Noted Here and There ...

I note with sadness that Millard Fuller was pushed and has resigned as"Founder and President" of Habitat for Humanity. The story is here. I do not know the truth about accusations against him. I only know that, under his leadership, Habitat for Humanity has built 175,000 houses for 1,000,000 people in 100 countries. He defined Habitat as a movement, like Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference was a movement, rather than an organization. Under King's heirs, SCLC nearly became an organization, ossified, and died.

Once, when it was my job to grade papers for Peter Filene in the history department at Chapel Hill, I returned a batch of them to him. Of the one at the top of it, I said,"I can put the ‘A' on this one if you want me to, but I'm not prepared to write the critical commentary on it." That undergraduate was just that good. There were others at the other end of the scale, of course, like the one who had never written an essay on an examination before. In his blue book, there were just the beginnings of sentences scattered throughout. I remember both of them very well. So, too, we remember good academic writing and bad academic writing. Mark Bauerlein has written recently of the latter in Philosophy and Literature which used to sponsor the Bad Writing Contests. That's not to be confused with the Bulwar-Lytton Fiction Prize, in which writers strive to produce bad writing. I like Caleb McDaniel's response to all that at Mode for Caleb. He's issued a call for nominations in a Good Writing Contest.

My colleague, KC Johnson, is a discerning observer of misbehavior in the United States Congress. He has a less principled rival in Mr. Sun, who comments on the unfortunate appearance of some of our newly elected finest in the New Member Pictoral Directory: 109th Congress.