Guilford College President uniquely prepared to prepare students uniquely — intelligence that is not artificial

Jane Fernandes’ Blog

Gradually, articles written about her, her own writing, and her speeches and oral presentations are showing us more of Jane Fernandes’ personal story.

The President of Guilford College has been deaf from birth. So was her mother. Over time, we have learned that

• When Jane was a small child, her mother would give her a few coins or a small bill and send her to the store, charging her to buy some item, pay for it, and return with the correct change — without the store keeper realizing that Jane could not hear.
• Jane attended public schools and after school, her mother would ask “What questions did you ask at school today?” (“My mother knew that if I asked my own questions and found the answers to them, I would have powerful preparation for life.”)
• Throughout her school days, Jane’s mother caused her to take piano lessons. When Jane complained, her mother sent her to a concert. (“I sat very close to the stage and watched Van Cliburn. As he played, I saw his soul. I saw what chords meant.”)
• In college, Jane majored in French and spent a year in France.
• At Guilford College, Jane celebrates the Eastern Music Festival, which is held on Guilford’s campus.

There’s more to tell, but you tell me:

• Is that a practical liberal arts education or what?
• Can you imagine a better preparation for a 21^st Century educator?
• Can you imagine a better orientation for a leader in a learning community at this moment?
• What core capabilities do you want today’s emerging adults to have for what’s coming?

And how about that mother?

A second comment on The Bright Hour

While Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour is “a memoir of living and dying” which recounts Nina Riggs’ experience of cancer and approaching death, it is profoundly and meaningfully humorous.

I find the writing and the insights to have particular relevance for professionals. Although the book is not explicitly didactic, it is so for a moment. Nina writes:

We contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them. … The crafted idea does this. It’s why I write. The metaphor does this. … I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.

Much to find in this book.

Go get this book – Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour – from Greensboro but far beyond

Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour, justly, has gathered national appreciation (acclaim, really).  Reviewers say her “memoir of living and dying” is a “stunning” expression of the human spirit. Across the country, readers are recognizing and celebrating it, and rightly.

Nina was a Greensboro poet and the wife of former Brooks Pierce lawyer, our friend John Duberstein. Her story and stunning book have created a quiet sense of wonder and more than a little pride here.

I see The Bright Hour as a liberal education – in itself – and, at the same time, a vibrant affirmation of the value of a liberal education. To make of cancer and a final illness what Nina has done and how …

Nina Riggs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Michel de Montaigne. How she walked with them, in her Greensboro life and how the three of them made meaning together (and with others) as Nina’s life came to an end are a profound validation of a liberal education and a compelling, ennobling demonstration of what it is, and how, to be human.

Go buy and read this book.

On the 4th of July: correcting the mistakes of the founding fathers

It’s a troubling issue of long standing: Self-evident as they may be, are our rights “unalienable” or are they “inalienable”?

Turns out, both words mean the same thing. But, you must admit, “inalienable” has a certain elegance about it, and“unalienable” seems sort of clunky. Still, the Declaration of Independence indubitably says “unalienable”.

Thomas Jefferson’s first draft had said “inalienable” and then it got changed to “unalienable” later, possibly by John Adams although he had also written “inalienable” in an intermediate draft. (Perhaps the celebrated ill will between Jefferson and Adams had its beginnings here?) The document notwithstanding, somebody carved “inalienable” on the Jefferson Memorial.

Anyway, “inalienable” sounds better, right? (Trust me, I’m a lawyer.)

So, I am suggesting that we should go back to the surviving originals of the Declaration of Independence and change the “u” that’s on them to an “i”. It’ll just be the one letter.

Now — I am not insensitive to concerns about damaging very old and authentic artifacts. So, I am also suggesting that the persons who do the work should be very well trained. No white out, please.

The Bell Witch from Upper Town Creek (Edgecombe County)

The ghost in “America’s greatest ghost story” is an Edgecombe County native.

She left home and made a big mark in Tennessee. Recently, she inspired the celebrated movie, The Blair Witch Project.

She is often identified as Kate Batts (note the Edgecombe name) but better known as “the Bell Witch” after the Edgecombe expatriate family whom she haunted. The Bells left Upper Town Creek in 1803 and moved to Robertson County in Tennessee, where they and others from Edgecombe County settled.

Probably, no American ghost story is more extensively documented than the Bell Witch story. It is the subject of books, articles, documentaries, movies, and now Internet blogs and posts.

In short, the witch haunted Edgecombe native John Bell and his family and others in Tennessee over as long as two centuries. Early on, she mostly tormented her victims but sometimes she was kind, singing hymns and serving fruit to the ones she liked. Ultimately, she poisoned and killed John Bell and then she disrupted his funeral by singing drinking songs while the mourners tried to sing church music. Following Bell’s death though, and continuing well into the 20^th century, she seems to have mellowed, merely visiting and hanging out from time to time with residents and others in the region .

In her first appearance, the witch confronted John Bell in a Tennessee cornfield. Famously, on that occasion, she manifested as a dog with the head of a rabbit. (This account, of course, is very consistent with Edgecombe County history. Not a single sighting of a dog with a rabbit’s head has been reported in Edgecombe County since the Bells left in 1803.)

Later, the witch appeared in other forms and often she spoke or acted without taking visible form. On that first appearance, Bell ran her off by firing his gun at her. Later, she was more persistent.

Different accounts explain where she came from.

One holds that John Bell had an affair with an Edgecombe County neighbor, Kate Batts, and then broke it off. This provoked Kate to threaten to tell the neighborhood how he had mistreated her. In response, Bell locked her in his smokehouse and left her there, tied up, until she died. Bell then left North Carolina for Tennessee with his family and Kate’s spirit followed. She haunted him to his death.

A second account is that Bell’s Edgecombe farm overseer, John Black, took up with Bell’s daughter, much to Bell’s disapproval. Ultimately Bell killed Black. By this account, the overseer’s spirit pursued the Bells from Town Creek to Tennessee. The ghost was identified in Tennessee with the corporeal Kate Batts who was among others from Edgecombe County who had moved to Tennessee and settled in the same area as the Bells. She had disputes with them out there.

Either way, it started with sex in Edgecombe County. So many things do.

The Bell Witch haunting is a long and continuing Tennessee tale and it has won a place in Tennessee history. But the ghost came from Edgecombe County and for those who have grown up in Edgecombe and later left home, the notion that Edgecombe ghosts may follow you wherever you go comes as no surprise.

Nor does the idea that sex and sorrow leads to no good end.

 

Cahiers de Hoummous: Lessons of public affairs for making your own hummus

Make and consume hummus (as usual).
Make contemporaneous memorandum.
Read Marcel Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdue.
Read Michel de Montaigne, Of Sadness.

Read Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Revise memorandum.
Repeat if desired.

I do not know which to prefer, the hummus, or just after.

 

 

Cahiers de Hoummous: Hummus Day’s a-comin’

We are once more in the annual run down to International Hummus Day.

The approach of the day has brought forward more of the encyclopedic hummus social media posts (well, collections of hummus links really) that we have become accustomed to.

BuzzFeed:  Signs you’re in a relationship with hummus

Huffington Post: Health benefits of hummus

Following these links requires assiduity – real assiduity, the kind that drives the truly committed to peel the skins off chickpeas pea by pea.

In this cascade of points and authorities has come yet another nuance in hummus technique. Now comes the suggestion that, after soaking your dried chickpeas overnight, and, just before you commit them to the cauldron for their hour-long boil-and-simmer, you might sautè them with the baking soda for three or four minutes in olive oil.

Observing this mounting enthusiasm, growing volume of commentary, and advancing granularity of detail, MidLaw is called to counsel:

First, temper obsession with dignity. As it is, you will be smearing a mess of semi-fluid, oil-drenched bean paste onto a shred of pita bread, then seeking to get it into your mouth without dripping anything on anything. Bear in mind that you are an exemplar of the species that produced the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta and the State Toast of North Carolina.

Second, never in the pursuit of hummus, exalt occult technique over the immediacy of the moment. What is the MidLaw Way if not to stop, breathe, then consume radically?  And always, to ROLL YOUR OWN.

 

More elephants walk in the South

Mary, hanged by the neck until dead

At Guilford College, Allan Gurganus brought to light the story of a baby elephant’s walk in Rocky Mount a hundred years ago.

Mike Miller points to the fate of Mary in Kingsport, Tennessee. An untrained handler sought to dissuade her from nibbling a watermelon rind in the course of a circus parade. This sent her into a rage and she killed the handler before she was done, provoking the citizens of Kingsport to exact Tennessee justice.

All she wanted was a bit of watermelon rind.

 

 

Allan Gurganus tells all at Guilford College. Was it in Edgecombe or Nash County?

The Sherwood Anderson family made a major gift to Guilford College several years ago to encourage “the daring and power of the artistic imagination.” The endowment provides scholarships and brings major writers to Guilford’s campus every year.

Allan Gurganus, major author and native of Rocky Mount, was at Guilford this week, teaching and reading his work.

Last night he read a story he said he’s been working on for 40 years. It stemmed from a one-paragraph report he found while looking through Rocky Mount newspapers from the end of the 19th Century. (Was it called “the Evening Telegram” then?)

The circus came to Rocky Mount and a baby elephant escaped. Local citizens caught and killed it.

Gurganus did not say whether this occurred on the Nash or Edgecombe side.

Legal aid is infrastructure, not welfare: got to have bridges so traffic can move

Word has come that the next federal budget will cut or eliminate funding for the Legal Services Corporation. Legal Services Corporation is the largest funder of legal services for the poor in the country.

Does the impetus for cutting legal aid come from a sense that legal aid to the poor is a form of welfare? Does it come from a sense that legal aid funds lawsuits against the wealthy?

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Legal aid, even when given free to the undeserving poor, is not a handout. It’s an investment in infrastructure.

The rule of law is the foundation of the economy and society. And it depends on the justice system.

Our system is complex and getting more so. (“Increasing complexity is the story of human evolution, and the story of how and why law emerged.“)

If poor people do not have effective access to this complex system, two bad things happen. First, the legal entanglements of the poor clog and burden the system. Either controversies don’t get resolved, or people try to fix them without assistance. That makes things worse.

Second, bad outcomes contaminate society. People get soured and distracted from positive, productive pursuits.

North Carolina Chief Justice Mark Martin perceptively points to domestic affairs: spousal abuse, child abuse, child custody, divorces. Often intervention by the justice system is the only fix in those cases. People helping themselves makes things worse.

That’s domestic relations. The same things can happen with healthcare, housing, veterans’ rights, benefits for the elderly, and any number of other everyday things. The unmet legal needs of poor people in these areas are growing, while funding is already on the decline.

Removing legal aid from the federal budget will make things worse. It will make our system more expensive for everybody, not less. And it will exacerbate negative spirits generally — in a way that drags down the economy, politics, and society at large.

Legal Services Corporation channels funds to local agencies such as Legal Aid of North Carolina. If there’s something wrong with Legal Services in particular, then fix that. But don’t take the resources out of the system.

Legal aid ain’t a handout. It’s bridges and roads.

Traffic has to move. Pay me now, or pay me more later.