we think (as I tentatively do) that large quantities of the time, effort, and money spent on student housing, dining, health, emotional well-being, discipline, and extracurricular activities, are wasted (or outright botched).

Thoughts welcome.

Despite tut-tutting from folks like Anthony Rickey (and perhaps Lee Siegel), the folks at De Novo are running a "Survivor: Blogosphere" to pick a new co-blogger for their blog for the summer (and perhaps longer). [Note: This is different than the version of Blog-Survivor I suggested last Novemeber (a post I wrote at the behest of some co-Crescatters).]

Anyway, I have pushed to have some part in an upcoming challenge. Stay tuned, as they say.

Since I still lamentably lack an IPod, I'm forced to burn CDs for my CD player to have the appropriate soundtrack for my morning commute. Tuesday morning, listening to Take Five, I suddenly decided that what I needed was a handful of really good jazz tunes, which had to be: 1) Good (to my ear), 2) Relatively upbeat, 3) Smooth, 4) In my MP3 collection. Despite the DC connection and the train connection, Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" failed both tests 1 and 4. Here's what I ended up with:

1: Take Five, by The Dave Brubeck Quartet (from Time Out)
2: Variation Seven, by the Jacques Loussier Trio (from Variations on Symphony No. 7)
3: One O'clock Jump, by Count Basie
4: Giant Steps, by John Coltrane (from Giant Steps)
5: Night in Tunisia, by Charlie Parker (& Dizzy Gillespie)
6: Summertime, by Miles Davis (from Porgy & Bess)
7: Now You Has Jazz, by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong (from High Society)
8: Lester Leaps In, Lester Young and Count Basie
9: My Funny Valentine, by Miles Davis (from Cookin')
10: Jive At Five, by Count Basie
11: Jumpin' At The Woodside, by Count Basie
12: I Won't Dance, by Frank Sinatra