So I think there’s a good case to be made that the accrediting associations are state actors. And if I’m right about that, then it would be hard for accrediting associations to do what Penn Professor Peter Conn suggests, and de-accredit schools that require faculty to pledge a belief in the literal inerrancy of Scripture.
The way I became familiar with the piece is a sort of a shaggy dog story of lonely young people leveraging what social assets they had, and making do with what was available.
Thanks in good measure to Herbie Hancock and Ramsey Lewis and Minnie Riperton and Macke Vending, I became an intellectual…
It had many of the aspects of perfection. Against odds, we found the time to get together, we had the double date, we played in the surf, we had two meals and lots of dancing and necking on the beach. And yet, in the end, it should have been more.
Of course there’s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then. I can picture sitting in Steve’s parents’ front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper. I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was.
But in the end I passed that test. After agonizing over it for a few days, I sent Cindy a letter telling as much of the truth as I could bear to tell.
Whatever I was thinking, and I swear I don’t know, the result was that my little musical contribution to the theatrical end product was to strip out any musical context for a racial argument largely couched in musical terms.
However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.
The summer after my graduation was perfect. I wasn’t working; couldn’t find any. So I kept my own hours — noon to 3 a.m., working on the Great American High School Novel. Only problem: I really had nothing to say about high school. But I think my inchoate hope was that by making sense of it all through fiction, I could still get the girl to love me.