Redundancy ...
There was little that surprised me in the conversation over Southern fried pork chops at the Collonade the next night. He is still a bit of an odd duck and a loner, only forty years older. What did surprise me was that, in the intervening years, he had accumulated 10, count ‘em, ten earned academic degrees. It was amazing. You name an institution and he'd say:"You know I have an M. A. from there" or whatever. I don't doubt it. He's got a bachelor's degree from Duke, a ph. d. from Vanderbilt, two certificates, and six master's degrees in one thing or another. On average, he's earned an additional academic degree every four years since he first enrolled at Duke in 1958. Not only that, but after retiring a year or so ago he's enrolled in another degree program. I don't know that there's anything wrong with that. Given the escalating costs of programs in higher education and the notion that an education in the liberal arts should be preparation for self-education, it just seemed to me to be an odd allocation of time and money.
Even so, it's not as bad as the story told me by a young Duke co-ed when we were having lunch together in about 1961. A Southern woman, born and bred, she told me that she had read Gone With the Wind 13, count ‘em, thirteen times. On average, she'd read Margaret Mitchell's very long, third-rate romance novel once every 18 months since she first took the breath of life. The woman capped that off by telling me that her uncle was a member of the Klan, which according to her rendition of things was a fairly benign organization. The local chapter, in Florida, I think it was, got itself together once a year and marched in regalia down by the local office of the NAACP to heave a brick through its window. I'm fairly sure that she was just saying some of that for shock-value to my civil rights activist self.
Yet, there was worse than that in my memory. When I was a child in suburban Louisville, mom and dad would give room and board to female students at a local business college in return for help with light house-keeping and baby-sitting. Most commonly, those women came to Louisville from the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The communities from which they came were often very provincial ones. We were surprised to learn from one of them that it was common in her community for students who graduated from the eighth grade to then be hired as the full-time teacher of a class of younger elementary students. That would be as late as the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was worse than that when one of the young women who lived with us said that her uncle had been elected to her community's local school board and that he was firmly opposed to the education of female children, altogether.
My point in thinking about these things is to say that it's important – it is crucially important – to look carefully and critically at the patterns that we repeat. We human beings are creatures of habit. We are most likely to do in the future what we have done in the past. There's probably some improvement in a move from opposition to female education and putting fourteen year olds in charge of first grades, to reading Gone With the Wind over and over and annually heaving bricks through other people's store fronts, to my old room-mate's redundant academic degrees, but Lord our unexamined habits need scrutiny. I've got some of my own that need examination.