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LETTERS TO THE EDITORKing’s College Today
The most recent issue of CCT (September) was great. The excerpt from Stand, Columbia was fascinating. Now I’ll have to buy the book! Lee J. Dunn Jr. ’66 Kudos for the 250th Anniversary Special Issue of King’s
College Today. It was informative, colorful and a delight
for a former history major who is keenly interested in the history
of King’s College. Warren L. Kimball ’58 The September issue of CCT was excellent, and I am grateful that it steered me to attend the memorial celebration of Jim Shenton ’49’s life on October 2, a wonderful event. The following Saturday, I decided that this might well be the year that we finally beat Princeton on its home field, and my seatmate, Steve Ronai ’57, and I were ecstatic at our comeback from 20–0 to win 33–27 in the final seconds. With the start of the 250th anniversary celebration, I was baffled by a date I saw on the refurbished frieze in the lobby of Hamilton Hall. As it was not highlighted in blue until recently, the date “1756” was never apparent to me. Looking through the timeline on the website, I still could not associate 1756 with anything significant in the College’s history. Can anyone help? Charlie Feuer ’58 Professor SaidI was moved by the passing of Edward Said. Of all the outstanding professors I had at Columbia College, he was probably the greatest, and he left an indelible mark on me as no one else did. When I was at Columbia, Professor Said was full of the energy and enthusiasm of youth. I visited him one time a couple of years ago at a seminar on Irish literature for undergraduates, and even though his body was wracked with cancer, his mind was full of the same passion of his youth but his thoughts were even more profound and insightful than I even remembered. Although Professor Said was a great critic of the Age of Imperialism, he also had an immense love of the outstanding individual writers who constituted that age. I am sure that in another age, another time, Said would himself have been Sir Richard Burton or Rudyard Kipling. No other critic I have read has been able to capture the absolute joy these writers experienced in the process of discovery. It was as much fun for me to listen to Professor Said talk about Kipling’s Kim as a student or later to read about it in Culture and Imperialism as it was to read the novel. Above all else, Professor Said turned literary criticism into an art and made interpretation a necessary bedfellow of literature. He has had a profound effect on the writing of literature. No Australian author can write a historical novel about that country today without being aware of Said’s insights on the imperial dimensions of Magwitch in Dickens’ Great Expectations. The film version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park also was obviously influenced by Said’s writings on the contextualization of British Imperialism in that novel. On the one hand, Professor Said was tremendously taken with the idea that writers shape their work and their lives around themes and concerns that they had already begun in the production of earlier literary pieces. I, as anyone else, can see that in my life. If I read my life backward, there are certain realities that had they not happened — among them, most importantly, having been a student of Professor Said — my life would have been completely different. On the other hand, Professor Said has contextualized literature into the world of social science and historical discourse and in the actual events, concerns and values of a particular age. It can no longer be assumed that literary critics are people with their heads in the air, concerning themselves about things that have nothing to do with the “real” world. Nor can it be assumed that literary critics don’t know enough about politics, so they don’t have the right to speak about things of which they are ignorant. For ever more, Edward Said has shown us that literature and literary criticism belong to and are a part of the real world of political discourse. For me, Said will always be Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (another work that he taught me), full of irreverence, but also full of the joy of life, whose meaning derives from the actions one takes in the here and now to try to create a new society from the old. Professor Said will be deeply missed. Dr. Alan Z. Weiss ’68 In just a few months, two of the most influential professors — Jim Shenton ’49 and Edward Said — in my Columbia College education (and in my entire education) passed away. I did not get the chance to write about Professor Shenton, but I did not want to let Professor Said’s loss go without writing. I met Edward Said when I was meandering through my English and Comparative Literature major. My era at the College was a goldmine of amazing and brilliant literature professors. One of these giants, my adviser, Edward Tayler, suggested I consider as my senior seminar a course being taught by Professor Said. It was a small class, and Said interviewed the seniors. I prepared as best I could for what I thought would be flurry of questions about my previous studies, and while those did come, he started by grilling me about some campus political issue that I worked on when I was a University senator. From then on, Professor Said and I had the chance to mix our politics with our love for literature and learning. As to the course itself, Professor Said was one of those teachers I have been lucky to have who inspired (perhaps forced) me to go deeper in anything we considered or discussed. I read better because of him, and I surely write better as well. Somehow, I ended up writing my thesis on analyzing Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams as if it were a piece of literature, and it was one of the most difficult and rewarding projects I had in any school. While we kept in somewhat loose touch over the years, Professor Said found time to let me know his views on the few cases or matters I worked on that became matters of public interest and media attention. Just as he had done when I was sitting around the seminar table, however, his comments made me think harder than or in a direction that I had not done on my own. I think that is one of Professor Said’s lasting legacies to all with whom he came into contact. Through the years, as I became more opinionated about issues in the Middle East and as I became a stronger supporter for Israel and its positions and actions, it was all the better for me that Professor Said became more outspoken about his views, many of which infuriated me and about which I could not have agreed less. Yet, I found myself bringing up a “Said point of view” when my friends or family would have discussions about these same Mideast topics, often over holiday tables. After getting over the shock of something I said to provoke more discussion or the other point of view, their response was always something such as, “Oh yeah, he was your professor at Columbia.” My reply then, as it is now, is “Yes he was, and I am a whole lot better off for that time I had with him.” In the classroom, in his books, on the op-ed page or in a television discussion, Professor Said made all of us better thinkers, and isn’t that what a professor is supposed to do? Abbe D. Lowell ’74 Edward Said was my sophomore English teacher at Columbia during the 1967 war. I hadn’t realized that the professor standing before the class in Hamilton Hall was an Arab, much less a Palestinian, and it would be a year or two before I even knew that there could be such a person as a “Palestinian.” I remember his wry tone and how his four o’clock shadow would shine through his cheeks in ways that would remind me of my older brother, who had died a few years before. If anything, I would have thought our professor was Jewish, and a version of my older brother. I don’t remember anything that we studied; only that he radiated a sense of profound culture and compassion, that literature truly mattered, and that a vast intelligence flowed from reading great works. I believe classes were over when the war broke out. I stayed up all night, distraught, and in the very early morning, I sat on the Sundial and read the newspaper. One story reported anti-Jewish riots in Morocco and of Jews getting their throats slit, and I wept in the dawn quiet at the horrors of war and hatred. I had no idea of the tears that my professor may have shed. When Orientalism appeared, and particularly when Said began to speak out about the plight of the Palestinians, I realized that our paths had crossed at a historic juncture, as minor as that encounter may have been in his eyes. He spoke out as a Palestinian sympathetic to the history of Jewish suffering and I as a Jew critical of Israel and Zionism, and the irony of having been in his class in June 1967 was driven home. As the years passed, I would have many occasions to meet him at political events in support of Middle East peace and at academic conferences and to say hello and remind each other of that moment. Said’s intellectual work became increasingly important to me. His approach to literature and culture brought in harsh social realities that had previously been rendered invisible. He brought in politics and history while at the same time exulting in the qualities of literature despite (or even because of) the influence of imperial agendas and other material impositions. To realize how the Orientalist outlook affects George Elliot or Herman Melville or T.S. Eliot only broadens the response to the text; it does not narrow it or denigrate it, as some suggest. Reading Orientalism, I was reminded of the sense I had felt in that classroom in 1967, the deep experience of literature and culture. Edward Said had remained my professor. I cannot call myself one of his close friends, and we were never colleagues. I can only count myself as one of his former students, an unexceptional undergraduate in a required course, but his presence and his work have deeply affected me. I teach at Stanford, and there is no Sundial. But when I heard the news of Edward Said’s death, I walked to the Quad, the center of this campus, and I wept for my teacher. Hilton Obenzinger ’69 In September’s issue is a piece on the opening of the school with a brief history of other schools that the University has started. As an alumnus of the Agnes Russell School, I must defend my alma mater. Agnes Russell was an experimental open classroom school at Teachers College, in the same building as the old Horace Mann School. It spanned first through, I think, sixth grades. My brother and I left in 1972, and the school was not around for long after that. Douglas Mintz ’84 The School at CUSome historical information in “The School at CU Opens” (September) is inaccurate. The Horace Mann School opened in 1887 as The Model School, at 9 University Place. In the early 1890s, its name was changed to Horace Mann. It was organized under the auspices of Teachers College when that new enterprise decided that there should be a school where its teachers in training could try out new ideas in education. Its organizer and first head later achieved some distinction at Columbia — Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. He continued in that role for seven years and was succeeded by Virgil Prettymen. Horace Mann and Teachers College moved to the northern wilds at 120th Street in 1901. The Horace Mann School name is on the front of one of the Teachers College buildings at 120th Street and Broadway. The Speyer School was started in 1899. A 1902 quote: “The Speyer School is intended to test and work out new ideas in education. Horace Mann school has for its function the demonstration of all that is best in teaching and school management under conditions that are as nearly ideal as possible.” The Horace Mann School continued as a co-educational institution until 1914, when the boys above the sixth grade were transferred to a new campus in Riverdale. The lower grades and the older girls continued to reside at 120th Street until 1946. The divided schools were a part of Teachers College until 1947, when the boys’ school became independent and the lower grades and the girls’ school were merged into Lincoln School, which then became the Horace Mann-Lincoln School and some years later the New Lincoln School. During the years of the Horace Mann/Teachers College relationship, Columbia faculty were offered scholarships for their children at HM and HM faculty were given the opportunity to study at Columbia at minimal cost. Much of the above information comes from a book published when Horace Mann celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1987. It’s interesting to see that after some 115 years, with a 60-year hiatus, the experiment is being repeated. Michael Loeb ’50
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