BACK TO SCHOOL

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2023 September Blog                                              By Chuck Peek

Recently, Nancy and I had the pleasure of being present in the peanut gallery for the gathering of notables for the Groundbreaking ceremonies for the future Rural Health Education Building on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Kearney for the education of rural health care providers. That’s a lot of “for”s, and in that FOR-est, lots of trees can get lost. That’s why we might want to go “back to school.”

At the groundbreaking we were assured by the speakers that this was, indeed, an historical event, a project that will make a profound difference in our state, a unique cooperation of all the colleges at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and our campus, a life-changer for rural Nebraska for decades to come. We were promised by more than one speaker that 20 years from now we would still be remembering this occasion, and at nearly 81 years of age I was ready live out that promise.

It was a pleasure to be present because, in my judgment, all those things are true: it was an historic event and could have many benefits for our citizens and did come about as a result of a unique coalition of forces, all of which would, today, be rare for either state or nation.

The speaker who carried the most weight was Jeffrey Gold, Chancellor of the Medical Center. He spoke knowledgeably to the desperate need for rural health care professionals, and he was articulate in his promotion of the project the new building will house. Other speeches either followed suit, or were the kind of “thank you’s” that have to be made on such occasions, or were of the “aw shucks, ain’t this grand” variety.

One of the secrets to holding public office in Nebraska—or at least holding it for very long—is that you have to make a whole lot of folks accept you as their neighbor. All too often the neighborliness presumes some not very flattering stereotypes of what we rural Nebraskans are like.

There was, of course, a lot of self-congratulation. That doesn’t bother me much—most of the efforts that go into this kind of achievement are unsung, so if they can’t be sung a bit on this kind of occasion, they never will be sung. Fine, congratulations, even self-congratulatory speeches, those are to be expected. Most people don’t get very far beyond needing to be thanked, especially if they are putting up money.

Our Chancellor was neither articulate nor inarticulate—just a bit halting as he moved from script to impromptu comments, but he was passionate, he hit all the right notes, and he was a gracious host. On the whole, though, what disturbed the celebration was what was not said, or, in not being said, was covered up with statements that pretended things were so that simply aren’t. And those things not only need said, but the future fulfillment of the project’s promise may well depend on looking at what was overlooked or miscolored.

In one respect at least, rural Nebraska may not be so different from rural anywhere else or from urban anywhere for that matter. Under pretty much the same conditions, same pressures, same abundance or dearth of resources, some communities or regions flourish while others dwindle or perish. Case in point, some communities where there has been an influx of immigrants flourish while others, succumbing to unreasoned fears and antipathies, perish. One or two places of note met the influx head on, welcomed and accommodated their new neighbors, and moved on; equally one or two fought the new reality—and declined.

Similarly, almost the whole of rural Nebraska has suffered from a lack of adequate health care, be it physical, emotional, or mental. Some of the figures cited in the speeches spoke of this being the case in all but three of our rural counties. There is more than one cause for this, and in a gathering such as the groundbreaking I don’t expect speakers to target the political reasons. But political reasons there are aplenty!

Some of the decline in the availability of care came from our former governor at first refusing, and then when mandated, dragging his feet in expanding Medicaid, which cost our state millions and forced the closing of not a few facilities. Some of the decline came from causes not at all related to health care itself, causes such as anti-immigrant fervor as I just alluded to, fervor whipped up by some of those who supported this health care project. Some of it came from a greater interest in being able to carry a weapon than in assuring the safety of our kids. That’s politics, and you don’t expect it to come up at a celebration like this. Fine.

But one of the principle causes for decline has nothing to do with politics, at least not directly, and everything to do with what has happened to and is happening to education, something that might be germane on a university campus. That something has to do with our culture and what it values and what creates one kind of culture versus another; that is, it has to do with what fundamentals are so valued as to create a culture that cares, cares in this case about health and health care and so, necessarily, cares about the public good and civil behavior. And the very campus on which we met, as is also true of thousands of others across the United States, has often under-valued or even forsaken those fundamentals. (As a former department chair, I can tell you horror stories about the injustice of vertical cuts!)

Good questions improve the possibility of good answers. We might encourage asking just what qualities of heart and mind form a life-giving culture? The answer is not at all obscure: Critical Intelligence, Creative Imagination, and a feeling both for personal dignity and public good. Once those take hold, form the ethos of a people, then every other skill imaginable—from beekeeping to bookkeeping—can contribute, but no skill set is worth much or will last long without that embedding of cultural values, embedded not through brainwashing but through reasoned and spirited discussions informed by history, language, literature and other works of the imagination, and philosophy.

So where are those taught, where are they to be found and transmitted? One answer: anywhere! But that is not very helpful, for what can happen anywhere doesn’t usually happen just anywhere, certainly not among a larger number of people and over a greater amount of space. In those conditions, where is the somewhere?

Well, we know that civilizations have risen among oral cultures as well as, later, in literate cultures. Orality or literacy or, now, orality and literacy are the pre-condition of transmission of values. Speaking and listening, writing and reading, and because numbers are also a language, then calculating and measuring, and because no one can experience everything, then from the ability to discern, to imagine, from access to the past and vision for the future.

The old fashioned (and not quite comprehensive) catch-phrase was “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” It is valuable to know the temperature when things melt, but you can learn how to read and write without knowing that; you can’t know that without knowing how to read and write, speak and listen, calculate and measure, imagine and evaluate.

Where, then, in our world today, are those fundamentals taught? Granted that they aren’t taught at all where they are not well-taught, still the general truth is that students learn them by taking courses in them, often in departments like history and economics, art and literature, writing and debating. You put learners in choruses or on stages or at easels, in laboratories or on field trips or at telescopes. You acquaint them with what the world knows and how it came to know it. And you help them to understand that, if there is no trust in truth, beauty, and goodness, then the rest of knowledge can easily become destructive, pernicious, soul-sapping. Knowledge without values gives us the Nazi guard in the play who read Goethe as he processed prisoners through the gate to the lethal showers.

But for some time now, both in our colleges and in our pre-K to 12 schools, the insistence on and promotion of those skills and the places they are taught have received less honor, less support, less defense. Students have been discouraged from studying them (just as teachers have been discouraged from teaching them), and then the budgets for those areas get cut because, lo and behold, fewer students took the courses their culture told them were not worth taking. Go figure!

But to only look at the enrollments in arts and humanities classes means you will miss most of the picture. Just for instance, most of the singers in the chorus aren’t majoring in music. The chorus may well have brought them to campus, but once here they major in and enroll in courses all across the curriculum. Cut out the chorus, and everyone suffers.

School administrations, at all levels, have made costly decisions in favor of lopsided curricula or vocational education and at the expense of the foundations. The moment budgets are tight, the foundations are the first to suffer; the minute the school or school system must put its trust in values or in expediency, it opts for expediency. It houses a history department, but it doesn’t consult history; it houses an art department but it tells students that they should major in “what will make them a living.” And it blames the decline in the numbers of students resident at its ever-larger campus on everything but the cumulative effect of its own decisions.

To be fair, however, much of the blame for what is coming down right and left across the country lies with those who were supposed to be teaching all those foundational things. For nearly two generations now, many of the faculty in the humanities and fine arts adopted discipline-specific jargons and then mistook learning those jargons for learning to think, to feel, to function. Post-modernism often left students with the impression that no idea was superior or inferior to any other, that a phone book was as much literature as the Pardoner’s Tale, that they were consumers in a game where the customer is always right.

Now, these declines, these disasters, are not universal. While some universities have eliminated teaching almost everything foundational, in other universities foundational studies thrive. They are taught well and students flock to them because they are challenged to grow mentally and emotionally. Sadly, though, among the smaller, regional universities – or the pop-up universities that claimed the title just because they started teaching a lot of different disciplines—the foundational studies are more likely to decline (or be eliminated) rather than thrive.

Even those differences, however, point out that the declines are not the result of some immutable fate…they are chosen by the administrations and faculties of the schools themselves. And those choices stem from the toxic culture that grows where only power, prestige, privilege, and popularity are the reigning values. They stem from citizens who will give a half a billion dollars to renovate a stadium but not a tenth of that to fund the university system.

What was not said at the groundbreaking was that the university is undermining the potential success of the very programs it would like to promote. Specifically, its layoffs of faculty (based on enrollment declines it engineered) will make it less likely that its purpose, a major upgrade in rural health services, is likely to succeed, at least in part, possibly at all. Whose imagination will be captured by the chance to serve in dwindling rural environments if their own values are mostly those of the reigning culture of greed and ignorance?

Would fulfilling the purpose for the new programs training people to provide health care mean classes in specific areas? In, say, STEM? Of course. No one wants their diagnosis to depend on a medtech who has been poorly trained. But without the foundational studies that turn out students dedicated less to making a living and more to pursuing fruitful and useful lives, without graduates excited about shaping the society in terms of values rather than empty ideas of success and failure, all the specifics pertaining to, say, dental hygiene, will not produce the desired end. They are a necessary but not a sufficient cause of the desired result.

The Groundbreaking lauded a “Nebraska Way” that supports faculty and staff; and the very people lauding that are busily closing departments and firing faculty that aren’t protected by tenure. And here is the irony: while there is not as much dead wood as critics yammer about, there is always some deadwood among faculty, but the people fired will not likely be among them. We’ll be losing the young and their promise for the future, not those whose legacy is the past.

And I’ll bet this: we won’t be firing the host of assistant chancellors and assistant deans that have proliferated in our whole system for forty years or any of the top-heavy staff of a central administration of dubious value to any of the campuses and dubious commitment to our state and its educational system.  And we won’t sell off any university property where we could build yet more buildings rather than, not as a last but as the first resort firing the life-blood of a real educational experience that can conceive of, commit to, and pursue the public good. And we won’t take 10% off the stadium renovation to support the university it serves. And we won’t dare look at what kinds of courses continue to be taught when vital courses in the Liberal and Fine Arts fall by the wayside?

And, oh, by the way, the Admiral who sought to shape up the ship by strategic strikes that endanger the hull of the ship? He’s leaving for a bigger salary. I’d be careful if I were the university hiring him.

Kearney, Nebraska

September 29, 2023

Next blog: most likely the All Saints “In Memoriam” at the end of October…you know, Halloween! (If that is not frequent enough to suit you, go read Charles Pierce or catch George Ayoub’s weekly column in The Nebraska Examiner, or follow the “nitrates” story in Flatwater Press!)

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN, at least not right away

In Memoriam Memorial Day Weekend-Labor Day Weekend 2023

Family, friends, and acquaintances

Delores Albertini, at so many Cather affairs, her husband Virgil and I would be involved in an event or meeting and Nancy and Delores would be the “trailing spouses” who chatted away the hours. Delores was astute and engaged and she and Virgil had lived long lives together during which she helped to edit Teaching Cather.

Deanna Gustafson Barnds, wife of Fr. Bill Barnds, formerly of the Diocese of Nebraska, mother of Kent and Glenda, daughter in law of yet another cleric once in the diocese, who reminds me of a line in a prayer I use: devoted to every duty, faithful to every trust.

Karl Borden, econ professor at UNK, who had a heart for supporting good causes, whether locally through information from friends or internationally through Rotary. I called him once with a cause I thought would interest him and he gave generously.

Richard Bush, local dentist with roots (sorry for such a bad pun) in McCook, and, while it was open, a very good racket ball player at the Royal Court, whose piano renditions of mostly “Christian” music entertained lots of people.

Ed Chinick, a companion in twelve-step recovery, lately of Seattle, returning to Kearney for burial with family, whose sense of humor took in that he was for a short while one of five guys named Ed who populated a large meeting. A Knight of Columbus.

Patty Felton, wife of classmate John Felton; you could tell how she was esteemed by the Facebook comments of the classmates closest to John.

Bob Gerten, former colleague from UNK and a companion in 12-step recovery, who spoke and witnessed to recovery in powerful ways; friends despite an immense political chasm between us

Jerry Grossart, partner in a distinguished Kearney law firm, where a former secretary of mine at UNK was working when I hired her. He’ll be especially missed by Kearney’s Roman Catholic community.

Fred Koontz, long-time director in the UNK theater department and of shows for Kearney Community Theater and our gracious hosts when I performed the marriage for Fred and Laura’s daughter Moray (organizer of the Academy Awards). Memorials go to their scholarship for the UNK theater department.

Ron Kort, for much of is life, a well-regarded teacher at Hastings High School, husband of Betty who was first President of the Cather Foundation Board of Governors and then its Executive Director, buried just a day before Betty’s art show at the Cather Spring Conference

Bill Lyon, formerly a local doctor in Kearney who was very supportive of the Central Nebraska Health Agency when Nancy worked there; his memorials sum up all his live except his many travels, memorials going to St. Jude’s Research Hospital or to the Humane Society.

Geri Mallory, long-serving treasurer of St. Stephen’s, Grand Island, and one of the first women to work at Fonner Park, faithful participant in the St. Mary’s Bible Study, and advisor to one Rector after another, including me.

Rick Miller, former Chair of the UNK Psychology Department, very dedicated to campus governance, and worthy opponent in the battles over “general studies”—his death began with a heart attack while sailing, that is while doing what he loved.

Mother Nicolette Papanek, interim Rector at St. Augustine’s, Elk Horn, before Fr. Ben succeeded her, remembered at St. A’s for her mantra: ‘bringing out the best in others with love, laughter, and lunch.’

Susan Robinson, ever faithful member of St. Mark’s on the Campus, with the longest membership of any current members, going back to when my father became the vicar there in 1962. She faithfully corresponded with Nancy and me from our interim year at SMOC in 2020 to her death.

Bruce Stewart. In academia today, Bruce stood out—not only a good math teacher (and sometime chair of the UNK department) and a congenial colleague, but a man of well-rounded intellect and a philosophical temperament, who over a cigarette could expound on music, Johnny Carson’s monologue, and college business with equal ease.

Martha Tweedy Long time stalwart at St. Elizabeth’s, Holdrege, along with her husband Roger; I supplied there often and long enough to feel as though it was a former parish and, since the current priest in charge is recuperating from surgery, I’m privileged to preside

Sharon Work. I never met Sharon, but certainly “knew” her from times with her husband and later on from his FB posts. Her last days were not easy but his care for her allowed her to go from arms of love in this world to arms of love in the next. Thanks, Jim!

John Wunder. Formerly director of the Center for Great Plains Studies our of UNL, and primarily responsible for my getting to teach a semester at Texas State on exchange. A gentle but determined and courageous academic and public intellectual. When Elaine Nelson Blansett graduated from UNK, I directed her to John Wunder for her next academic steps, and John knew she was the real deal right from the start. It was she who let me know of John’s passing. John’s daughter took a class with me at UNK.

Special Feature

Altberg, John Edward. John was one of the first people I got to know when we moved to McCook, Nebraska, in 1953. We were in band together and he was my debate partner in high school until he graduated a year ahead of me. Even in high school, he ran the photo department at Prest Drug, and knew all there was to know in those days about pipes and pipe tobacco. We’d prepare for debates at his place, listening to classical music and smoking our pipes and chasing their dog back upstairs.

Before high school, he’d grab a .22 rifle, hang a camera around his neck, and head to the country-side around McCook to take photos. A trip to Japan to spend part of a summer with his dad at the base where his dad was the adjutant served to instill in John a desire for travel, adventure, and flying. Leaving McCook not too long after his stint at McCook Junior College, he rose to the upper echelons of the Kodak company, living in Rochester, St. Louis, and San Francisco, failing only in his attempts to get Kodak to move into the digital age. Bye-bye Kodak.

In high school, John and I were the go-to acolytes who were privileged to get a half-day out of school to assist the rector with funerals. Having his driver’s license a year ahead of me, we’d head out on the dirt roads around McCook on weekends, where he get in the passenger seat, I in the driver seat, and he’d join the efforts of my dad and Dean Kilburn to teach me to drive, a clandestine favor that ended when I put his mother’s car in a ditch and we had to find a farmer to bring his tractor and pull us out.

Deeply religious, in part through the influence of his family and in part through the influence of two of St. Alban’s rectors, my dad and his predecessor Bob Folkes, Johnny was eventually ordained in the Anglican Church of North America.  He eventually also flew—first gliders, and then gaining his sport pilot license. We joined together to present St. Alban’s with pictures of all the men who had been ordained from that parish, my providing him with photos, he photo-shopping and framing them. One of his last photographic adventures carried out in what I would guess was one of his last times in McCook, was to join with classmate Don Morgan to produce a photo book/narrative about the Frank Lloyd Wright house in McCook, called while we were growing up and for years before “the Sutton house.”

John was the rector of his church until just shortly before his death on Orcas Island where he and his second wife were living. The last time I actually sat down for a long talk with him was over coffee in St. Louis when he was there with Kodak and we’d visit Nancy’s folks in Belleville, but we’d kept in touch for years.  About five years ago, he’d stopped answering my emails, and periodically I’d try again to no avail. I suspected then—but didn’t really want to know—that John had died. I just today decided to face up to it and find out. Diane Lyons kindly answered my inquiry by sending me his obituary.

His obituary read in part, “In addition to photography, John explored a vast array of other interests…hunting, flyfishing, piloting, sailing, backpacking, cross-country skiing…classical music and trumpeting, cycling, home improvement . . . it was his practice to read, practice, and ask questions; he had mind that never forgot a thing it had learned.”

The curiosity, sense of adventure, and pursuit of multiple interests—those don’t make a boy a popular figure in high school, at least not where John and I were raised. You would be hard-pressed to find many high school graduates who had a rockier start in life and still did more with his life once out of high school than John. I’m belatedly today mourning his passing, and thinking how glad I am that we were friends. John, may you rest in peace and may light perpetual shine upon you! July 11, 2023.

The Altbergs from an old holiday greeting

In the news

Bob Barker, 99; don’t know about the truth, but these are the consequences and we can only presume the price was right.

Tony Bennett, despite the credit he gave to Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, Bennett may have been the most accomplished stylist of them all, and he knew other talent when he saw it—and often sang with them. One of our fondest memories is the Orpheum Theater in Omaha, our dear friends Jerry and Cathy Parsons (Jerry was a huge fan), and Tony Bennett singing, singing one song after asking that the sound system be turned off—just to show he could still do it!

Jimmy Buffett: heard him sing his most famous song at a Berkshire-Hathaway annual meeting—at the point where the MC would introduce Warren Buffet, he asked for a warm welcome for Mr. Buffett, and out came Jimmy singing; too much sun in Margaritaville.

Daniel Ellsberg, military analystof the “Pentagon Papers” fame, whose revelations helped end the Vietnam war, a war that ranks with our treatment of Natives and minorities as one of our great scandals. He was one of the first to call that war what it was: not meeting aggression from the north, not a civil war, but a war of American aggression, and, though cleared of wrong-doing by the courts, he faced anywhere from 30 to 115 years in prison for putting his country first.

Mohamed Al-Fayed, Egyptian owner of the famed Paris Hotel, Hotel Riz, as well as of the famed London department store, Harrods. The Fulham Football Club is also bereft. Preceded in death by the famed Princess’s boyfriend, Dodi.

Glenda Jackson, stunning British actor, aka Queen Elizabeth, but most memorable to me for Marat/Sade, and the real-life sequel of politics in the Labour Party and early membership as an “anti-Nazi”—would we had more of her today.

Cormac McCarthy, whose Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men earned him a place in the best American writers of his time and whose unflinching realism was only bearable because of the beauty of his writing.

Randy Meisner followed his own exhortation and took “it to the limit.”

Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, possibly as some say a modern Peter Pan, or possibly a sad man who made people laugh, which would not be new in the history of comedians.

Bill Richardson, former New Mexico Governor, Ambassador to the U.N., member of Clinton’s cabinet (as he would have been in Obama’s except for a “timely” investigation into his business practices that was dropped as soon as he withdrew his nomination); the NYT calls him the “Champion of Hostages Held Abroad.”

Pat Robertson, the fool who tried to pray away a hurricane on his TV program and tried to pass himself off as a religious leader, even entering once the presidential race. Hope death holds lots of surprises for him!

Robbie Robertson (no relation to Pat, I’m pretty sure), Canadian born—one of the Toronto crowd—who left working carnivals to play with several bands including with Bob Dylan before helping make The Band famous with “Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” joining The Band just in time for Woodstock, there and elsewhere singing of the American experience.

Treat Williams, another actor whose career spanned decades. Who knew motorcycling in Vermont could be that dangerous. This time a moose was not at fault! He’d have been safer by far in 1941, or coming to fame in Hair.