What started as a marginal grumble soon came to include professors, political consultants, and high-profile members of the new American left. It was part of a larger nostalgia for the great groups of “resistance” and political radicals of the late 1960s. When campus protests were organized against Israel’s war in Gaza, they were modeled directly on Vietnam war-era campus takeovers. And then of course there was Beyonce, dressed as a Black Panther, performing at the Super Bowl.

But people in revolutionary groups did do all those things, and more. A few recent releases and reissues have me thinking about this mythologized period of revolution, and the hangovers that followed. Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, published this January, documents the various leftist groups that embraced violent resistance in the hopes of bringing on revolution. Many of the men and women who waged armed combat were true believers in socialism and the Palestinian cause, but some just got pulled in by charismatic leaders like Carlos the Jackal and Andreas Baader, and others were just enchanted by the violence and spectacle of it all, eager for an opportunity to blow up a shop or take a plane full of people hostage.

Principled people like Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist who abandoned her children and husband to join the Red Army Faction and fight for revolution, were outnumbered by the likes of her collaborator Baader, whom Burke describes as “spoiled, arrogant, and lazy.” Baader took credit for other people’s work, quoted Marxist rhetoric to get laid, and waged campaigns of humiliation and manipulation on fellow members of the group. Other groups were similarly run into the ground, starting off fighting for “revolution”—vaguely defined—and ending up in drug trafficking or assassination-for-hire schemes.

Burke focuses mostly on revolutionary groups in Europe and the Middle East because they were the most active, long-lasting, and interconnected. German groups collaborated with Palestinian networks, Japanese revolutionaries showed up in North Africa. Trinidadian novelist and journalist Shiva Naipaul focuses on the Americans, who were less interconnected and less effective: “the children of a prosperous middle class [who] exploded into a semblance of a revolt. They were well nourished, they were more or less educated, they were sentimental, they were spoiled, they were bored, they were looking for kicks, they were touched with half-digested idealisms, they were scared of dying in a war in Southeast Asia.” These were the young people who protested Vietnam, amassed guns and bombs, blew up a few buildings, did time in prison, and then—some of them at least—became tenured professors at prestigious universities.

That is not to say that their protests were not valid. As Burke documents, there existed a real desire among those active in European leftist groups to liberate Palestine, root out the legacy of Nazism in Germany, and bring an end to imperialism and exploitation. Naipaul is clear about the entrenched racism, police brutality, and warmongering that drove young Americans into organizations like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. But their methods were nonsensical, their goals were impossible, and their organizations were infiltrated by egomaniacs, psychos, and informants.

There’s an uncomfortable scene near the end of Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (first published in 1980 and reissued this year by Outsider Editions) in which he visits Huey Newton at the Black Panther headquarters in Oakland, California. It’s the late ’70s at this point, so Malcolm X and MLK have been assassinated, Cointelpro has been unleashed and uncovered, and the massacre at Jonestown has just happened. The Black Panthers have been decimated and reduced to a few social programs—providing buses so that loved ones can visit family members in prison, establishing a small school, offering some health clinic hours.

Newton and Bobby Searle had originally written the Black Panther manifesto, which Newton claims took them only 20 minutes to compile. “We want full employment for our people,” the manifest read. And: “We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society.” They are mostly utopian ideas that would take decades to implement, but they are being presented by people who, when going on armed patrol, have agreed to go down fighting in any confrontation with the police.

Naipaul writes that “none of [these demands] were realizable. Only the truly powerless could be so detached from reality, could write a manifesto in twenty minutes that demanded everything.” Less than a decade after their encounter, Newton would be dead, shot by a member of a rival Marxist Black empowerment paramilitary group.

Naipaul is meant to be writing about Jonestown. Generally, when people write about the Peoples Temple—the California cult that moved to Guyana to create an Eden on Earth and ended up in a mass suicide that left more than 900 people dead—they compare it to other cults, like Heaven’s Gate or the Branch Davidians of Waco—other religious groups that confused charisma with wisdom and death with peace. Naipaul was writing immediately after the tragedy, and so he instead sees Jonestown as just another example of people in the 1970s claiming to want better lives who decided to take them instead:

It has often been said that the Temple was reared on an idealism which, somehow, became perverted. It would, I think, be more correct to say that the Temple was reared on—or, better still, inherited—an idealism that had already gone wrong, that had already lost its way and been twisted out of shape in the promiscuous chaos of the sixties.

Jim Jones built his congregation in San Francisco with a combination of politics and faith healing. In a time of segregated churches, his audience was notably mixed, with more than half coming from working-class Black neighborhoods. His sermons, which went on for hours, mixed gospel with a vision of a kind of heaven on earth, where discrimination based on race, class, and gender did not exist. He also claimed he could heal the human body with just a touch or a glance, and many adherents credited him with their renewed ability to walk or see or hear.

Jones’s followers believed that their mission was to establish socialism within the United States. Members pooled their financial resources to create the utopia of which they dreamed: They built soup kitchens to feed the hungry, clinics to heal the sick, and homes to house the aged. It was the sorry state of social programs in the Bay Area of the time that made people vulnerable to organizations like Jones’s. And when Jones then started preaching about how the American government would never allow the community of racial harmony and social justice to find peace, and that the Peoples Temple would have to start somewhere fresh in another country far from interference and surveillance, his congregants were ready to sell their belongings and move to Guyana.

In Guyana, Jones found a compatible host. In 1970, Guyana’s dictator Forbes Burnham declared the nation to be a Cooperative Socialist Republic. He had been installed by the CIA, but the tide in the region had since turned away from Western influence and toward political radicalism and revolution. The bauxite mines and sugar estates were nationalized; diplomatic relations were established with Cuba and the USSR. Soon Burnham was one of the richest Black men in the world, but the shelves at the grocery stores were bare, the hospitals had run out of supplies, and 50,000 Guyanese—more than six percent of the population—had emigrated.

As the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (as Jonestown was formally known) grew, followers would write letters to family members and friends back in the States, boasting of the abundance they had created. Their communal kitchens were overstuffed with the most delicious foods they had ever eaten. The health clinics were providing state of the art care to the sick and elderly. And all property was held in common, because no one would be treated differently based on their ability to work or pay. A large percentage of Jonestown residents were elderly, who were independently housed, fed and cared for in exchange for signing over their social security checks.

Jones was well connected with the politically radical at the time, with friends and contacts in both the San Francisco mayor’s office and the Black Panthers. For him, it was all part of the same fight, whether conducted by gun, ballot, or spade. As Naipaul moves through the associates, friends, and fellow travelers of Jonestown, he encounters people who can imagine only cataclysm and destruction: the end of patriarchy, the end of capitalism, the end of imperialism. Once these obstacles are removed, then real life could begin.

But not all the Westerners seeking socialist relief went to Guyana, and some of them are still around.

For about a decade, it was very chic for an architect to have his own city. Le Corbusier had Chandigarh, India. He designed the government buildings and many housing projects, created a grid system for the urban layout, and built the monument of the Open Hand as a symbol of honesty and generosity. Oscar Niemeyer had Brasilia, Brazil. He designed the new capital city’s presidential palace, city museum, and city hall, among others. And then Roger Anger had Auroville, India, which got its own book this year.

These were planned cities, cities built where there had not been humans before: all the better to scrape clean and start again, without the burden of existing infrastructure, ingrained habits, and memories. In the case of India, Auroville and other planned cities were meant to establish a new start after independence and partition. They could clean away all the violence and suffering from the country’s troubled birth in 1947, and incubate a better world. As Polish journalist Katarzyna Boni puts it, these were “cities untainted by a colonial past, free of expended symbols, cities that showed the way for the entire nation. A cradle of hope for the entire country.” Her new book, Auroville: A City of Dreams (translated by Mark Ordon) documents her second trip to the southern state of Tamil Nadu, following an initial visit in 2009.

Built in 1968, Auroville was founded on the teachings of one guru, Sri Aurobindo, who believed that human beings were on the cusp of an important spiritual evolution. Life on earth could be transformed into something more harmonious if enough people reached enlightenment. Prior to his spiritual turn, he had been a political radical, active in the nationalist movement to gain independence from England, and his revolutionary group was responsible for several bombings. He died before Auroville could be created, so the implementation of his ideas and philosophy were handled by Mira Alfassa, also known as the Mother.

The city, which still stands today, is meant to foster spiritual enlightenment, and anyone from any part of the world can live there as long as they agree to abide by the rules. In order to create human unity, each resident must be willing to serve the Divine Consciousness. That means no engagement with politics, no speaking in the silent zones, and no displays of physical affection out in public. Meaningful contributions must be made to communal kitchens, public areas, and community resources.

It’s strange that Boni engages so infrequently with the ideas behind Auroville, instead choosing to focus on the feelings and experiences of those who live there. Most of the long-term residents are Westerners who made their way to India in the 1960s and ’70s. Several seem to be bored rich kids who are ensnared by Mother’s charisma.

Many of them talk about making a better world … somehow. “This is where true democracy will finally appear, and taxes will not even be needed, because everyone will naturally and unforcedly co-create the prosperity of Auroville and its inhabitants.” Because Boni is determined to document the lives and desires of the residents, rather than put them in any kind of political perspective, what we get is something like a tourist pamphlet, bidding us to join this new world. The few moments of skepticism or uncertainty have mostly to do with how the built world is misaligned with the grand plans. No ideas or goals needed, then. “Humans will create a rainbow tribe that will save the Earth and restore its beauty. A new era will come, there is no doubt about it. Common spiritual effort can help accelerate it.”

That last bit seems to come from a man named Roy, an Auroville resident who had left behind a middle-class New York City existence because he was seeking spiritual connection. Boni is vague about who is saying what, what is quotation and what is her interpretation. The stories are all very similar: I can never tell if I’m listening to the disillusioned son of wealthy Washington parents or the resentful daughter of wealthy British parents. They all insist on how different and special they are and are ultimately indistinguishable from one another. It’s almost as if for this group of utopian dreamers, having a recognizable personality or story or way of communicating would get in the way of creating paradise on earth.

Boni was driven to return to Auroville in 2018, a particularly difficult year, she insists, citing a school shooting in the United States, the war in Syria, and a humanitarian disaster in Yemen. “People who were feeling increasingly more lost were constantly looking for a different world,” she writes. But everyone always thinks their era is uniquely terrible, uniquely perilous. No one has ever suffered the way they have suffered. It’s interesting to note how little any of the problems she lists would directly affect her own existence as a Polish journalist. The war in Syria might have caused a migration crisis that she saw on the news, one that she felt helpless to do anything about, but she herself was not displaced and was likely no more than inconvenienced by the war.

Auroville, 50 years after its creation, has around 3,000 residents from 59 nations. They meditate, they try to reach enlightenment, and still the world is in shambles. Lately, plans to expand the city and allow more residents have been met with protest from current residents, who believe Auroville would lose its special quality. Putting the harmony of the city at risk would put the fate of a better world at risk. Only one person in Boni’s book dares to say what’s really going on, that Auroville is not an attempt to improve the world but a retreat from it: “Don’t take responsibility for the whole world … You just need to take care of yourself.”

Near the end of Journey to Nowhere, Naipaul attends a discussion led by Buckminster Fuller, a utopian architect who believed that one could design a better world with the right ideas, the right architecture, the right urban planning—and the right billionaires converted to the cause. At this particular event, Fuller holds the audience in a state of rapture as he talks about how they can all turn the world into a paradise. “I felt I was working shoulder to shoulder with a chosen few,” Fuller tells the crowd, “a handful of people who were really willing to put their lives out for something beyond themselves.”

“The people here had not come to learn anything,” Naipaul writes. “They had come in search of revelation; they had come to discover how they might save themselves, save mankind, save the world.” And yet here we all still are, half a century on, having the same arguments about the people committed to saving us.

The post The Allure of Eden on Earth appeared first on The American Scholar.

It was like being “locked in a cruise ship,” retired University of Florida English professor Gregory Ulmer told me of his experience at the conference. Separated from spouses and oath-bound to make the conference all work and no play, Ulmer and the others found commonality in their commitment to literature and language learning—and in their shared opposition to the conference’s keynote speaker: E. D. Hirsch, the University of Virginia English professor whose controversial bestseller Cultural Literacy had appeared in the spring. Even before his private jet landed in Maryland, Hirsch had won the endorsement of William Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, who championed the idea of a canon of shared knowledge as if it were the legend at the bottom of a map, a resource for an increasingly diverse, multilingual student population navigating majority culture. Hirsch, a Democrat, attempted to split the partisan difference as he sold his thesis, that every American needed to know some 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts. For example: What happened in 1492? Or: Who was W. E. B. Du Bois?

“People hated it,” said Ulmer, characterizing the cold reception the faculty afforded Hirsch’s presentation. The notion that knowledge of a common set of references granted membership in literate culture struck many as “ideologically conservative,” Ulmer said—for many, it smacked of a too-simple type of American patriotism. Ulmer, however, took a different view. “Clearly Hirsch was on to something,” he said. “Democracy itself is the invention of the collective self, and that’s connected to language and literacy.”

In response to Hirsch, the teachers formulated a striking countervision, presented in a report titled Democracy through Language. Published in 1989 by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), two of the eight professional organizations that sponsored the conference, Democracy through Language explored “why different ways of reading can find different meanings in the same text” and how that experience can support students in “understanding and appreciating opposing perspectives” even as they may remain committed to their own. The report proclaimed that “enhancing this ability is a major aim of language arts education.” Nearly 40 years later, at a time when many Americans see the country in a state of democratic disrepair because of our inability to find any shared meaning across the political divide, those lines seem particularly apt.

Political controversy about the purpose of English education is nothing new, of course. But in its ambitious vision for the future of the field, as much as in the conflicts it chose to ignore, Democracy through Language offered a script about why the language arts—the intellectual practices of reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening—are essential to civic learning. By the time students leave the sixth grade, the elementary teachers asserted within the report’s 100-plus pages, they will “recognize when language is being used to manipulate, coerce, or control” and “use language as an effective response to such attempts.” As students proceed through secondary education, they “should be invited to read deeply in our diverse literary traditions,” the high school instructors insisted, “including writing by men and women of many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.” And through a yearlong course, college freshmen would learn how to navigate the “information age.” The professors pronounced that “citizens need to make meaning—rather than merely consume information.”

Democracy through Language seems like a time capsule meant for our present moment, when civic education initiatives are resurgent. Educating for American Democracy, a national framework for K-12 civic learning spearheaded by the Sandra Day O’Connor–founded nonprofit iCivics, debuted in 2021. In 2023, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars launched College Presidents for Civic Preparedness; more than 100 campus leaders have responded to the New Jersey–based nonprofit’s push to recenter the civic mission of higher education through programming and course offerings. These movements focus primarily on academic disciplines such as U.S. history, political science, and the law. What’s missing? Language studies and literature—which are, in many ways, the fields that allow us best to make sense of and find meaning in the world.

To the 60 teachers sequestered on the Eastern Shore in 1987, English education was civic education. And if the vision of a one-room schoolhouse where English and civics students sat alongside one another seems hopelessly quaint, the idea behind that vision is far from outdated. At a time when both reading and the civic fabric of American democracy are at risk, the idea warrants a serious second look.

That democracy emerged as the congealing concept for the English Coalition Conference surprised almost everyone who participated. “Never in the four years of planning could we have guessed that we would achieve a single coherent consensus about the teaching of English at all levels,” wrote Phyllis Franklin after returning from the conference. Franklin, who served as MLA executive director from 1985 to 2002, was a central force behind the event.

As it turned out, the broader political environment induced a sobering urgency that made “democracy through language” an easy theme to ratify. In 1983, with plans for the conference already underway, A Nation at Risk, a report published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, sounded the alarm about America’s poor global position in education. When the teachers met four years later, they knew that William Bennett had proposed abolishing his entire department, and that they themselves were viewed as impediments to the administration’s desired education overhauls. A month after the conference ended, a Lynne Cheney–led National Endowment for the Humanities issued American Memory, which invoked Matthew Arnold’s belief that students should read certain texts to learn “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” Hirsch served as an adviser for the report.

“Of course, the phrase [democracy through language] is hopelessly general and has a patriotic if not sloganeering ring to it,” acknowledged Peter Elbow in his 1990 book that covered the conference, What is English? Still, the late University of Massachusetts, Amherst, English professor, best known for his research on the democratization of writing instruction, recognized the rationale. Elbow understood the theme first as an attempt “to fight against the way Hirsch and many educational conservatives claim a monopoly on patriotism—that anyone not interested in teaching lists and a single culture (and ‘English only’) is anti-American.” But he also saw the slogan as seeking to communicate the aim of English studies to the American public. He wrote that “good work in English needs democracy and democracy needs good work in English.”

That principle is something that Paula Krebs, MLA’s current executive director, takes seriously. “Democracy is under threat at least in part because we haven’t paid enough attention to the values represented by language and literature,” she told me when we spoke last summer. She revisited Democracy through Language in preparation for our conversation and noted that the values the English teachers highlighted in the report—close interpretation and analysis, attention to modes of representation and differing perspectives—remain central to her work in leading the MLA, a professional association composed of roughly 20,000 members, most of whom are employed in higher education.

Krebs, who had a long career as an English professor and dean before taking on the MLA’s top post in 2017, understands why some faculty might worry about mingling values like nationalism or patriotism with English studies. Historically, the teaching of literature in American public schools served the practical purposes of promoting patriotic citizenship for immigrants, often in reductive ways. And when Democracy through Language first appeared, one skeptical professor complained that, in rendering the study of reading and writing as “an extension of high school civics courses,” the report ignored the experience of “delight” that is the real reason anyone would want to study English.

At the same time, Krebs told me, “democracy demands wisdom,” and so for “the humanities to be left out is deeply flawed.” I thought the phrase might have been Krebs’s coinage—her own slogan for the advocacy of English studies today—but she explained that it comes from the legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts more than six decades ago. “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens,” Congress declared in the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Recognizing that a democratic way of life cannot sustain itself on science alone, the act continued, it “must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Now Krebs is advocating to keep that vision alive. In May 2025, the MLA filed a joint lawsuit in federal district court arguing that the executive branch’s cuts to the NEH, whose funds Congress had already appropriated, violated the separation-of-powers principle enshrined in the Constitution, as well as federal statutes. This past May, a judge sided with the plaintiffs in finding the termination of NEH grants “unlawful.”

It was funding from the NEH that in part enabled the 60 teachers to meet in Maryland in 1987.

What is the proper place of English studies in cultivating democratic wisdom? The answer is not self-evident, despite what the conference’s participants believed. Civics itself is a decentralized field, with researchers operating in far-flung disciplines such as history, political science, and education. In the siloed world of academic disciplines, it’s not always easy for a civic-minded English professor to locate an intellectual network, or a like-minded legal researcher to identify a co-investigator in literacy. In K-12 schools, teacher training and certification enforce disciplinary divides between English language arts (ELA) and social studies. And the latter, which includes civics, often plays the part of second-class citizen. According to a 2018 report from the Center for American Progress, fewer than 10 states mandate a full year of U.S. government or civics instruction. A 2022 study performed by the RAND Corporation found few state or federal incentives to improve social studies learning in the face of high-stakes testing, with schools often singly focused on raising students’ reading and math scores.

That doesn’t mean educators stay in their assigned disciplinary lanes. When I asked Anton Schulzki, a former interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCCS), why civic education doesn’t include ELA, he resisted the framing. “I give students Federalist 51 and ask them to annotate it, ask them what is the point of view and perspective, what is the argument?” Schulzki said. “That’s ELA. Social studies teachers are ELA teachers.” Schulzki taught history, civics, and American government for 41 years in southern Colorado schools before stepping into a temporary leadership role at the professional association for social studies education. In 2013, the NCCS published the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework that identified ways to bring literacy instruction into the social studies classroom by focusing on such skills as how to read a chart or how to approach sources. The NCCS’s report was a response to Common Core State Standards, which required that social studies teachers share in literacy instruction duties.

When Tonya Perry taught middle school ELA in the 1990s, long before Common Core, she wouldn’t necessarily have labeled herself a civics teacher. Still, she wanted students to envision “themselves as active participants in this world of information and not just receivers.” Those aims, she told me, no matter what you call them, are finally about preparing students for democratic citizenship. Perry shared a moving example, from her fifth year of teaching. Following the death of a beloved coach at her urban Alabama school, Perry invited students to compose messages to the late coach in which they reflected on their time together. Students were so engaged in the assignment that they compiled the letters into an anthology, sold copies for $1 each, and made a $300 donation to the coach’s family. Through the experience, Perry reflected, students “saw themselves as citizens in the classroom, citizens in the school, citizens in the country.”

An education scholar who is now provost and vice president of academic affairs at Miles College, an HBCU in Fairfield, Alabama, Perry also formerly served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English. Although today’s NCTE doesn’t necessarily refer to the 1987 meeting or the report the attendees produced, Perry explained, the belief that “language is a powerful tool that we help [students] hone” is central to the organization’s mission. The NCTE originated from early-20th-century efforts to counter the influence of college-entrance examinations on the high school English curriculum, and secondary school teachers have always represented its largest constituency. In 2022, with funding from the Educating for American Democracy initiative, the organization released “Reading, Writing, & Raising Voices: The Centrality of Literacy to Civic Education,” a guide to support ELA teachers and school leaders in activating the civic dimensions of language and literature instruction. “English language arts is a foundational source of civic learning,” the document states, in words that could well have come from Democracy through Language 35 years earlier.

This resonance is not lost on Brook Thomas. From his position as chair of the English department and as director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine, in the late 1990s, Thomas was mounting the case that reading and writing instruction can help students learn “how to think like citizens,” much like law schools claim to train graduates “how to think like lawyers.” Thomas saw the value of this disciplinary approach as distinct from the broader aim of teaching critical thinking.” Pretty much anyone can claim to teach critical thinking—“even the business people,” he quipped. Yet Thomas often found the toughest audience in fellow English professors. “I had more success with that argument outside the department, rather than within it, because there in English, everyone had their own ideas about the function of literature,” Thomas, now an emeritus professor, told me.

By the time I finished my PhD in English in 2012, Thomas was renowned for his books on law and literature, a field he helped to create. Later I discovered that he also authored the lesser-known Civic Myths. The 2007 study made the case for treating American literary works as resources for civic education. Civic Myths sprung in part from Thomas’s teaching of China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1980 book about the Chinese-American experience. “Not every literature class should be civic education,” Thomas clarified. “But there are areas of opportunity.” After we spoke, Thomas mailed me eight pages of handwritten notes outlining ways that college-level literature and composition courses can support students’ development as citizens. Among the suggestions: asking them to think closely about the meaning of words, having them adjudicate the validity of various arguments, and having them debate difficult questions in a civil manner.

Scholarly interest in democracy and citizenship hasn’t disappeared among college English professors since Thomas’s Civic Myths appeared almost two decades ago. But according to Andrew Newman, who teaches American literature at Stony Brook University (and who studied with Thomas while completing his PhD at Irvine), recent work is “academicizing” the topics, rather than exploring in a more general and practical way what changes could be implemented in the classroom. Through NEH professional development seminars that explore the relationship between ELA and citizenship education, Newman has collaborated extensively with high school English teachers, and he’s currently writing a book on the history of the high school canon. Though high schoolers today are as likely as their parents were to encounter To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby, students are also less likely to read complete works, given the shift to excerpts and informational texts in many state standards.

Newman doesn’t want to return to an era when every student read a list of great books. But he added, “I do believe that reading whole books, sharing them with others, and arguing about their significance foster capacities for citizenship and what earlier scholars have called the ‘social imagination.’”

As they walked the banks of the Wye River between meals and meetings, the Coalition Conference participants might have smelled the smoke rising from the canon wars. Although E. D. Hirsch never called for a standardized set of texts that everyone must read, for many attendees, his emphasis on a singular national culture grated against the pluralist campaign to teach more works by women and writers of color. “We can’t give you any list without creating the whole dynamic we are trying to fight,” Elbow remarked in his 1990 book about the conference, conveying the majority sentiment. So, the teachers avoided the canon altogether. Their report affirmed that students should “read widely in both traditional literature and literature that reflects the diversity of American culture.” But it remained silent on what works such reading might include.

It’s easy to understand why. The teachers had bonded around their shared identity as educators in the language arts, not literature; centering the contentious canon question could have splintered that solidarity. That same summer of 1987, at the Institute on Writing, Thinking, and Citizenship Education held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sandra Stotsky was weaving a different story about the civic ends of literature and language learning. Stotsky earned her education doctorate from Harvard in 1976 and later served as senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education. She believed that ELA teachers were civic educators and that they ought to teach canonical texts. In a 1997 paper on the “anti-civic forces now at work” in literature curricula, Stotsky decried the disappearance of “the experiences of European ethnic groups” from the expanding canon. “Selections abound in classrooms today that portray members of racial minority groups as saints or as victims of white oppression,” Stotsky wrote in the 1997 paper, referring to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. (Interview requests sent to two publicly available email addresses for Stotsky, who is now in her 90s, went unanswered).

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that almost everyone I interviewed hesitated when asked about the role of the canon or specific reading lists in English education today. The reasons varied. For K-12 educators, corporate textbooks and prescribed standards mean that text selection is often made for them; pedagogical approaches like student reading clubs, or thematic inquiry around a set of books, also deemphasize a great-works mentality. For college literature teachers, meanwhile, the canon debate feels slightly less urgent than in decades past. Meanwhile, faculty members who teach composition, who have long struggled to establish their discipline as distinct from English literature and theory, never cathected to the canon as a central concern.

Still, questions—and controversies—about content endure. The Supreme Court’s June 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, affirming the religious rights of a group of Maryland public school parents to opt their children out of certain instructional content, turned in part on the justices’ reading of LGBTQ+ storybooks in the ELA curriculum. Morrison’s name surfaced again in a Texas State Legislature hearing about Senate Bill 13, a law passed last summer that prohibits library material containing “indecent content.” And Hirsch carries on the cultural literacy campaign through his nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, whose curriculum emphasizes “citizenship readiness,” and “the ability to speak with, listen to, and respect different perspectives of people from across this country.” Readings included in the Core Knowledge Foundation’s ELA curriculum range from Homer’s Iliad to Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming.

Controversial or not, texts deserve a central place in civic education in the United States, where the “idea of citizen as interpreter is very, very deep,” Roosevelt Montás told me. Montás, who was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to Queens, New York, two days after his 12th birthday, authored the 2021 book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. “Any form of teaching, particularly humanistic teaching, runs the risk of being co-opted by an ideological agenda,” Montás said. “You have to be on the alert for that.” Keeping watch means approaching a foundational text like the U.S. Constitution with a spirit of inquiry that encourages students to think in nuanced ways, continued Montás, who, after a long career at Columbia University, began as the Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College last July. “Is it a document that establishes and solidifies slavery in America? Or is it a document that put slavery on the path to its ultimate extinction?”

“Liberal education lives in the questions, not in the answers,” he said. “And civic education must be the same way.”

When I started asking Gregory Ulmer questions about the English Coalition Conference more than two years ago now, the retired University of Florida professor didn’t cite the “democracy through language” theme or the report bearing that name as the most vibrant memories of the gathering. What stood out to him was the very democratic coming together of primary, secondary, and tertiary educators who might otherwise never have met. For Annie Abrams, too, the democratic coalition is the point. Abrams has inhabited two different worlds of English education that sometimes feel like different planets. She holds an English PhD, with a focus on American literature, from New York University and has been teaching English in the city’s public schools since 2016. “One of the reasons I became a public school teacher is that I spent so long reading about theories of American democracy, and I wanted to practice American democracy,” Abrams told me during a phone call, as the fifth-period bell rang in the background.

Abrams sees her English classroom as a component of students’ civic education, and she hopes that college faculty members think about their work in the same way. But she wonders if forcing ELA and civic education to walk the hallway in single file ought to be the goal. “Instead of trying to fit ELA into the civic ed framework, maybe there’s an opportunity to be deliberate about literature’s role in public schools,” said Abrams, whose 2023 book Shortchanged asserts that the Advanced Placement curriculum has veered from its early democratic ambitions into an educationally impoverished testing regime. Abrams wants students to think about the books she assigns as engines for democratic possibility. Henry David Thoreau kept a commonplace book to record his reading and ruminations; Abrams invites her students to do the same. It’s not about using books for some determined end but about learning from their “traditions and habits of mind,” she said.

From his administrative post in the Somerset Hills School District in suburban Bernardsville, New Jersey, Michael Catelli likewise wonders about what it might mean to bring civics and English together in a public school system already stretched for time and money. “It would sort of be hard for ELA teachers at the middle and high school level to fit their work into the ‘how-the-bill-becomes-a-law’ frame of civics,” he told me. The former social studies instructor does not doubt that “ELA is a natural partner for lived civics, for a more expansive view of civics.” Earlier in his career, at another New Jersey school, Catelli co-taught an American studies course that blended history with literature. He attributed better student engagement and richer discussions about concepts like personal liberties and civic rights to the interdisciplinary approach.

Still, Catelli, who’s writing a dissertation about how teachers and administrators can work together to support the best civic education experience for students, isn’t sure that simply adding civics standards to ELA courses will do much to help matters. Instead, he imagines a future world in which guidelines for civic education might cut across the entire school curriculum, not housed under one subject or discipline but touching, and maybe transforming, all of them.

For now, however, there aren’t enough minutes in the day, Catelli said, and overworked teachers naturally expend their energy on reading and math instruction, the subjects that students are tested on and that consequently attract the resources of time and money. “Literacy and numeracy are king.”

The post Reading Like a Citizen appeared first on The American Scholar.

We got into the grass behind the apartment buildings, walked the overgrown fence line, cut across an empty lot, took the shortcuts through the industrial area with its jumbo warehouses, and rounded the last corner onto the gravel road. A couple of hundred meters ahead, it turned into a trail through the woods. It was a nice morning. Not hot, not damp.

Then Toby squatted. I thought, “Really? Here?” We were so close. “Can’t you hold it?”

He could not, though in a scant six minutes, we’d have been on the dirt trail. Rather than making a mess to clean up, requiring yet another plastic bag destined for the landfill, Toby would have been squatting in the overgrowth, contributing to the natural cycle of composting, like the horses and cows we passed in their fields, the hedgehogs under bushes, the birds on their branches. My father used to tell a story about a woman in his hometown when he was a boy who would gather and lift her skirts and squat in the street to urinate. “Dogs do it, why can’t I?” For Toby, communicating with his mournful, questioning look, it would be, “Javali and birds do it here, so can I, too?” Can—not only about ability but also about permission.

But there’s more to can. George Mallory said he wanted to climb Everest because it was there, which seems to me like because I can, only more elegant. Some beings are like that; for them, possibility is itself a reason to act, not just a condition for action. Think of children. They stack blocks, jump off things, throw a spoon onto the floor over and over, press buttons, and ask endless questions not because they need to or have to, but because they can.

Toby isn’t a creature to stake out territory or expand horizons. He would always rather please than defy, rather follow in safety than lead fearlessly. I looked around. Not yet eight o’clock. Not many people out. I tore a baggie from the dispenser in preparation for clean up. Because I have to. And because Toby can’t. And I can. I still can. Yes, even stronger than being able to is knowing that one day I won’t be able to. Neither of us will welcome that day. Finally, I still clean up after Toby because he’s still here.

Toby was gazing at me with his sad dark eyes. “Ready?” I asked. Toby took up his place at my heels.

The post Can, Still appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post  “Cubistic Body World”  by Carolyn Rodgers appeared first on The American Scholar.

In her takes on a Nascan funerary shroud, Chuls imagined hands and tongues reaching out from beyond the grave. “The hands started to feel like spirits coming back to act as midwives,” she says. In one work, Las Tres Marias, three ceramic hands come through the center of a woven textile of white, red, and pink wool, the colors referencing “the Nasca mantle, which has such a strong red border. Even with time, it hasn’t faded away.” In another, a ceramic tongue peaks through a shroud instead, as if in conversation between the living and the dead—or even representing the land itself talking to women. “It asks, If we think of reproductive justice, how much would that mean to think of the land, as well?” Chuls says. She hopes her art inspires viewers to research pre-Hispanic South American culture and to understand the contemporary links between environmental harm and women’s health. She cites the 1999 Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia, where women in drought conditions suffered miscarriages at a higher rate than those who had access to water. “When there is lack of access to water or there is pollution in water, does that affect our amniotic fluid if we are carrying a pregnancy?” she asks. “Our body can be a full mirror of the land, where struggles over basic resources also become struggles over the body.”

The post Romina Chuls appeared first on The American Scholar.

Andrew Rankin studied and worked in Tokyo for 20 years before earning a doctorate in Japanese literature from Cambridge University. He is the author of Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide and Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait.

Some of our host’s favorite yakuza films include:

• Pale Flower (1964)—a moody noir following a yakuza member recently released from prison who must navigate both a new balance of power in the underworld and a reckless new love with a gambling problem—all while wearing incredible suits
• Tokyo Drifter (1966)—a stylish, technicolor dream of a yakuza member set loose after his boss closes up shop and must outrun his own assassin through the countryside
• Blind Woman’s Curse (1970)—Meiko Kaji (of Lady Snowblood fame) stars as the leader of a yakuza clan in this psychedelic film that memorably deploys dragon tattoos in everything from the fight choreography to the credit sequence
• Fireworks (1997)—a police officer stressed by a sick wife, a dead child, and a paralyzed partner starts to tumble into the underworld himself when borrowing from a yakuza loan shark leads him to rob a bank
• Giri/Haji (2019)—this British miniseries follows a Tokyo detective to London on the trail of his brother, whose alleged murder of a yakuza member’s nephew triggers the threat of a turf war; mesmerizing, impressionistic, and darkly funny

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

The post The Extreme Path appeared first on The American Scholar.

When I attended summer camp in the early 1980s, there was no long journey north from some hot city. No slow drive down a narrow dirt road through a tunnel of tall pines. No tearful goodbye as my parents dropped me off with a duffle bag of jeans and T-shirts, swim trunks and a towel, then drove away. I was a local kid, a poor year-rounder in Maine. “Summer camp” meant my small town’s daily parks-and-rec program on the grounds of my elementary school, which was across the street from the dilapidated house my unstable mother rented with her alcoholic boyfriend. For me, there was only waking to an empty house, making myself breakfast, then crossing the road.

At camp, kids ranged freely around the school’s sandy playground and grass fields, occasionally participating in activities loosely organized by camp counselors who were, I understand now, basically kids themselves: most too young to vote, all too young to buy beer. They corralled us into the school’s small gymnasium when it rained. The summer I turned 10, the camp counselors cajoled us into a game of street hockey on the gym’s squeaky floor. I was not athletically gifted. I was chubby and uncoordinated, and I could not be counted on under pressure. Team sports were not my strength. So when I rushed behind an opponent in an excited tunnel-vision attempt to steal the orange rubber street hockey ball, I took a stick directly to the mouth. Immediately, I tasted sweet, metallic blood. I dropped my stick, brought both hands to my face and groaned. Mike, a handsome camp counselor whom all the boys thought cool and all the girls had a crush on, rushed over and put his hand on my shoulder.

“You’re okay, buddy, you’re okay,” he reassured me. “Just walk it off.” He clapped his hands together twice, like a football coach giving his players a pep talk. “Walk if off.” He clapped again.

I leaned forward and spat bloody shards of shattered tooth into my palm.

“Okaaaaay,” said Mike, backing away. “I’ll go call your mom.”

I slumped on a bench and waited, wondering how much trouble I was in.

Dr. Joseph Iriana’s dimly lit waiting room had dark wood paneling, a gurgling water feature, and a large aquarium thick with tropical fish and a little treasure chest that hiccupped bubbles. It looked less like a dentist’s office than the living room of a rakish 1980s television private eye. When Dr. Iriana leaned over my brightly lit, pulled-wide mouth during routine cleanings, he clicked his teeth the way those gag teeth chatter when you wind them up and set them down. It was unnerving. I always thought he was demonstrating what he wanted me to do, so I would begin to close my mouth, only to feel the hook of his index finger tug my cheek back open.

That day Dr. Iriana looked into my mouth and saw what remained of my left front tooth—little more than a white sliver poking beyond the pink gumline. He didn’t click his teeth. He made a distinct tsk, tsk, tsk sound with his tongue. I sat stiffly in the chair and held my breath. For what felt like hours, but was probably much less, Dr. Iriana piled layer upon layer of composite resin until he’d built up a flat, broad structure that was somewhat toothlike in appearance. A little white tombstone is what it looked like to me.

This cap was, he explained, temporary. My teeth were still moving around, he said, unsettled; I thought of my teeth playing dodgeball at summer camp. Dr. Iriana said he would eventually fit the tooth with a permanent crown. Composite resin. Cap. Crown. At a point in my life when I’d never even had a cavity, I felt thrust into an adult vernacular.

Naïve boy that I was, I believed my tooth trouble to be behind me.

There is a Japanese method of repairing broken pottery called kintsugi. Cracks are filled with lacquer, then dusted with powdered gold or silver. With kintsugi, that which is broken is honored not by attempting to hide the flaw but by drawing attention to the repair.

This is the opposite of how most Americans treat their teeth. With my new fake tooth in place, I wanted nothing but to fade back into preteen anonymity and range unnoticed by friends, family, and strangers.

For a few years, my cap was fine. Then, in junior high, it quickly began to discolor. My tooth seemed to age. It faded like a paperback left in the sun, stained like wallpaper in the home of a smoker. I hated my discolored tooth because I felt certain everyone else hated it. At this excruciating moment of near ceaseless desire for the opposite sex, I felt ugly. I buried myself in Ray Bradbury books and skateboarding. Unable to read the blackboard from my desk, I also got my first pair of dorky glasses. So began my miserable era of tight-lipped toothless grins.

An appointment with the teeth clicker was scheduled. It was time to replace the temporary cap with a porcelain crown, an experience that became the foundation of my lifelong dental fear: Every time I sit in a dentist’s chair, I think of Dr. Iriana leaning over me with a tiny whirring grinder in his blue-gloved hand, his eyebrows rising as if to say, “The only way out is through,” then the dust of my discolored tooth rising like smoke from a tiny forest fire in my mouth.

When the singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker was 21, she was in a bike accident that knocked out one of her incisors. After years of cycling through cheap caps or just an empty gap, she now has a gold crown.

Lenker briefly met Joan Baez backstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2024. Baez, who complimented Lenker on her hypnotic solo set, immediately noticed her glinting tooth. “Me, too,” Baez said, opening her mouth and pointing at her own gold canine.

“Oh yeah,” said Lenker, “cool!”

“I got a little diamond in mine,” said Baez, who’d shattered her tooth years earlier on a popcorn kernel.

“Nice!” said Lenker.

By that point she could have afforded a high-quality porcelain tooth and returned her smile to its virgin state, but her new gold tooth served a different purpose: “After all that time with just a gap, it kind of felt strange to not see the scar,” she said in an interview.

Lenker chose, in a way, to make her scar permanent. She and Baez both chose kintsugi: They honored their broken bits by refusing to hide them.

When I was 16, I discovered the short stories of Raymond Carver. I was young, so I didn’t know one could write about the kinds of things Carver wrote about and elevate them to art.

“Feathers”—included in the collection Where I’m Calling From, which I found left behind in the local coffee shop—is about two colleagues who get together for dinner with their wives. There’s Jack, the narrator, and his wife, Fran. And his friend Bud and Bud’s wife, Olla, who invite Jack and Fran to their house in the country.

There are two things most readers remember about this story: Bud and Olla’s baby, Harold, who is described in detail by Jack as being the ugliest baby he has ever seen, and the couple’s petulant pet peacock, Joey. The bird is even featured on the original Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition of Cathedral.

What I remember most is Olla’s teeth.

While the couples have a drink in the living room, Fran notices something sitting on top of the TV and nudges Jack: “Next to the vase, on the doily, sat an old plaster-of-Paris cast of the most crooked, jaggedy teeth in the world. There were no lips to the awful-looking thing, and no jaw either, just these old plaster teeth packed into something that resembled thick yellow gums.”

Bud explains that it’s a cast of Olla’s teeth before her braces: “I’ve got used to them. But I guess they look funny up there. For the life of me, I don’t know why she keeps them around.”

Olla taps her front teeth and says they came in crooked when she was a kid, but her family couldn’t afford to fix them. When she married Bud, he insisted on paying for her braces. She shyly explains that the cast is a daily reminder: “I’ve got lots of things to be thankful for … That’s one of the things I’m thankful for. I keep them around to remind me how much I owe Bud.”

Bud takes the cast from atop the TV and holds it against Olla’s cheek while she smiles. She says the orthodontist wanted to keep the cast and submit it for publication in a magazine. “I said nothing doing. I pointed out to him they were my teeth.”

“After I got the braces off, I kept putting my hand up to my mouth when I laughed,” Olla says. One day, Bud told her she could stop doing that: “You don’t have to hide teeth as pretty as that. You have nice teeth now.”

I found the whole scene between the couples breathtakingly tender and intimate, though I never could have described it that way at 16—I might have simply let out the breath I’d been holding and said softly, “Whoa …”

Could people really be so vulnerable with one another, I wondered. Could I be so vulnerable?

There is no shortage of teeth-related idioms in the English language.

When you narrowly avoid something, you escape by the skin of your teeth. The phrase dates back to the Geneva Bible of 1560, where in the Old Testament pious Job was made to suffer mightily because of a bet between Satan and God. He lost all his property and wealth, his seven sons and three daughters. He endured great physical agony; he repulsed his wife. Job’s hardships left him emaciated and covered in sores. Even his teeth fell out: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” Biblical scholars believe that Job had lost all his teeth and only the skin of his gums remained.

One thing I loved about my high school sweetheart was how she laughed. She had a beautiful, honest smile. But she tried to hide it. She hated her teeth because in elementary school a boy once asked her, incredulously, “Why are your teeth that color!?”

She’d grown up in a rural town in the early 1980s and had some harmless brown stains on her teeth, probably from fluorosis.

If I could have been Bud to her Olla and paid to fix her teeth, I would have.

Gap-toothed actresses have always held an unusual allure, from Brigitte Bardot and Lauren Hutton to Aimee Lou Wood and Dakota Johnson. None captured my imagination more than the troubled French actress Béatrice Dalle, star of the 1986 film 37°2 le matin, released in America as Betty Blue. Her expressive gap-toothed grin was captivating. Parisians even have a name for such a smile: les dents du bonheur, the teeth of happiness.

I was a senior in high school when my girlfriend and I discovered Betty Blue on VHS in the foreign film section of our local video rental shop. I recall only the broad strokes. A writer named Zorg is working as a handyman in a seaside resort on France’s Mediterranean coast when he meets passionate, impulsive, and occasionally violent Betty. She thinks he is a genius. They make love regularly and with the wild abandonment with which high schoolers think all French people make love.

Betty’s unpredictability and eroticism were, to me, inexorably linked to her gap-toothed smile.

In my 20s, while absent-mindedly eating an apple, I caught a seed just so. Nearly half my crown snapped away like brittle glass, leaving me with a sharp, jagged splinter of a left front tooth.

A friend joked that it made me look tough. I laughed, but I was horrified. I could swear people’s eyes flicked to my tooth when I spoke. Soon my hand went reflexively to my mouth every time I laughed.

To look like a street brawler in the film Fight Club, Brad Pitt—People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1995 and 2000—had his dentist intentionally chip away bits of his front teeth. “Brad’s willing to go to great lengths for a character,” his publicist told Entertainment Weekly.

Pitt’s intentionally chipped teeth hollered Look at me! I, however, didn’t want anyone to see my ragged smile. Most of us have the confidence of mere mortals. We don’t want to be gold-webbed kintsugi cups.

My chipped tooth began to turn brownish yellow, like an overripe banana. Every time I opened my mouth, I was leading with one perfect pearly white and one misshapen mess. No amount of brushing with whitening toothpaste made a difference. The tooth was impervious to whitening strips. I couldn’t afford to see a dentist, so my closed-mouth, Mona Lisa smile became second nature.

I hated my tooth. It looked to me as though it was rotting. I assumed everyone saw it as my defining physical feature. I hated this, too: I was susceptible to the taint of narcissism that tricks us into believing that how we look actually matters to most other people. It rarely does. And when it does matter, it’s not often for the right reasons.

Years passed.

It was jarring when, in my 30s, one of my father’s incisors was yanked. One moment he had the handsome smile I’d known my entire life, the next it was as though someone had thrown a brick through a window: Most of the panes still sparkled in the sun, but now there was a dark, unsettling void. In a long line of windows in a brick mill building, a single broken windowpane immediately catches our attention. The eye is often drawn not to what is there but to what it knows is missing.

My father was still handsome—he was far too charming to be anything but handsome—but he’d been vandalized. The missing tooth changed him; not to himself, I think, since he seemed as comfortable as ever in his skin, but to me.

Was it because of my own half tooth? Because I felt unnerved by what I was missing?

A Maine architect once explained to me the various kinds of cedar shingles he used for siding the rustic coastal cottages he designed. Shingles that are treated in a chemical wash, I learned, do not warp or discolor. “They’re so boring,” the bow-tied architect said with a dismissive groan. “They’re like a perfect, bright American smile.”

He much preferred untreated shingles that took on a feathery silver hue as they aged. They curved and chipped and weathered. Across the seasons, they changed in the light. “They’re like a French woman’s beautifully crooked smile,” the architect said. “Gorgeous!”

The wide-hipped Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales must be a precursor to the wildly erotic Betty Blue.

The Wife of Bath is the lusty storyteller of perhaps Chaucer’s best known tale. Her face is described as bold and handsome and red of hue. But her most distinctive feature is her gap-toothed smile, which, she says, symbolizes sensuality and lust:

But yet I hadde alwey a coltes tooth.
Gat-tothed I was, and that bicam me weel …
As help me God, I was a lusty oon,
And faire, and riche, and yong, and wel bigon

If gap teeth symbolize lust, why does a missing tooth attract stares?

Why are some people so attracted to a crooked-shingle smile and others prefer stock-straight teeth bleached bone-white? Did Bud, who so obviously loves his wife, Olla, want to change her teeth to make her beautiful by society’s standards? Or did he want her teeth straightened simply because that is what she wanted? What does the state of our teeth tell others about us?

I left my chipped tooth untouched for a long time. It continued to discolor. I suppose I accepted it. Maybe it did make me look, as my friend suggested, tough. At the very least, it gave me an air of wildness. Or maybe it was because I was without dental insurance and acceptance was the easiest path. For long periods, I forgot about my tooth entirely. Until, of course, I met someone new who would ask, assuming it was recent, “What happened to your tooth!?” With that I went tight-lipped.

Then a surprising thing began to happen. As I got older, became a father, moved into a more demanding career, I found that I thought about my tooth less and less. At least, I think I did. I mean, I must have: There are photos of me with friends from this period, laughing without reserve, my half fake tooth on full display. A strange thing was happening to my unchipped front tooth, too: It began to seem more perfect than it actually was simply because it shared the stage with a chipped partner.

When I look now at those photos, I am shocked by how I seem to have accepted my ugly tooth. Or was the power of happiness sometimes more powerful than my sense of embarrassment?

More years passed.

My dear friend Wes, an 85-year-old poet, recently told me he found my chipped, discolored tooth endearing. When I met Wes, in my 30s, I’d been sporting my jagged-tooth smile for a decade. Sometimes I completely forgot about it for long stretches. Wes noticed the tooth immediately when we met. He is attuned to such things, and teeth sometimes even appear in his poems.

He told me, “You’re so handsome and so capable, so your tooth … the imperfection … it made you seem down-to-earth, more approachable.”

Meanwhile a woman I had briefly dated called my chipped tooth “sexy” shortly after we met. It stunned me. We are incapable of seeing ourselves the way others see us. Rather than giving me a boost of self-confidence, the comment made me self-conscious. I began to wonder, Well, what the hell is sexy!? If my chipped tooth was sexy, I obviously had no clue. Maybe it made me seem unpredictable, something this buttoned-up and particularly predictable girlfriend found exciting.

“I think it’s got something to do with the intimate things we do with our mouths,” Wes speculates. We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Wes.

My wife has a slightly twisted incisor. It looks as though it has excitedly stepped out of line with her other teeth. If a tooth could be said to have a personality, her incisor is rebellious. When she’s laughing or smiling widely, her upper lip catches on the tooth in an utterly appealing way.

I call my wife’s tooth Wabi, as in wabi sabi, the Japanese philosophy of appreciating the beauty in imperfection. I love her Wabi.

My wife has a nickname for my chipped, discolored tooth. She calls it Snaggle.

My wife is haunted by a very specific terror about her teeth. She says it is a common fear: She is scared that she will stumble while walking and fall, and her open mouth will hit the concrete curb just so, smashing all her teeth. Again, she says that most people have this exact same fear. Though that seems suspect, I take her point. Our teeth, so unprotected and on display, often make us feel vulnerable.

“I know it’s irrational,” my wife says. “But my heart races if I even think about it.”

I don’t have this fear. Though I suppose my version is falling while ice-skating: When I’m trying to get myself up, with my hands splayed in front of me, someone glides by and cleanly slices off my fingers, which skitter across the ice like frozen hot dogs.

In his long poem “Fire,” my friend Wes included his boyhood distress about his mother’s teeth: “Where is my father? / Why had my mother come home without her teeth?”

“My mother was elated when all her teeth were pulled at once,” Wes tells me on the phone. The culture of the 1950s made his mother obsessed with new white appliances and new white teeth, everything bright, bright. Later in the poem, Wes watches his mother, who took in sewing jobs to earn extra money: “And where, after her promise, were the brand-new teeth? / Her with pins in her mouth where the teeth were meant / to be …”

Teeth still mean something in America. If they aren’t straight and white, they signal poverty, ignorance. That shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

A version of my wife’s nightmare actually happened to my friend Candace.

“I was nine,” she intoned with the ominousness of a campfire horror story. “My family was moving to Panama on a military transport plane. The day before the flight we checked into a Holiday Inn near the airport. I asked my parents if I could go swimming in the motel pool. They both lit cigarettes, poured themselves a room cocktail, and shooed me out the door. I ran to the pool and dived in before I noticed there were only a few inches of water.”

Candace told me this story in the intimacy of our shared office when we worked together as editors of a life-style magazine. I asked her about it again recently.

“As luck would have it, I landed on the side of my face. The pool rash was appalling, but temporary. My six front teeth were chipped and cracked, but shockingly still attached. Eventually the damage made the nerves and roots die, and the teeth turned first gray, then brownish. I was finally allowed to get them fixed in high school.”

It could have been much worse. She’d escaped by the skin of her teeth.

My friend Abbott went through an anguishing, multiyear ordeal having his front teeth capped. He consulted with Candace, who had, after all, had her entire smile rebuilt. He sought a second opinion. Then a third. But not mine. He said my snaggletooth was “no big deal.”

Abbott finally chose a dentist and embarked on the slow process. When the capping process was complete, he slipped into a mild depression. He hated his new smile. Those of us closest to him, friends since our early teens, thought he looked great. But he couldn’t hear us. We’d spent our youth reading Henry Miller when a dash of Anaïs Nin’s wisdom could have done some good: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Abbott wanted his teeth to disappear but felt he’d gotten a kintsugi smile. “I’m stuck with these fucking Chiclets,” he groaned. He had gone too far, spent too much money, to turn back.

Sometimes you’ve already leapt only to realize there’s no water in the pool.

Another idiom: sets my teeth on edge, to communicate extreme discomfort.

In the first complete translation of the Bible from Latin into English, credited to the theologian John Wycliffe and his followers, there’s this line, from about 1382: “And the teeth of sones wexen on egge.”

But the phrase’s place in the lexicon was solidified by Shakespeare’s Henry IV, when the king’s former ally Hotspur—before he dies at the hands of his nemesis, Prince Hal, in the battle of Shrewsbury—says it is bad verse that leaves a sour taste in his mouth: “And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, / Nothing so much as mincing poetry. / ’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.”

Frida Kahlo explored so much of her physical being in self-portrait after self-portrait. In her paintings, she rejected traditional beauty. She didn’t shy from her unibrow or deny her mustache. Yet she never painted herself smiling. Kahlo was not an unhappy woman—she joked, she laughed, she had a wicked sense of humor—but it is difficult to find even a photograph of her smiling.

According to art historian Parker Lesley, quoted in Hayden Herrera’s biography of Kahlo, “She had two gold incisors and when she was all gussied up she would take off the plain gold caps and put on gold caps with rose diamonds in front, so that her smile really sparkled.”

Kahlo, who married pain and sexuality in her work, didn’t pluck her eyebrows, but she tended to her teeth.

My friend Abbott’s dark response to his new smile frightened me more than I realized at the time—the story of his teeth set my teeth on edge. My complacency deepened. For fear of making things worse, I stayed the course of my self-prescribed dental plan: Do nothing.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, stressed from high-pressure, deadline-driven work and a toxic coworker, I began grinding my teeth. I awoke one night with excruciating electric shocks of pain pulsing through my jaw. The next day, a dentist told me I had cracked both of my lower back molars so badly that they needed to be pulled.

I dragged myself to an endodontist who carried himself with the uninterested air of a man who’d been ready to retire years ago. He made halfhearted small talk while filling me with successive needles of lidocaine over the course of 45 minutes, then leaned into my mouth with a pair of shiny pliers. My entire body clenched. I tried to control my breathing, but my heart thudded. I still have my wisdom teeth, so things were tight back there. The extractions were tricky. The first molar popped out like that of a cartoon boxer hit with an uppercut; the second shattered. The endodontist dug for shards like a child in a sandbox. My jaw filled with pressure. I winced when I heard the unholy scrape of metal tool against tooth; for a passing moment I yearned for the innocence of my childhood dentist hovering over me, his teeth going clickety clack, clickety clack.

The months that followed became a blur: bone grafts on the empty sockets, stitches, healing, laser mapping, custom molds, post-hole drilling, post insertion, more healing, and at last, implants. The whole process took roughly a year.

Still my chipped, discolored front tooth remained.

After perhaps 15 years together, my wife told me I had begun to put my hand near my mouth more and more when I spoke in public. She said I tried to hide my tooth by stroking my mustache or beard.

I had become Olla. My wife was my Bud, encouraging me to take care of my tooth—not because it bothered her but because, as with Bud and Olla, she loved me so much, she hated the idea of my feeling insecure.

A final idiom, another from the 14th century: to lie through one’s teeth means that a person is able to smile while lying.

The origins of this expression can be traced to the legends of the romantic hero Sir Guy of Warwick from the early 1300s. When Guy confronted the traitorous knight Morgadour about his treachery, the wicked man had the audacity to reply, “Thi lerst amidward thi teth.”

Thanks to my wife’s gentle support, I found I couldn’t lie to myself through my chipped tooth any longer. I pushed down the anxiety I felt about how my friend Abbott was unable see himself in his new smile. After the ordeal of my two molar implants was well behind me and I felt healed—physically, mentally, and financially—I decided to have my front tooth repaired. I’d survived the implants. Why not keep going?

The new dentist I’d begun seeing—not the excavating endodontist—was calm and kind. She patiently explained the process. She spoke softly. As she built up the layers of tooth-colored composite resin, pausing occasionally to cure and bond it with a slender light wand, she asked whether I felt okay. She was gentle. If I winced, she rested her hand softly on my shoulder. The whole thing, from the time I sat in her chair to my slow, stunned walk out the door, took less than an hour.

I drove home opening and closing my mouth as it tried to make sense of its new fit. When I called my wife from the car to tell her everything had gone smoothly, I noticed I suddenly had a slight lisp; my tongue, used to so many years of a void where a tooth should have been, didn’t know where to put itself, as though it was moving inside someone else’s mouth. My eyes darted between the road ahead and my reflection in the rearview mirror. My unchipped tooth no longer needed to carry my smile; its partner was back. For the first time in decades, I smiled an unbroken smile. I was nearly 50 years old—not young, but not so long in the tooth that I couldn’t, despite sporadic resistance, find my way to embracing change.

We rarely succeed in changing the things around us, but as Proust wrote, gradually our desires change.

When my friend Abbott told a woman he’d just begun dating how much he hated his Chiclet teeth, years after he’d had the procedure, her brow furrowed. She asked, “What are you talking about?” She hadn’t noticed what he could not help but notice every time he looked in the mirror. That woman is now the mother of his daughter, and Abbott has accepted, if not embraced, his teeth.

When my friend Candace had her pool-shattered smile completely reconstructed, she was stunned by her high school sweetheart’s reaction. “While I was elated with the result,” she recalled, “my boyfriend was less so. He thought my jacked teeth were endearing. That’s what first love looks like.”

Dakota Johnson’s gap tooth disappeared naturally after her orthodontist suggested she remove a retainer she’d worn since her teens. The disappearance made international news. Johnson told interviewers she was devastated and wanted her gap restored. Instead, she got more work done.

Aimee Lou Wood still has her gap. “No Americans have my teeth,” she said.

Brad Pitt had his intentionally chipped teeth repaired once he finished filming as a bare-knuckle boxer. When playing the role of himself, Pitt must have felt something closer to perfection was more appropriate.

Imperfect teeth are going extinct.

In our increasingly stratified society, sparkly white chompers have become a priority for both the actually wealthy and those striving to project a luxury life style. As many as 19 percent of Americans have whitened their teeth; North America accounts for nearly half of the global dental veneer market. The consequences of bad habits or unfortunate accidents are brushed away by a few appointments in a dentist’s chair; what was rotten or broken is spackled over. The cosmetic dentistry market, which generated $11.54 billion in 2022, is projected to reach $33.8 billion by 2030.

Why are we all conforming? Why did I?

After my chipped, discolored front tooth was finally fixed, nobody said anything. For much of my life, I had been both consciously and subconsciously uneasy about my tooth, in all its states. Then, when the thing that I’d come to believe physically defined me was—poof!—gone, no one seemed to care. I waited for people to notice, the way they do when you get a new pair of glasses or lose weight. But, nothing. I was surprised, then a little wounded, which is silly, I know, and embarrassing to admit.

More than three years have passed since my tooth was fixed. Until my tongue reminds me, I sometimes forget; it’s difficult to unlearn the habits of self-doubt. No one is likely to say my ordinary new tooth makes me look tough or sexy. My smile as I knew it for decades has disappeared. It is anonymous now, unexceptional. I got what I wanted—didn’t I? When Thoreau wrote, “Things do not change; we change,” he certainly didn’t have in mind 21st-century dental culture. But there it is.

It seems ridiculous, but I sometimes miss the snaggletooth that made my smile wild and singular, a weathered Maine shingle. And I wonder: What are we trying to change—our teeth or ourselves?

The post My Two Front Teeth appeared first on The American Scholar.

Snakes do not scare me particularly. In Asturias, where snake encounters and bites are rare, the snakes are small; few are venomous. What I’ve seen mostly are grass snakes—no bigger around than my thumb, and reclusive, never a threat. I watch them slither away.

But triple the size, and I’ll rethink an encounter. Snakes that are five or six feet long and as big around as my arm give me pause, even when they aren’t venomous. We skirted the rattlers, both of us skittish because we had to step off the trail and into the brush. Two rattlers in plain sight in the road suggested to me a mountainside crawling with snakes. And almost running into a pair of snakes suggested how easily we might almost run into a pair of bears, or even cougars. Danger could be lurking behind every rock or tree.

It lurked behind none—no more snakes on that visit.

This past July, I was back in Magdalena for my annual visit. On my first morning, I took my customary run up to the old Kelly Mine. The long view of the plain below was glorious. Then I started back. Close to town, I saw a dark object on my side of the road. I slowed.

Stick? Piece of hose? I came closer.

Not a stick or piece of hose but a snake. Alive. Big. Halfway across my lane, headed toward the other, not moving but clearly alert. It had not been there 30 minutes earlier, when I’d been going in the opposite direction.

I looked around for a stick to prod the snake off the road and into the field. But not a one did I find on either side of the road. The snake still wasn’t moving. I found a chip of wood and tossed it toward the snake in hopes of startling the creature into movement. Anywhere was better than the blacktop. My hunk of wood landed short and made no impression on the animal. I gathered up some gravel from the edge of the road, and scattered it toward the snake. Again, no reaction. I looked around for some tool to use to goad it into movement, but saw nothing.

While I stood there, in the right lane, looking at the snake angled toward me in the left lane, a vehicle from Pierson Road arrived at the intersection with Kelly Road. It was going to skirt me, which would put it in the snake’s lane. Quickly I switched lanes to protect my snake while the truck went by.

But it didn’t go by. It headed straight for us and stopped, straddling the two lanes, and a big man with a cowboy hat leaned over his open window. He didn’t even look at me, but down at the snake. So did I.

“That’s just a bull snake,” the man pronounced after a minute. “It won’t hurt you.”

“It won’t hurt me?” I repeated. “I just want to get it off the road before a car comes and squashes it.”

The man opened the door of the pickup and stepped into the road. He took a step toward the snake, then raised his booted foot. Not to harm the snake, as I’d momentarily feared, but to shoo it off the road. “Go on,” he said, poking with his toe. “Go on. There you go. Go.” And the hissing snake turned back and slithered off the pavement.

“There you go,” said the man to me, climbing back into his truck.

“Thank you!” I said. He started the truck up and turned it back into his lane and drove on toward town.

I looked for the snake, but it was gone, vanished among the tufts of grass and weeds along the road. So I resumed my run, trailing the man. But he was gone, too, disappeared into the morning sun.

The post There You Go appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St Vincent Millay appeared first on The American Scholar.

1. Do unto others as they do unto you.
2. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
3. What’s the difference?

Most students wrote that the first law—giving as good as you got—described a less considerate way of treating others than the second. Those who’d read a fair amount traced the first law back to the Code of Hammurabi or the Old Testament directive of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They contrasted it with the New Testament philosophy of turning the other cheek, or loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Some called this second law the Golden Rule. If they were capable of this level of analysis and wrote well, they got an A.

No one ever questioned the wisdom of the Golden Rule.

No one, that is, until a bright student who sat in the middle row appended a curious coda to her essay. She went over the two ways of thinking involved in the two laws, then wrote, “Of course, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you also gets it wrong. Other people aren’t you.”

Handing back the essay a week later, I talked with her briefly. She wore the pale, dissatisfied look of those for whom life isn’t quite sufficient. “I liked your essay,” I told her. “You’re the only person I know who’s ever taken issue with the Golden Rule. What made you think of it?”

She smiled painfully. “My boyfriend takes me out to a lot of basketball games. Because that’s what he likes, not me.” In fact, what she’d written coincided with what I’d come to believe myself, that a lot of kindly meant behavior is marred by the egotistical self. The point that other people don’t hold the same assumptions that you do is hard to take. The people close to you may not share your taste in food or opera, and why should they? Still, if love, as some cynics put it, is a triumph of illusion over reality, then it’s certainly understandable that they should—or should seem to. If you truly love someone, the loved one feels like an extension of yourself. That’s because love is partly a matter of projecting your traits onto someone else and then admiring what’s there.

Developmentally, we begin by loving ourselves: We are it, the point of everything. Soon enough, we learn that others surround us and their feelings are also significant. Some of us may even go on to become famous philanthropists or saints, such as Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, loving others as a vocation. But the essential filtering through the self never stops, since what other true vantage point do we have? You experience others as yourself. Yet as any simile will show, the preposition as is inexact at best.

To be fair, the phrase “as you would have them do unto you” isn’t really about what you’d like. It’s meant to be an exercise in empathy. Yet if we are all born narcissists, and the projection of the self onto others is second nature to us, then seeing through another’s eyes is impossible, except through a form of wishful guesswork.

This idea, the inescapability of the self, has implications beyond moral behavior. It threatens the very notion of objectivity. Isn’t one always imposing one’s own standards on others? Yes and no. First of all, those selfsame standards inevitably reflect communal values: No one is brought up in a void. Parents and teachers can inculcate the value of tolerance or hard work. Second, some people’s standards seem more flexible, more empathic than those held by others. Consider the person who expresses an opposition to charity but still gives money to a homeless person. Herein lies some hope for the Golden Rule: If you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes or at least imagine what it must feel like, you can properly do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Of course, if you have this kind of empathy, you probably don’t need that kind of guideline.

But I’m neglecting the other law (“Do unto others as they do unto you”), which describes a great deal of the events on our planet. For the same writing assignment, another student decided that he favored the “eye for an eye” mode of behavior. “It’s only fair,” he wrote. “The punishment fits the crime.”

I guardedly admired this essay and talked to this student as well. He was slightly apologetic yet stood his ground. As he explained, he was bullied as a kid till he learned to fight back. “Nothing else works.” How can one argue with this version of the School of Hard Knocks? An eye for an eye often is the way of the world, in everything from schoolyard fights to a judge meting out public service to a defendant who has damaged the community. It also unfortunately describes human nature, as I’ve observed it for more than half a century. Despite millennia of so-called civilization, people derive satisfaction from payback.

As for my other students, who came from many ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic levels, did any of them advocate a system of rewards and punishments other than the two offered? That was beyond the scope of the assignment, but a few astute students did try—including one whose last paragraph, a masterwork of social policy, concluded, “Easier said than done.” Another quoted this witticism: “Do unto others before they undo you.”

After a few years, I stopped giving this assignment. If I found the task too complex, I figured that most students did, too. Eventually I replaced the essay prompt with one about the difference between a good joke and a bad joke—another difficult topic, but one that got more laughs.

The post Rules of Reciprocity appeared first on The American Scholar.

To Gaylin, it was clear that organ transplantation was saving lives. But why stop there? Look at all the hormones a neomort produces. Insulin, growth hormone, estrogen, testosterone—a neomort is a veritable hormone factory. Even better, consider how useful neomorts would be for medical training. Students could practice potentially embarrassing pelvic and rectal exams on neomorts, and surgical residents could use them as practice dummies for hernia repairs and limb amputations.

Neomorts are also ideally suited for medical research. Take, for example, Phase 1 drug trials, in which pharmaceutical researchers test the safety of an experimental drug by giving it to healthy subjects. Such trials are uncomfortable, lengthy, and potentially hazardous. Often the researchers push the dose higher and higher until the subjects start to experience side effects. But if researchers could use neomorts instead, they could administer as much of a drug as they wanted without worry, or even infect a neomort with a virus to test the cure. Researchers could poison neomorts and try out an antidote, administer a carcinogen and test a potentially toxic chemotherapy, or give them an experimental vaccine followed by a deadly infectious disease like Ebola or anthrax—all without endangering the life or health of a conscious subject.

Gaylin’s proposal never really took off: Medical students still practice pelvic exams on living patients, and drug safety is still tested on healthy, conscious subjects. Yet neither has the proposal entirely vanished. In 2021, a surgical team at NYU tested a genetically modified pig kidney by suturing it to the leg of a brain-dead research subject. Shortly afterward, another team of surgeons implanted two pig kidneys into the body of a brain-dead subject at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Some bioethicists have suggested a similar experiment for childbirth. Noting that the bodies of pregnant women who are brain-dead or irreversibly comatose can be maintained for months before a child is delivered, Anna Smajdor has proposed that brain-dead cadavers could be artificially impregnated and used as gestational surrogates.

Whether Gaylin intended “Harvesting the Dead” as a serious plan or a modest proposal is unclear (he died in 2022 at age 97), but either way, his utilitarian logic is not easy to refute. When I raise his ideas at conferences or in seminars, the response is often an uneasy silence. Many people seem disturbed by the idea of impregnating a brain-dead body or using it to practice limb amputations, yet being able to explain their reactions is another matter. “This whole thing makes me feel squirrely,” they’ll say, “but I can’t really say why.”

Bioethicists often refer to such responses as the “yuck factor”: a gut feeling of disgust or repulsion that a proper philosophical education could put to rest. My diagnosis would be a little different. For me, the point at which each of Gaylin’s proposals feels unsettling is roughly the same point at which it starts to feel degrading. To be degraded is to be reduced in rank—to be lessened, diminished, or demeaned. Adults feel degraded when they are treated like children; workers feel degraded when they are treated like robots; patients feel degraded when they are treated like medical curiosities. Degradation doesn’t necessarily involve people. Sometimes objects are treated in a way that is degrading, such as when a grave is desecrated. The currency of degradation is disrespect. If it is possible to imagine someone or something as deserving of respect, it is usually possible to imagine it degraded when the proper respect is withheld.

Degradation takes many forms, but one of the most familiar ways to degrade something is to commodify it and bring it into the market sphere. This is part of the argument against prostitution, commercial surrogacy, and organ markets. When something is put up for sale—priced, advertised, perhaps discounted for a special summer blowout—it is being valued instrumentally, as a means of generating income. This may seem fine if the good in question is a mattress or a propane grill, but it seems degrading for the kind of good that ought to be valued for its own sake. This is one reason we have adoption agencies rather than baby markets: Treating children as property would threaten their status as human beings.

Degradation is one of a number of related English words—such as disgrace, dishonor, or debasement—that describe the variety of ways in which something or someone can be brought low. Unlike desecration or defilement, degradation doesn’t always imply that something sacred has been violated. Yet it does suggest the contamination or deterioration of a moral ideal. Like debasement, degradation sounds like a word from a 19th-century novel, perhaps in connection to an old-fashioned vice like drunkenness, gluttony, or sexual promiscuity. To say that a man has debased himself is to imply that he has lowered himself in a way that offends both morality and good taste. Often it suggests behavior that a person should be ashamed of, but isn’t.

Exactly what constitutes degrading treatment of a brain-dead body can be difficult to parse, not least because of the unusual position the corpse occupies in our culture. It is no longer a person, yet it is closely connected to one; it is not exactly property, yet it has instrumental value; it has deep personal meaning, yet from the moment of death it is handled completely by paid professionals working behind closed doors. Virtually every culture has developed ritualized ways of expressing respect for the dead body, but in ours the default setting for respect is whatever the individual wishes. Perhaps it will be possible to use brain-dead bodies instrumentally and preserve some measure of respect for them. But if past experience is any guide, our moral attitudes toward brain-dead bodies will be shaped less by conscious choice than by the forces of the market.

If you were a mortician in 1902, visiting Milwaukee for a meeting of the National Funeral Directors Association, you would have witnessed an early marvel of American embalming technology. His name was Bisga Man. Although Bisga Man had been dead for three months, he did not lie in a coffin. Instead, he sat upright in an ornate, high-backed chair: legs crossed, rigid as a pole, a newspaper folded in his lap. His blank stare and tweed jacket gave him the look of an anesthetized banker.

Bisga Man was the star feature in an exhibit of preserved human body parts intended to advertise Bisga Embalming Fluid, a product developed by two instructors at the Chicago College of Embalming. According to a report in The Casket, a trade journal for morticians, Bisga Man was “one of the most remarkable specimens of embalming ever produced in this country.” By “remarkable,” The Casket meant “remarkably lifelike.” If the purpose of embalming is to prepare a corpse to be seen, the promise of Bisga Embalming Fluid was to prepare it to be seen in an altogether new way: so pink and vivid that it no longer looked like a corpse. John Troyer, the former director of the Center for Death Studies at the University of Bath, has described the appearance of Bisga Man as “unnaturally alive,” a phrase that captures both the hyperreality of the embalmer’s art and the weirdness of posing a dead man in a wingback chair.

Bisga Man represented the culmination of a long technological arc. Until the mid-19th century, the job of disposing of dead bodies in America fell to family members and close friends. They would “lay out” the body, wash it, shave it if necessary, dress it in a shroud, and place it in a coffin, which was usually made by a local carpenter. The family would keep the body in the home for one to three days, often in a designated room such as the parlor, where there would be a vigil or wake.

That changed with the development of embalming. Prior to the Civil War, embalming was a medical technique mainly used to preserve cadavers for dissection. But in the 1860s, when an unprecedented number of young American men met their deaths on distant battlefields, embalming made it possible to preserve their bodies for the long journey home. Later it allowed funeral services to be delayed longer so that mourners could travel to the ceremonies. Of course, embalming also required skills and equipment that could be provided only by trained specialists. So by the early decades of the 20th century, the care of the corpse was no longer a ritualized family affair. It was a commercial endeavor conducted by professionals.

At the heart of this endeavor was the idea that the corpse should be publicly displayed. As Troyer points out, the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made possible the rise of “death photography,” allowing anyone to view a corpse at any time. Death photographers typically posed the deceased in a style and setting that suggested a deep sleep, an aesthetic later mimicked by morticians when mechanical embalming techniques allowed the body to be displayed for longer periods. By 1920, it was possible for a Boston mortician to advertise, “For composing features, $1. For giving the features a look of quiet resignation, $2. For giving the features the appearance of Christian hope and contentment, $5.”

Today, of course, paying a mortician to take care of a corpse seems no stranger than paying a nanny to take care of a child or paying a home-health aide to take care of an elderly parent. A task once seen as a moral duty and an expression of love has become commodified—a job to be outsourced to paid professionals. And although commodification may have come with social costs, most of us are satisfied with the trade-off. The death of a family member is a traumatic event that comes with a disconcerting array of social and legal expectations. Most people are glad that preparing the body for a funeral service is no longer among them.

How did the early funeral directors avoid the taint of commerce? They came to a simple but profound realization: Commerce can provide meaningful rituals of its own. Along with the new technology of embalming, for instance, came the ritual of viewing the body. A similar transformation took place with floral arrangements, coffins, cemetery plots, headstones, and hearses, all of which were monetized and incorporated into the formalized customs of the funeral. And whereas many people see funeral arrangements as expensive, even exploitative, nobody really argues that they are degrading. Just the opposite, in fact. Part of what people are buying from the funeral industry is a guarantee that the dead body will be treated with respect.

Yet once a good or practice has moved to the market sphere, it becomes subject to commercial norms. According to those norms, status often marches hand in hand with money. If you concede that it is morally acceptable to buy and sell sex, you also submit to a system in which visiting a high-priced escort at the Ritz-Carlton is superior to a 15-minute encounter in the alleyway behind a Greyhound station. So when it became possible to buy mortuary services, it was no surprise that expensive funerals soon became a status symbol and the inability to afford one became a mark of shame. That the tide seems to be turning back now with the middle-class preference for cremation and green funerals is less a rejection of the market than a predictable shift in consumer taste.

Such is the logic of consumer capitalism. Once we cross the boundary into the market sphere, it doesn’t take long for us to grow accustomed to our surroundings. Fashions change, and so do markers of status. Practices that once seemed degrading, profane, or disrespectful eventually come to seem ordinary. I can still remember the shock I felt in 1985 the first time I saw a credit card sign in a doctor’s office. Today pharmaceutical companies advertise their drugs on television, patients have been rebranded as “clients,” and entire medical schools are named for corporate executives. The notion that I was dismayed by any of this strikes my children as comically old-fashioned, as if I were a Victorian gentleman scandalized by modern bathing costumes.

Even this sense of shock can be monetized. Take, for instance, Body Worlds, the boundary-pushing science exhibit developed by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. Like Bisga Man, Body Worlds was made possible by a new technology—in this case, plastination, a process that replaces the fat and water in the body with plastics. The product is a hardened corpse that does not decay. Von Hagens displayed skinned, dissected corpses in poses intended to be entertaining and instructive: kicking a soccer ball, pirouetting like a ballerina, rearing up like the Lone Ranger on a giant dissected stallion. After opening in Tokyo in 1995, Body Worlds went on to break attendance records all over the globe.

Von Hagens marketed Body Worlds as the latter-day equivalent of a 19th-century medical museum: an educational science exhibit that would reveal the secrets of human anatomy to the general public. An ethics advisory committee called Body Worlds a “ground-breaking educational exhibition” and a “gold standard for the field.” But the real allure of the exhibit was the way it violated an invisible boundary between the sacred and the profane, promising visitors the frisson of seeing a dead body that was not lying in a casket. Von Hagens even posed some of the corpses in ways designed to get a laugh. One held his liver out in front of him, like a waiter holding a tray. Another looked like a flasher opening his raincoat: his torso butterflied like a chicken, a fedora perched on his head, his dissected genitalia dangling between his legs. In 2009, von Hagens introduced an exhibit in which two plastinated corpses were posed having sex in front of a mirrored wall.

In 1974, when Gaylin published “Harvesting the Dead,” the concept of brain death was only six years old. The criteria were formalized in 1968 by an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School. Yet even then the concept was intertwined with the need for transplantable organs. Surgeons had performed the first transplant from a brain-dead donor five years earlier. The Harvard committee declared that if someone’s brain is permanently nonfunctional, the person is “for all practical purposes” dead—even though the heart is beating, the hair is growing, and the subject may occasionally raise its arms and drop them across its chest, a reflex known as the “Lazarus Sign.”

The state of being “dead” and the state of being “dead for all practical purposes” are not quite the same thing; if they were, we wouldn’t need the term brain-dead. Yet the concept is critical for the support of organ transplantation. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer has famously called brain death “a concept so desirable in its consequences that it is unthinkable to give up, and so shaky on its foundations that it can scarcely be supported.” Noting the instrumental rationale for the concept, the anthropologist Margaret Lock has suggested that a more apt phrase would be as-good-as-dead.

Outside the culture of medicine, in which the concept of brain death is firmly established, the moral status of brain-dead bodies is not nearly so settled. For example, when a French doctor performed a nitrous oxide experiment on a brain-dead subject in 1988, he was vilified. ‘‘I find it revolting that in this country these types of experiments on human beings are considered,” the French minister of health said. A similar response greeted Anna Smajdor’s suggestion that brain-dead women could be artificially impregnated and used as gestational surrogates. Commentators found the proposal “outrageous,” “dehumanizing,” and “dystopian.”

To many people, brain death seems like a fate worse than death itself: the body trapped in a liminal state, not exactly alive but not exactly dead, suspended in a cool, sterile web of medical machinery. We are taught from an early age to treat other human beings with respect, and we have customs and rituals for the respectful treatment of the dead body. But how to treat the brain-dead body with respect remains a troubled question decades after the diagnosis was established. At least part of the reason is because we remain unsettled about the place of brain death within larger frameworks of meaning that extend beyond the language of individual rights and personal autonomy.

Two decades ago, a team led by the cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt presented students at the University of Virginia with a series of hypothetical scenarios designed to test moral reasoning. In one scenario, a research assistant in a pathology lab sees a cadaver that is about to be cremated. Although the research assistant is a vegetarian who believes it is wrong to kill animals for food, she is disturbed by the thought of perfectly edible meat going to waste. So she cuts off a piece of muscle from the cadaver, takes it home, and cooks it for dinner. Haidt asked the students: Is there anything wrong with this?

Not many of the students were willing to defend cannibalism, yet they struggled to explain why it was wrong. They were just as puzzled by other hypothetical scenarios. In one, an adult brother and sister decide to have sex—only once, in secret, using birth control. In another, after a pet dog is accidentally killed, family members add its meat to a tasty stew and eat it for dinner. These actions struck the students as reprehensible in ways that they couldn’t easily express. As Haidt writes, the students were “rendered speechless by their inability to explain verbally what they knew intuitively.” Haidt calls this “moral dumbfounding.”

In most parts of the world, Haidt contends, morality can be mapped onto one of three axes: individualism, community, and divinity. Moral concepts such as rights, liberty, justice, and tolerance come from the ethic of individualism. The purpose of these concepts is to protect the interests of individuals as they pursue their needs and desires. Concepts such as duty, authority, and patriotism come from the ethic of community. These help preserve the social fabric by protecting collectives such as families, armies, and nations. But it is from the ethic of divinity that we get concepts such as desecration, defilement, and degradation. The ethic of divinity sees the person as a spiritual being who is connected to a sacred or natural order; living in accordance with these moral concepts maintains that order and protects the soul from being degraded. Often these notions are tied to rules regarding the body: eating, menstruation, sexual activity, and the treatment of the corpse.

The reason educated, liberal westerners are morally dumbfounded by Haidt’s scenarios is because many of us reason almost exclusively along a single axis: the ethic of individualism. On this axis, a moral violation typically involves cruelty, unfairness, or dishonesty. But violations such as cannibalism, bestiality, and incest are offenses against norms of purity or sanctity. To the extent that there is a moral problem with eating the flesh of a human corpse, it is that the act feels like a defilement, a violation of the respect a dead body should be accorded. There is a reason the term desecration is used in law to describe illicit interference with a dead body or a grave. The actions are transgressions against some notion of the sacred.

Although the word desecration suggests an offense against God, there are secular equivalents as well. Burning the American flag is sometimes described as desecration, especially by social conservatives. Many Americans on the left would feel a similar sense of violation if the Minnesota Boundary Waters were turned into an industrial waste site, or if a pharmaceutical company began using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to market Ambien. Almost everyone has some institution, place, or figure for whom admiration borders on awe and reverence. I remember talking to an English friend who was offended by a comedy sketch making fun of David Bowie.

Often our reaction toward violations of sanctity or purity is not mere condemnation but disgust. We might denounce burglary and fraud, but we feel viscerally repulsed by necrophilia or child sex trafficking. Offenses against these norms seem to extend beyond wrongs to individual victims and to pollute society as a whole. Think, for example, of the collective impulse to destroy the houses where violent sex offenders have tortured and killed their victims, or when people say they need to take a shower after seeing or reading an account of an especially twisted crime. It is as if a moral stain must be removed before order can be restored.

What makes violations of sanctity or purity difficult to articulate and justify—at least for many of us in the West—is that they are no longer explicitly supported by any larger conceptual scaffolding. Words such as desecration and debasement sound archaic and prudish, even reactionary. Faced with a conflict between emotion and reason, many people feel that the only appropriate response is simply to change their minds and admit that their gut feelings were wrong. When one of Haidt’s interviewees was presented with the case of a man who has sex with a supermarket chicken before consuming it, he replied, “It’s his chicken, he’s eating it, nobody is getting hurt.” What the interviewee did not say (but may have felt) is that a man who has sex with a dead chicken has degraded himself, even if he enjoyed the experience.

Such judgments are a form of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluation”—a judgment of better or worse (or higher or lower) that stands independent of one’s own tastes, desires, and preferences. It can be a narrowly moral judgment, such as condemning a practice as cruel or unfair, but it can also be much broader. To tell someone that he is wasting his life is not exactly a moral condemnation as typically understood, but neither is it a casual expression of personal preference. It appeals to a larger framework of meaning within which a human life can be judged a success or a failure.

It is within this larger framework of meaning that judgments about degradation get their purchase. Taylor calls it “spiritual”; others might prefer the term “existential.” Either way, it is the framework within which we might speak of a life as having meaning or purpose. To say that someone has degraded himself by having sex with a chicken carcass or eating the flesh of a cadaver is to make a judgment about the place of such actions in an admirable human life and the way such a life should end. No one’s rights have been violated when a dead body is displayed having sex, but to feel uneasy about the display is more than just a “yuck factor.” It is the sense that the bodies on display have been degraded, even if the reasons why are difficult to articulate.

“My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in The Philosophical Investigations (tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe). By an “attitude towards a soul,” Wittgenstein was referring to the stance that is implicit in our relationships with other human beings. Some aspects of this stance are explicitly moral—for example, the notion that other human beings have rights and that they are accountable for their actions. But other aspects are close to custom or habit, such as the idea that people should be addressed by name rather than a number, or that they should eat at a table rather than from a bowl on the floor, or that they deserve a funeral when they die. An attitude toward a soul is usually less a matter of conscious deliberation than the background for that deliberation. We simply take the attitude reflexively, in accordance with how we have been taught and what the situation seems to demand.

The premise of “Harvesting the Dead” is that we should take the same attitude toward a brain-dead body that we do toward a donated cadaver. Yet when Margaret Lock interviewed North American nurses, she found that not a single one was able to think of the brain-dead body as simply a cadaver. This was not because they had any difficulty accepting brain death as a diagnosis. Yet if they happened to be taking care of an unconscious patient who was later declared brain-dead, the declaration of death did little to change their attitudes. The anthropologist Lesley Sharp documented a similar dynamic at work in Strange Harvest, her ethnography of organ transplantation. According to Sharp, relatives of a brain-dead organ donor usually respond to the body of their loved one as if the person is still present, speaking to and caressing the body up until the moment when it is taken to surgery.

Contrast that with the bluntly instrumental attitude taken by employees of organ procurement organizations (OPOs), which are responsible for obtaining and evaluating organs for transplantation. According to Sharp, organ procurement specialists do not refer to donors as “patients” and rarely use a patient’s name. Instead, they simply say “he” or “she.”  Instead of “life support,” they use phrases like “mechanical support” and “artificial support.” They measure the quality of a brain-dead body by how many organs can be harvested, with the ideal being a “nine-organ donor.”

To see the body in such a starkly instrumental way is not the result of malice or ill will. Organ procurement is emotionally draining and demands enormous sensitivity. Its very nature makes the process extraordinarily difficult: a grieving family, the pressure of time, the brutality of organ and tissue retrieval itself. But there is no avoiding the fact that the brain-dead body is being used instrumentally as a source of salvageable parts. Many organ procurement specialists have to remind themselves that their work serves a larger social good.

OPOs take care to emphasize the altruistic nature of organ transplantation. Organs are “donated,” not sold; donors “give the gift of life.” Yet behind the language of altruism lies a very profitable business. In 2022, the global transplantation market was valued at $8.5 billion. And though there is no legal market in the United States for most human organs, the same is not true of human tissue—such as bone, cartilage, and eyes—which is collected and sold by tissue banks. In 2012, a National Public Radio investigation estimated the market value of a single human body at roughly $80,000 or more.

Unlike organ recovery, which is a skilled procedure performed by surgeons, human tissue is harvested by technicians using crude instruments like hammers and metal wedges. Tissue salvagers pull out the large bones from arms and legs and replace them with plastic or wooden pipes. They split open the chest to get to the heart valves, and they peel veins from the inside of the skin. To remove the skin, they use a dermatone, a specialized instrument that one salvager describes as “kind of a cross between a cheese grater and an electric razor.” Some companies offer their salvagers financial incentives and prizes for recovering as much tissue as possible. At one such company, called Allograft, this prize for skin recovery was known as “The Golden Dermatone.”

The sudden shift in attitudes—from seeing people as patients to seeing them as organ and tissue donors—can be hard for caregivers to navigate. Margaret Lock interviewed a Canadian physician who, as a resident in the 1970s, spent a morning trying to save the life of a young boy. When the boy was declared brain-dead, the physician was then required to assist the transplant team in opening the boy up and removing his organs. The doctor’s physical revulsion was so intense that he left the room and vomited. He described the experience as the worst moment of his medical career.

The notion of degradation typically depends on a hierarchy of value. In 1956, when the sociologist Harold Garfinkel introduced the concept of a “status degradation ceremony,” he had in mind rituals of public denunciation: stripping military officers of their rank, pronouncing a prison sentence on a convicted offender, having a security guard escort a fired employee out of a building. The purpose of such rituals is to express moral indignation. Yet that purpose can be fulfilled only if there is an agreed-upon status hierarchy within which the target of the ceremony can be lowered. When there is no shame in being fired, sentenced, or expelled, no status degradation will follow.

Hierarchies themselves are culturally and historically contingent. A marker of high status in one culture is a marker of low status in another; just compare the difference in how the elderly are revered in China or Japan with the way they are treated in the United States. Status can also change dramatically over time. The status of the clergy in Western cultures has declined over the past 200 years while that of scientists has risen. And when status hierarchies are flattened—as they were in the United States when legal rights were extended to women, racial minorities, and gay people—the degradation associated with crossing a boundary dissipates. Not so long ago, many white Americans saw school integration and interracial marriage as degrading. But when the status hierarchies associated with race began to crumble, what was once seen as degradation began to look like moral progress.

Despite its contingency, however, the feeling of violation that accompanies degradation can be profound. For an extreme example, consider the degrading ways in which American soldiers treated prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison during the war in Iraq: stripped naked and photographed, stacked in human pyramids, forced to simulate sexual acts. The force of degradation as an offense against human dignity was reflected in the deep sense of shame that many Americans felt when photographs of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were made public. It is for this reason that the Geneva Conventions prohibit not just torture and acts of cruelty but also “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” This prohibition extends to the treatment of dead bodies, which the Geneva Conventions prohibit from being “mutilated” or “despoiled.”

The depth of such violations can be measured by the moral injury experienced by at least some of those who have engaged in it. In Achilles in Vietnam, the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay writes that American soldiers in Vietnam who desecrated corpses later struggled with those memories even more than they did with their exposure to combat. One soldier had intrusive memories every Christmas about “this dead [guy] we hung on a tree with a big banner that said ‘Merry Fucking Christmas.’ ” Another had flashbacks about mutilating a corpse. As much as the soldiers were haunted by the act of killing, they were haunted even more by dishonoring the bodies of the dead.

Soldiers who desecrate the corpse of an enemy do it to express their contempt. This brute fact separates the action morally from the damage that accompanies organ and tissue harvesting. Yet in the early days of transplantation, surgeons had to deal with the accusation that they were disrespecting the bodies of the dead. “To the butcher of Groote Schuur Hospital,” read a letter sent to Christiaan Barnard shortly after he performed the first heart transplant in Cape Town in 1967. The sheer success of transplantation has done much to change public attitudes, but so too has the development of practices that emphasize the higher moral purpose of organ harvesting while hiding its more mercenary aspects: walls of honor for those who volunteer, privacy protocols to shield the practices from public view, a vocabulary of altruism to obscure the financial stakes. In this way, the public’s understanding of organ harvesting has been transformed.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a dystopian future in which the government has sold naming rights for time, such that years have become known by the names of their corporate sponsors: “The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad,” or “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” In 1996, that read as satire. Twenty years later, KFC paid a couple $11,000 to name their baby after Colonel Sanders, and an online casino gave a Utah woman $10,000 to have “GoldenPalace.com” tattooed on her forehead. Willard Gaylin’s neomorts may have sounded fantastical in 1974, yet we now live in a country where it is possible to order a human head on the Internet for $640.

If such a transformation in social attitudes could happen for organ harvesting, it could also happen for other uses of the body. If it did, the concept of the neomort would no doubt be accompanied by a set of customs and rituals designed to disguise and soften what occurred in the medical setting. The difficulty is predicting what would be lost. It is possible that future generations might look back on pre-neomort times with a sense of longing, in the way that we might remember an old-growth forest before it was turned into a golf course, or the way the characters in the 1973 film Soylent Green remember naturally grown vegetables. But it is also possible that they would see the changes as a reasonable sacrifice in light of the goods produced: risk-free drug testing, shame-free pelvic exams, more babies for those incapable of childbearing.

Nor is it impossible that a latter-day Gunther von Hagens might do for neomorts what was once done for plastinated corpses. Body Worlds for the brain-dead would walk the same thin line that von Hagens navigated in 1995: close enough to medical reality to produce a shiver, yet far enough away to feel safe. The faces of the neomorts could be obscured while their internal organs are displayed. Perhaps visitors could view the neomort’s digestive system through a porthole, like the “cannulated cow” at the Arkansas State Fair. Other exhibits might be interactive: Visitors could inject the neomort with epinephrine to increase the heart rate or diuretics to increase the production of urine. Critics will be shocked and scandalized, of course, but defenders will assure us we are seeing a landmark in educational instruction, the “gold standard” for the field. Over time, our objections will slowly fade into the past.

The post Welcome to the Bioemporium appeared first on The American Scholar.

Many ungated European universities, like the Sorbonne in Paris, are interspersed with the business and busyness of city life. Other institutions, however, are tranquil refuges. At Trinity College, Oxford, one enters through delicate iron gates flanked by muscular stone piers. Affording a view of the college’s lush lawns and picturesque buildings, Trinity’s Broad Street gates are at once an imposing portal and an inviting picture frame. In the same vein, at Harvard, the formidable brick piers and lacy ironwork of Johnston Gate frame an enticing view of the Edenic precinct of Harvard Yard. The broad outlines are similar enough to the Trinity portal to make you wonder whether it influenced the Harvard gate’s architect, Charles McKim of the celebrated McKim, Mead & White firm.

Almost all gates, of course, exist for practical reasons. Railroads need them to prevent trains from colliding with vehicles and pedestrians. Ranchers need them to keep livestock in. The reverse was true at rural American institutions in the mid-19th century; some built utilitarian gates and fences to keep livestock out, lest roving cattle chew up campus lawns. Then, as America urbanized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, city campuses may have sought to build gates to shield their placid, leafy quadrangles from screeching streetcars and other hurly-burly. But in all likelihood, there was more to it than that.

The campuses themselves were being transformed from small, colonial-era colleges into huge, modern research institutions. Their old borders—at Harvard, a simple post-and-rail fence—no longer expressed their identity and aspirations. Campuses needed a new architectural declaration—not just monumental buildings within their boundaries, but impressive entryways at their edges. The impulse behind this shift dates back to the time of ancient walled cities, when gates, by virtue of their prominence, assumed heightened, symbolic significance. Consider that when Moses reiterated God’s commandments to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:6–9, he urged not only that the commandments be obeyed but also that they be put on public display: “Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

McKim’s Johnston Gate, completed in 1889, did much to set the modern American template for such portals with its breathtaking composition of brick, stone, and wrought iron. Like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, stone panels that adorn the gate’s brick piers express Harvard’s reverence for truth, evident in the three-book shield that spells out “VE-RI-TAS.” To enable the gate to fit in with nearby Massachusetts Hall, constructed nearly 170 years earlier in 1720, McKim chose overburnt bricks, called “culls,” whose varied colors and weathered textures made the new gate seem as old and authentic as its colonial-era neighbor. This very American process—call it instant aging—accentuated the sense of authority. Johnston Gate’s Georgian revival style and “Harvard brick” became the university’s design DNA.

In the next quarter century, other major universities—among them Berkeley, Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, and Princeton—built their own grand entrance gates. Women’s colleges including Radcliffe, Smith, and Mount Holyoke joined the trend. A tune sung at the formerly all-male Amherst College may have referenced the portals at nearby Smith and Mount Holyoke with these romance-tinged lyrics: “First she gave me candy, / And then she gave me cake, / And then she gave me gingerbread, / For kissing her at the gate.”

Designed by and named for architect Henry Ives Cobb, the University of Chicago’s Cobb Gate further reveals how such sentries have insinuated themselves into campus life and lore. New students process through the Gothic revival structure to signify their entrance into the university community. Over the decades, as the architecture writer Jay Pridmore has observed, campus wits have assigned meanings to the mysterious stone figures that line the gate’s steep gable. At the base are “dragon-like concoctions with long necks and predatory expressions” (admissions officers). Then come grotesques climbing the gable with increasing confidence (first- , second- , and third-year students). Finally, you see a large griffin at the top, “enjoying the position of a fourth-year upperclassman, basking briefly in his success before taking hypothetical flight.”

To this day, lighthearted mythology attends many campus portals. After entering the main gate for the first time, such superstitions hold, a student should pass through again only after graduation. To do otherwise is supposedly bad luck.

Despite such froth, campus gates can occasion a genuinely toxic mix of anticipation and trepidation. (“I’m glad I made it through these gates, but when will everyone realize I’m an imposter?”) They’ve also turned into political battlegrounds. Columbia shut its gates following pro-Palestinian demonstrations in 2023, and the following year, Harvard locked gates in response to a pro-Palestinian encampment. Also in 2024, demonstrators locked Chicago’s Cobb Gate and blocked Berkeley’s Sather Gate, long a site of picketing and protests. Such closures invariably divide opinion. On one hand, when an institution locks its gates, outsiders lose the opportunity to join students and protest on previously open university grounds. On the other hand, members of a university community who oppose or feel threatened by demonstrations might welcome such a closure. There are two sides to every gate controversy, which is fitting because, in Roman mythology, Janus was the two-faced god of doorways and ceremonial gateways.

That many protestors chose gates as the platform for their views speaks to the symbolic power of these portals. Although gates typically occupy the campus edge and are diminutive compared with the massive university buildings to which they lead, they’re often central to a university’s identity. At Penn’s Class of 1893 Memorial Gate, the iron arch proclaims, Inveniemus viam aut faciemus—“We will find a way or we shall make one.” The three columns of the Arch at the University of Georgia are said to represent the state motto of  “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.” Harvard’s Dexter Gate, built in 1901 as a mother’s memorial to a son who died of cerebrospinal meningitis only four years after his Harvard graduation, bears similar symbolic weight. Harvard President Charles William Eliot composed its noble, often-quoted, outward-facing inscription: “Enter to Grow in Wisdom.” The gate’s inward-facing inscription, however—“Depart to Serve Better Thy Country and Thy Kind”—reads like something from another time.

It’s worth asking: Are gates anachronistic holdovers from a more formal, less egalitarian age? A 2025 New York Times story about the Columbia shutdown suggested as much, asserting that the “gates were mere emblems of exclusivity and elitism, of the wealthy and powerful whose names adorn the university’s buildings.”

Recent campus construction suggests that there’s much more to gates than this two-dimensional, journalistic caricature would have it. Gates continue to resonate, though they are now often built without lockable, hinged doors and are valued more as symbolic passageways than as security-related protectors. Indiana University’s Sample Gates, dedicated in 1987, provide a setting for graduation photos and protests, not to mention a showcase for Indiana’s limestone industry. Similarly, Northwestern’s Weber Arch, completed in 1994, each fall hosts a rite of passage known as “March Through the Arch,” which features a marching band, cheering onlookers, and the campus mascot. And at Harvard, a playful gate built in 2020 and inspired by beloved children’s books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was designed to be left in the open position—more a bridge between town and gown than a barrier between them.

Such examples remind us that campus gates can bring us together as well as separate us. The finest display exemplary beauty, articulate an institution’s highest ideals, and endow otherwise undifferentiated space with a memorable framework for essential human transitions.

Why slam the gate on that?

The post Portals to Eden appeared first on The American Scholar.

Bad enough that these people were motivated to record themselves for all to see, but making it even worse was the influencer or commenter culling these videos from the internet and bundling them together with commentary about the eating habits on display. To be fair, the commenter never used overtly pejorative terms. But he didn’t need to: His ringside seat—watching the videos while his viewers watched him watching—made clear what kind of spectacle it was. That, and the calorie counts he supplied as a form of analysis.

To rebroadcast content with commentary is a moneymaking project. But so must be these videos that people upload—enough views and you get royalties. I can think of no other reason for subjecting yourself to the ridicule of strangers. After four or five videos, I’d seen enough. I asked my son, who had showed me the videos, “Is that even legal?” If I were to hang out at a local eatery, and I posted videos of strangers gorging themselves, I’m sure I’d be picked up. Or beaten up.

My son explained that the commenter was taking people’s content and rebroadcasting it for an entirely different purpose. “What about copyright?” I wondered. He told me that as long as the original content is repurposed, it’s fair use, so you get away with it. Get away with, his phrase, shows he agrees there is something underhanded about using people’s own weaknesses, bad judgment, or cravings—for attention or otherwise—against them. What could be more damning than the video of a man digging with glee into a whopping 10,000-calorie vat of crumbled Oreos and milk in lieu of his breakfast cereal? One should look away.

No one I saw topped the Oreo man in terms of calories in a single sitting, but one image struck me even more. Of a pretty girl of about 20 making a doughnut sandwich. This was not like a croissant sandwich such as my stepmother sometimes serves—a croissant cut in half lengthwise and filled with white bean spread and lettuce. Instead, the girl took a doughnut from a box, proclaimed it to be “the bread,” then slapped it onto her open palm. Then she took another, called it the mayo, another the cheese, another the meat, another the tomato, and so on, until she had a doughnut tower, 13 doughnuts high. It looked solid, stacked on her hand. Then she slapped her other hand over the top. Whap. And pressed down. Each doughnut folded into the doughnut below in full-stack collapse. Within seconds, the 13-doughnut high-rise was three inches tall.

What she did next was to eat it—which was astonishing too, the way each bite tore into the structure like Godzilla entering New York City, advancing not with any particular malice but with a heedless appetite for whatever lay before it, each step destroying something that had, a moment before, seemed integral.

These broken, squashed doughnuts were rendered mush, and unbelievably, 13 of them disappeared down the woman’s throat in four bites. It was carnage without death. It was obliteration.

The image has stayed with me. She was smug with the success of her attack on decorum and restraint, concluding the debacle by folding and twisting and pushing the last quarter of the compressed doughnut wedge into her mouth. Thirteen doughnuts balanced on her palm, then beaten down with one blow, reduced, then destroyed, obliterated, no resistance. It is not the gluttony that I keep coming back to. It is how substantial those 13 layers had appeared and how diaphanous they soon proved to have been. One strong thwack, and they imploded.

Isn’t that what is so unsettling about life, too? All the layers of experience and education, effort and work, built up, one stratum at a time, polished, presented. But time pours like a thick sauce over the whole of your life, burying the bottom layers. It was supposed to be so substantial, so meaningful. Yet under the accumulated weight, the bottom layers turn to sand and disintegrate. The middle layers are mush. The top, the accomplishment of your life, the crown of the towering assemblage—what is that? It is slipping and sliding and rolling and falling. Nothing to hold it up, nothing solid. Sugar doughnuts we were, and sugar doughnuts we are.

Thirteen doughnuts. Thirteen? Okay—when I checked I found it was only six. The girl was not, in fact, pretty. We all exaggerate.

So the carnage was not carnage—it was not even worth noting, not worth filming, not worth commenting on, and possibly not worth writing about. But then, what else to do if you can’t find a thing that is worth the effort? Eat a doughnut while you ponder? You could do worse—like eating a dozen.

The post Doughnuts appeared first on The American Scholar.

As a scholar of science fiction—or what I prefer to call speculative fiction, for its more comprehensive implications—and as an administrator in higher education these past several years, I have spent countless hours considering the interconnectedness of the past, the present, and the future. Through the study of history, we are able to map patterns, recognize human tendencies, and with the benefit of time and distance, make sense of ourselves and the inherent contradictions of a humanity striving to reconcile the competing polarities that seem to dominate much of our social relations.

Our present circumstances reflect not only our past actions but also how well we have made meaning of previous experiences. The study and interpretation of history, then, defines our understanding of the present moment. Important decisions made at particular inflection points, pivotal occasions that mark some sea change for society—these are but punctuations in the persistent drumbeat of cultural beliefs and habits that drive the rhythms that make up our society.

This is the foundation from which any futures we can perceive may be imagined. The act of speculation is neither fantasy unmoored from reality nor mystical prediction conjured from thin air. It is the thoughtful, deliberate study of human complexity in historical contexts and present actualities. It demands a capacious exploration of the many and varied approaches to understanding the world and the human condition. And it is fitting, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, to turn our collective gaze to the powers of speculation to meet the demands of our day and shape a future of promise. Looking back to understand our present, we may boldly cast a vision for the future that we hope successive generations will see.

Early in the life of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, its members presciently affirmed, “Here too you are to indulge in matters of speculation …” The impulse to question, inquire, try out unconventional and untested ideas formed the purpose for their convening. That purpose, worked out in practical terms, served them well as many entered public service and played decisive roles in shaping the principles enshrined in the Constitution and other foundational documents and governance structures.

The members’ resistance to simple acceptance of received knowledge gave way to a revolutionary set of behaviors in a time informed by and formed within a revolutionary culture. The extreme challenges of their age fomented change in countless ways, not the least of which revealed itself in our distinctly American form of what we now speak of as liberal—or broad, free-ranging—education, defined by the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. It was dangerous—indeed, very nearly treacherous—to question and critique conventional wisdom.

In taking up debate on the serious questions that defined their day, they fostered not only the critical thinking skills that form the bedrock of American education, innovation, and ingenuity but also a commitment to occasions set aside for “Jollity and Mirth.” The fine feelings of fellowship in the company of like-minded individuals pursuing truth through thinking, reason, and discussion were just as central to shaping the ideas and ideals that would influence their work in the emerging nation.

As the Society navigated perilous periods, sometimes nearing obliteration, it nevertheless survived through adaptation. When Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his 1837 lecture to Phi Beta Kappa’s Alpha of Massachusetts chapter at Harvard University (thus designated for being the first chapter to be organized in the state), he elaborated on the role of men of speculation in meeting the demands of the present moment. Emerson spoke of the “Man Thinking,”

that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be a university of knowledges. … In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all. … This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation to the American Scholar.

On this occasion, Emerson articulated a bright line distinguishing American individualism and exceptionalism from the received European modes of thought. And it is a distinction that has endured and served the nation well, in large part.

Overlapping waves of revolutionary change most certainly influenced Emerson’s thinking. Ideas emerging from the Age of Reason intersected with the technological advances of the ongoing Industrial Revolution in shaping labor, economics, and class relations. The concurrent rise of the Romantic period created a dynamic crucible that tested the scholar attendant to these shifts. Emerson recognized the moment during which he delivered these remarks as an age of Revolution, “when the old and the new stand side by side … when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

What lesson might be learned from Emerson’s embrace of the change made possible by the challenges inherent to a period of revolution? Speculation paves the way for adaptation, invention, and innovation. The shape of the future requires “men of speculation” to act, to do something informed by “historic glories” and to seize the possibilities provided by the new and emergent. Both actions are required for the most advantageous effect “if we but know what to do with it.”

And therein lies the question that still pertains to us today: Do we know how to make sense of the revolutions our world is currently undergoing? What rich possibilities do we perceive in reconciling the perils and potential in the ubiquity of generative AI for labor, life, and the economy? Or the rapidly escalating shifts in climate change, educational access, and health care? Or the dramatic rehauling of governmental structures, laws, and policies? The challenges are grand and sweeping in their effects, with reverberations that will rock generations to come.

If past is prologue, we may find ourselves coming full circle in the present moment. Above all, speculation requires us to take stock of the conditions of the present and its historical contributing factors and to calculate a probable future state. Engaging history and as much accurate knowledge available to us as possible, we can “game out” various scenarios. In mathematics and data science, this is predictive modeling: Y = F(X) + ε. In literature, this is science and speculative fiction and is expressed in the syntax of the conditional: If X social conditions, human behaviors, etc. continue, then Y is the likely outcome.

At any given point in time, it is difficult to fully assess and make sense of all that is happening in the present moment. But studying the past helps to anchor the present and more forthrightly assess how the decisions we make now are likely to play out in our future.

Consistent with the cultural and legal norms of the time, Emerson’s clarion call to do a new thing in service to the common good was, unsurprisingly, made to men of letters. The status of women’s rights was a matter debated by members of the Society early on. When Emerson was addressing the Alpha of Massachusetts chapter, women’s education was only beginning to emerge. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was founded in 1837, and that same year, Oberlin College became the first established institution of higher learning to admit women. Harvard College, meanwhile, would not establish its annex for women until 1879. This annex would later be chartered as the Radcliffe College in 1894.

The Society eventually adapted to meet the societal changes and expanded to include women, African Americans, and other groups historically ineligible because of legal restrictions or status, cultural practice, or social norms. The diverse perspectives from these groups contribute to an enriched expansion of our knowledge base, which, in turn, strengthens our capacity to game out different possible futures and their implications for the ever-complex textures of the world we are creating.

Today, the Society elects alumni and honorary members with a record of living the values of lifelong learning and serving the common good in their chosen fields of work. This practice further extends the Society’s influence. In this way, and countless others, the halo effect of the Society’s values reaches far beyond the elected membership. It suffuses the very fabric of American culture and genius.

In the 1990s, Octavia Estelle Butler published two works of speculative fiction set in the near-future United States. Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) imagine a country in dramatic decline, suffering through the pains of rapid social, political, and economic deterioration. The novels are primarily set in our time, the 2020s–2030s, a period Butler refers to as “the Pox,” an abbreviation for “apocalypse”—decades of chaos “caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems” in the intersecting and coinciding realms of climatic, economic, and sociological crises. All of the societal concerns are recognizable to the contemporary reader because we have been aware of them for many years.

The world Butler imagined 30 years ago is eerily resonant with our current historical moment. Some readers have characterized this series as “prophetic.” Butler herself would have likely rejected such religious and mystical undertones to characterize her works. They are, rather, the result of speculation and extrapolation: studying history with curiosity and viewing the present with clear-eyed attention to test out potential outcomes if we continue on a particular path unchecked. It is a thought experiment fleshed out in narrative.

In similar fashion, however, the works do not leave the reader to wallow in despair. The estrangement evoked by the unsettling fictional rendering of our contemporary conditions also creates opportunity to speculate on the necessary conditions to imagine our way out of trouble. Butler’s protagonist in both novels is Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenage Black girl from a middle-class family whose position of simultaneous social vulnerability and educational privilege offers one potential path forward.

Olamina’s father is a preacher and professor, and her family is able to persist, for a time, in precarious comfort despite the surrounding poverty. She anticipates—correctly—that her home will eventually be lost to this calamitous habitus. So she embarks on the practices of reading, learning, and teaching, gathering all the knowledge available to her—both philosophical and practical, in books and by experience—to survive the perils of the relentlessly hostile hellscape in which she has come of age.

Her drive to survive, once her home is burned down, demands that she prepare for the loss of the status and privilege that have protected her during her formative years. Her psychosomatic health condition of “hyperempathy syndrome” complicates the oversimplified notion that more empathy by more people would cure the ills that have allowed society to disintegrate. And she knows that she will need a community of care and connection if she is to survive. The communities she eventually builds survive through embracing broad knowledge and learning and by teaching others whatever they know.

I read Butler’s Parables alongside Emerson’s invocation of “The American Scholar” and see in both the same valorization of learning and education as foundational to meeting the demands of the day. Emerson calls the scholar to action, for “without it, thought can never ripen into truth.” Butler carries this forward: Olamina is compelled to translate knowledge into action because it is a matter of literal survival for one whose intersecting identities make survivability more difficult. In a point of departure, Emerson notes and extols the rise of individualism, of each man treated as a “sovereign state,” surrounded by “barriers of natural respect.” Butler, alternatively, proposes the necessity of communities of care and interdependence.

The question to pose here is not which of them has gotten it right. Rather, how do challenges and their solutions shift depending on our baseline understanding of what we know and how we are positioned? In these speculations, we may imagine many futures. We could not know the broad scope and expanse of all future possibilities without each author’s contribution to the project of speculation.

How, then, do we extend the influence of the Phi Beta Kappa Society to shape a livable, thriving future safe to sustain us all? I contend that we see this future not only in the key holders whom we count among our elite, rarefied membership, but also in the many products and beneficiaries of an educational system and a culture that promote love of learning, deep thinking, and the freedom to pursue one’s intellectual and creative interests. Both Emerson, the holder of a Phi Beta Kappa key, and Butler, the career science-fiction writer who attained an associate’s degree and took courses devoted to her craft, contributed to the world of ideas, the discovery of truth, and the force of action in service to a common good.

The vitality of our future lies, here and now, in our capacity to speculate, to imagine our way out of whatever the day demands of us. It was true at the time of the Society’s founding; it remains true today. The next 250 years of this society and this nation are yours and mine to shape. May we rise to meet the occasion.

The post The Revolutionary Scholar appeared first on The American Scholar.

Commencement exercises always drew a crowd, and interest in this year’s proceedings was especially high: The university’s first women students were to receive their degrees. Already by nine a.m., seniors, families, professors, alumni, and townsfolk had begun to gather on the campus green, a mile uphill from the shore of Lake Champlain. Soon the academic procession would make its way down through the center of Burlington and into the College Street Congregational Church, where the ceremony would begin. Afterward, there would be a banquet at the American Hotel, the finest in town, to be followed by the last and arguably most important event of the day: the president’s annual party, which the university hoped would raise badly needed funds.

Yet even as the celebratory mood built on the green, inside nearby Institute Hall the atmosphere was clouded with unfinished business. There, members of the University of Vermont’s chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society had assembled for a most unusual third meeting in less than 24 hours.

The men gathered inside Institute Hall were all distinguished UVM alumni. Each of them had once been elected and inducted into PBK at a chapter meeting very similar to the one they were now attempting to conduct. These men had about an hour to resolve what a circumspect report in the Vermont Phoenix described matter-of-factly as an “interesting question” that had come up the day before. The question had derailed the society’s first meeting the previous day, stymied another in the evening, and had so far prevented the PBK members from doing what they had come to do. And now time was running out.

Phi Beta Kappa had been founded nearly a century earlier, in winter 1776, by five students at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The students first met in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern to hold wide-ranging discussions under the cover of public conviviality. Their membership was secret, like many other societies on campus and off, because secrecy allowed for freedom of thought and speech. Together the members debated “the advantages of an established church,” “whether any form of Government is more favourable to public virtue than a Commonwealth,” and “the justice of African slavery.” To distinguish themselves, they issued square silver medals bearing “SP” on one side, for Societas Philosophiae, and on the other, alongside three stars of friendship, morality, and literature, “PBK,” for Philosophia Biou Kybernetes, or “philosophy as a guide to life.”

From the outset, even when its numbers were small, the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s purposes were large: the “advancement of sound learning in our country,” not to “be confined to any particular place, men, or description of men.” By 1779, the Virginia chapter had extended charters to Harvard and Yale, forming a “Foundation of Continental Harmony and Union.” Over the next decades, PBK chapters had opened some events to public view (to combat suspicion of secret societies) and turned management of elections and occasions over to faculty (to keep up a scholarly reputation). Perhaps the most famous public PBK address is still “The American Scholar” (from which this magazine takes its name)—Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 address to Henry David Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard. By the 1840s, PBK was no longer a tavern debating club for undergraduates but an honor society—and not just any honor society but “the honor society of American academe,” as Richard Nelson Current put it in his diligent 1990 study, Phi Beta Kappa in American Life. By design, and through no little effort, PBK had come to represent an entirely uncontroversial standard of academic excellence and intellectual achievement.

The UVM chapter—chartered in 1848 as Vermont’s Alpha chapter (that is, the first in the state) and the 11th in the country—had always taken this standard seriously. Once a fortnight, its members met for discussions and lectures. The only rule was that “subjects of a partisan character,” whether political or religious, were entirely forbidden. Yet now, in the summer of 1875, this was precisely the sort of question the Vermonters were facing: highly partisan, and in some ways both political and religious. And though this question had been the subject of widespread and often bitter public debate for years, it nevertheless seems to have taken the members of the Vermont chapter by surprise.

The annual meeting of the UVM chapter of PBK had begun the day before, July 13, in the usual way. The society’s vice president—the Honorable Homer Hibbard, who had graduated from UVM in 1850 and made a career in banking in Chicago—called the group to order. He was standing in for the absent president, the Honorable George Benedict, class of ’47, a decorated Union veteran, a dedicated Republican, a former Vermont state senator, and the editor and publisher of Burlington’s most important newspaper, the Free Press. After the call to order, the chapter’s registrar, Professor J. E. Goodrich, who taught Latin, reported the standing of the year’s graduating class. Normally, the names of the highest-ranking students were put forward for election. Normally, those elected were then inducted at a second meeting held later the same day or the following morning.

But 1875 was not normal. The first student in rank of the class of 1875, comprising only 12 undergraduates, was Alfred Nathaniel Tagert. And that was as far as normal went, for the second in rank was Lida A. Mason. And the third student, tied with Frank Edward Woodruff, was Ellen E. Hamilton.

After these names were read, Selim H. Peabody, class of ’52, president of the UVM alumni association and a professor in Chicago, set off what later would be described as a “bomb” in the chapter meeting by moving “that persons eligible on the grounds of scholarship be admitted to membership without regard to sex.”

The proposal had no precedent. No woman had ever been elected to PBK at UVM or anywhere else. In fact, UVM was the first college with a PBK chapter to admit women to the same course of study as men, and Mason and Hamilton were the very first women to qualify for graduation there, having started on campus as sophomores in 1872. Both had amassed outstanding academic records, yet no anticipatory or peremptory steps had been taken to prepare for their graduation by the UVM chapter or any other.

Phi Beta Kappa then had chapters on 22 campuses around the country but lacked a central organizing body to set policies for the society at large. The chapters tended to consult one another when a question of policy or propriety arose, but this was an informal, unreliable process. The members of the UVM chapter had a decision to make about Mason and Hamilton—a decision connected to one of the most divisive social questions of the day—and they were effectively on their own.

On the one hand, there was no fixed rule that would have obligated the UVM chapter to elect and induct women. During the lean years on campus that followed the Civil War, when graduating classes sank low into the single digits, the PBK chapter secretary at UVM had written to his counterpart at Harvard to ask whether a required number of students needed to be inducted each year. The reply came back that there was no such quota, and in fact, small induction groups often proved to be quite congenial. In 1866, when there had been only three graduating seniors at UVM, just one was elected to PBK. Speaking just in terms of numbers, the members of the Vermont chapter were under no special obligation to induct anyone other than Tagert, the first-ranked student. On the other hand, even in the absence of a quota, students had conventionally been inducted in proportion to the size of the graduating class—the top third, for instance. Would deviating from that custom be viewed as an act of cowardly demurral?

In those days, Vermonters were often thought to be practical people who had learned through hard lessons of farm labor and long winters to value independence and to view women’s work as essential—and therefore likely to be sympathetic to campaigns for women’s rights and equality. In 1870, the American Woman Suffrage Association had held its national convention in Montpelier, in part for this reason. What would the state’s no-nonsense residents and newspapers say if PBK denied honors to a deserving student, Frank Woodruff, simply to evade the question of the eligibility of women? And if Woodruff got in, how could it be fair to exclude Mason and Hamilton, who had respectively bested and equaled him in the same course of study? Would inducting the women change the standing of PBK on campus and beyond? Were women even permitted to belong to fraternal organizations?

With those questions looming, Peabody’s motion to induct the women sparked “animated discussion” of precisely the sort the UVM PBK chapter had always sought to avoid. With the members divided, Peabody’s motion was “laid upon the table,” unresolved. Then Robert Dewey Benedict, the brother of the absent chapter president, brought the meeting back to order. He was a lawyer, a judge, and a member of a prominent Burlington family that had been closely connected to the university for generations. As a lawyer, Benedict would have been well acquainted with the usefulness of precedent in smoothing unruly present complexities, and he spoke up to propose a workaround. He suggested that the chapter go ahead and vote “for the two gentlemen who stood highest in the class.” Technically, it could be said that in past years, the members had also voted for and inducted the “gentlemen who stood highest in the class”—for in all prior years the class had been composed entirely of “gentlemen.” Under Benedict’s proposal, the men would be treated as they always had been, while the women would also be treated, in effect, as they always had been: as if they did not exist.

In response, G. L. Waterman, another Burlington lawyer, proposed an amendment to the motion that directly contradicted it: to add to the ballot the names of the two women who had made themselves eligible by virtue of their high scholarly achievements, and who after all did exist. Quickly this suggestion was struck down as out of order. Benedict spoke up again on behalf of his original motion to vote for the men. It passed, and their names were put to a vote. Alfred Nathaniel Tagert and Frank Edward Woodruff were elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

A publicly presentable, plausibly defensible outcome having been attained, Benedict now proposed two further resolutions. First, a formal statement to the effect “that in the opinion of this chapter all the graduates of this University should be eligible to membership in the PBK without distinction of sex.” Second, “that the Corresponding Secretary be directed to communicate the action of this chapter and a statement of the situation which occasioned it, to the other chapters of the order.” With another vote, these resolutions passed. From one perspective, these were progressive, fair-minded measures befitting men of learning and liberal values. From another, they were tinsel: mere window dressing to distract from the society’s inaction. With the membership still split, and Peabody’s motion still on the table, plans were made to reconvene that evening in the parlor of the College Street church, and the meeting was adjourned.

In most years, the UVM chapter of PBK held only two meetings: one for election, and the other for induction. Yet when five o’clock arrived and the members reassembled at the College Street church, they found themselves still unable to resolve Peabody’s earlier motion. The chapter secretary’s minutes say nothing of the substance of the meeting. No progress could be made toward a vote on the women, and no inductions were performed that evening. The members could only agree to adjourn once more, retire for the evening, think over the questions they faced, and gather again in Institute Hall at nine o’clock the following morning, for, at least, the induction of the men.

When Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton graduated from the University of Vermont in the summer of 1875, few women in the United States had ever been publicly, formally honored for academic achievement and intellectual distinction by a national institution such as Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1841, naturalist and artist Lucy Way Sistare Say was inducted into the American Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Six years later, Maria Mitchell of Nantucket discovered a new comet, and in 1848 she was awarded a gold medal by the King of Denmark, a passionate amateur astronomer. Later the same year, Mitchell was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which would not induct another woman for nearly a century. In 1869, the American Philosophical Society also honored Mitchell, alongside Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, as its second, third, and fourth women members, respectively. Its first woman member had been admitted 80 years earlier, when Benjamin Franklin nominated the Russian Princess Dashkova, president of the Imperial Academy of Russian Language, which she had founded with her friend Catherine the Great.

That short record of honors underscores what was at stake for the Vermonters. Mason and Hamilton were not merely two extraordinary individuals. As the first women graduates of the University of Vermont, they had achieved success that represented a larger shift. Oberlin had first admitted women on a coeducational basis in 1837, and in the years since, perhaps a quarter of the colleges in the United States had followed, but the change had not yet been widely felt in the world beyond campus. In 1870, there were perhaps 525 female physicians (out of more than 60,000) in the United States, and only five female lawyers.

Women wanted more. In 1873, while a professor of astronomy at Vassar, Mitchell had helped to found and lead the Association for the Advancement of Women, advocating especially for greater access to higher learning. Education was often seen as a proxy for other ongoing campaigns for women’s rights and equality—the rights to vote and to own property, and for marital rights, including divorce—and a referendum on women more generally: what they were capable of, who they could and should be. This was not only an “interesting question.” It was also, acknowledged Matthew Buckham—the president of the University of Vermont and himself a UVM PBK, class of ’51—a “much agitated” one.

In 1872, Buckham had presided over the admission of Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton to UVM. Reviewing their outstanding academic records three years later, members of the university’s PBK chapter found themselves standing before a crack in the bedrock foundations not only of their honor society but of Western culture as well.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the five teenage founders of Phi Beta Kappa named their association with Greek words and letters, making it the first such Greek-letter society in the country, because they had been taught to see ancient Greece as the highest ideal of civilization and learning. One founding member, William Short, went on to serve as private secretary to Thomas Jefferson, who had attended William & Mary in the 1760s. Jefferson, like many American elites of his time, also venerated classical Athens, a slaveholding society in which public life was the exclusive domain of men, as a model for the political and social systems of the United States.

Mason and Hamilton entered the University of Vermont in an age of bold challenges to the unequal institutions Jefferson and his colleagues had created. The 14th Amendment, passed in 1868 to protect formerly enslaved freedmen, affirmed birthright American citizenship and extended to all citizens the same unalienable rights to “life, liberty, or property.” This formulation in turn seemed to open new possibilities for contesting longstanding forms of discrimination, including those that had kept women out of the center of American public life.

But in the spring of 1873, as Mason and Hamilton were finishing their sophomore year in Burlington, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law barring women from practicing law, on the principle that a woman’s place, and her responsibilities, were in the home. Two years later, while Mason and Hamilton were in their last semester, the Court concluded that the franchise was not a right inviolably conveyed by citizenship, effectively denying women the ability to vote in national elections.

Obstacles to women’s equality were built into every level of American life. In 1875, PBK induction still required a demonstrated strength in Greek and Latin languages and literature. Even as more women attended college in the decades after the Civil War, however, most of them trained in separate academic programs designed to prepare them for teaching young children rather than for classical scholarship.

An Athenian ideal of the woman’s sphere as separate from and junior to the public realm of masculine life shaped not only the institutional structures of American education but also the very substance of its lessons. For Aristotle, whose works on ethics and politics were standards of the classical curriculum, women were like men in most respects but lacked the highest capacities of the soul, including advanced reason, and were therefore terminally inferior. “Phi Beta Kappa” stood for “philosophy as a guide to life,” but much of the philosophy available to the members of the Vermont chapter in the summer of 1875 did not fit the questions now before them.

Even if the UVM chapter had been able to immediately consult one of the other chapters to which it was accustomed to showing deference, especially Harvard, it might not have received a ready answer, for Harvard had no women students. The school that would become Radcliffe would not be founded until 1879. The tradition of discrimination that emerged from the celebrated schools of ancient Athens had been carried forward to the modern classrooms of Cambridge, Burlington, and beyond, where very many well-educated men, including those who had achieved the highest levels of academic distinction then possible in the United States, fiercely held onto its tenets, even in the face of accumulating evidence to the contrary.

Where is Vicksburg? Calcutta? Staten Island? How do you get from St. Petersburg to Sevastopol by water? What nouns form their plural in –es? Find the least common multiple of 10, 25¼, 2½, and ½. Who were the Nereids? Translate Book 1 of the Iliad, lines 503–10.

When Ellen Hamilton of Brandon, Vermont, took the test for admission to the University of Vermont in 1871, her examiner was Professor Henry W. Haynes, who was as classical as they came. Haynes sent the results of Hamilton’s exam to UVM President Matthew Buckham, who had taken office just weeks before. In turn, Buckham passed Hamilton’s results to his predecessor, James Angell, then starting a new job as the president of the University of Michigan, which had begun admitting women a year prior. Hamilton, Buckham reported to Angell, was “as good as the best we have.” He meant men, for at the time the University of Vermont had no other women.

And then, in 1872, they had two. Lida Mason, of Jersey City, New Jersey, started first, in January 1872. For one chilly semester, she was the only woman student on campus in Burlington, and she seems to have felt that her male classmates viewed her as a kind of “monster.” That was merely one variety of discomfort. Reporting on the admission of women to UVM, the newspaper in nearby St. Albans noted with a leer that the “only shadow of regret athwart the glory is that our college days are over.” In a letter to trustees, UVM President Buckham acknowledged that Mason’s position on campus “was a trying one.” Perhaps it improved slightly when Hamilton joined her in the fall of 1872. Yet for as long as they were UVM students, Mason and Hamilton were also living spectacles, and symbols of the question of women, on campus and in the world.

Despite those pressures, they shone. The University of Vermont required each sophomore, junior, and senior to give a public speech at the end of the academic year. When Mason was abruptly called out of town in April 1873, Hamilton was left as the only woman in that year’s sophomore exhibition, and the first woman ever to speak at the university’s public exercises. The Burlington Free Press reported that she “took her place upon the stage with modest self possession, and read from her manuscript titled ‘Socratic Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul,’ an essay which was more like a Senior than a Sophomore piece, acquitting herself so creditably that the question, if there was any, of the propriety of the young women taking their share in the College Exhibitions, must have been set at rest in the minds of all present.” Yet such questions are rarely if ever set at rest, and when the next year’s public exercises came around, the women were again a novelty. The Free Press reported: “A peculiar feature of the occasion was the first appearance, at a Junior Exhibition of this University, of ladies, who acquitted themselves creditably.” Hamilton’s address was “A Day in Athens, 444 B. C.,” and Mason gave a talk titled “The Puritans and Art.”

Hamilton for one had been brought up to stand out, but only in ways befitting her sex. Her father was a homeopathic physician who encouraged her to strive for membership in the universal brotherhood of man—at the same time maintaining that a woman was supposed to be “a light set on a Hill. A check to the passions of man … Worshiped by her Husband. Adored and honored by her children.” When Hamilton was just starting at the university, he told her to “cultivate all the graces that make a woman lovely.”

By all indications, both Hamilton and Mason did so. For years after graduation, they would fondly recall the friendships they had made with male classmates and teachers. Yet in their hours off from school, they were most strongly drawn to each other, and later to the few women students who joined them on campus in the next two years. UVM had no dorms for women, so Mason and Hamilton boarded with local families who had been approved by the administration. Hamilton lodged at the home of a local merchant, while Mason lived in the brick parsonage of the First Baptist Church with the pastor and his family. The two spent many afternoons by the hearth of the parsonage, talking, laughing, and above all studying. Together, they were doing something for which the university had not planned. They were excelling.

The University of Vermont had not admitted women so that they could be excellent. It had admitted women because for the entirety of its early history, stretching back nearly a century, the university had experienced severe shortages of students and money. To make matters worse, the comparative financial success of nearby Middlebury College meant that in the mid-19th century, merger was often proposed as the best course of action in a state that counted about 25,000 farms and 314,120 people.

Then came the Civil War. More than 30,000 Vermonters served in the war, and more than 5,000 died—an unusually high proportion of the state’s population. As a consequence, the university itself nearly perished. In 1861, 25 men had graduated from UVM. In 1866, three did. The fence around campus was falling down. The green could have been a hayfield. Faculty salaries had been sharply cut, but even so, university bank accounts were empty. When Middlebury considered admitting women students early in 1871, UVM had virtually no choice but to do the same.

On August 1, 1871, all but two of the university’s 18 trustees voted to admit women. The holdouts were concerned that “the admission of women students would raise questions about the rigor of the University’s reputation, perhaps making it in some people’s eyes a mere ‘bundle of whimsies.’ ” The dissenters worried that women were reaching beyond their proper sphere, and that college training might “ ‘addict’ them to professional life” and thereby pull them away from their homes and families. One trustee, the Reverend C. Carroll Parker, feared that college courses would prove too strenuous for “the womanly mind and womanly physique” and cautioned that the “attempt” to educate women at UVM would be “perilous in the extreme.”

Those prejudices were so widespread that they were often mistaken for biological facts, even by proponents of coeducation. For instance, the St. Albans Messenger concluded that women at UVM would probably be just fine in the end because Burlington, unlike Boston, was generally safe. And in truth the last thing the trustees of UVM wanted was to “educate women ‘into men.’ ” Instead, they wanted women to gain “a higher standard of intellectual culture” to pass on—at home, to their families, and in schools, to their students. If this came to pass, as UVM President Buckham put it not long after taking office, the “experiment” of coeducation, “and the sacrifice, if any there be, will not have been made in vain.”

Buckham and others worried that life on campus might prove too much for the women who entered their university. Yet never did any of UVM’s trustees, administration, or faculty go on record to raise the possibility that the women they admitted might come to view the university’s existing academic culture as unsatisfactory.

The first female students at the University of Vermont pursued their own ideas of “the womanly mind.” In 1874, Mason, Hamilton, and the few other women on campus founded their own Greek-letter organization, Alpha Rho. They felt a “need of a more general culture than [was] afforded by one curriculum of study.” They wanted “a wider sympathy with the progressive spirit of the age; a more extensive knowledge of the results of modern thought.” They wanted “the contact of mind with mind in the mutual comparison of ideas and friendly criticism.” They found none of these things on campus in sufficient measure.

Alpha Rho met in the Women’s Reading Room, which hadn’t existed before the members asked the university to create it. There they maintained subscriptions to Popular Science, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the New York Weekly Tribune, alongside copies of Webster’s Dictionary and Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities. They performed Shakespeare. They presented essays to one another, including an imagined “Speech Before the U.S. Senate,” and a commentary on “Bad Grammar and Slang Overheard in and Around the University of Vermont with names of Students and Professors Using the same.” After one debate, the members of Alpha Rho decided that women should be permitted to speak from the stage of the university chapel, as men were. But they were hardly radicals. After another debate, they concluded that the Bible should be read in public schools. They deemed the fashions of their grandmothers preferable to their own. Individually and together, they found their voices.

In March 1874, Mason, Hamilton, and other members of Alpha Rho put their names on a women’s petition for temperance that was published in the Burlington Free Press and addressed to the city’s men:

We appeal to your regrets over miseries that are now past remedy, to your sympathy towards sorrow that you now can relieve. … We ask you to believe that we have not been eager to put ourselves forward in this movement. We have long been waiting, hoping that the work would be done by you, and now while we are willing to assume our share of the responsibility, we ask you to join us in undertaking the work which you and we have already too long neglected …

The point of such petitions was to use the collective voice and the public forum to say what was riskier and more difficult to say in private.

In its exasperated and downcast depiction of men, the petition to ban the sale of alcoholic drinks sketches a picture of life on campus for Mason, Hamilton, and other women students at UVM that opens another perspective on the proceedings of the PBK chapter in July 1875. Though coeducation was often framed as a referendum on the abilities of women, it was just as much a referendum on the men who had got there first. The “interesting question” faced by the members of PBK at UVM was not just about the achievements and eligibility of Mason and Hamilton, or even about the proper station of women more generally. With a very old system—one that had always been slanted in their favor—showing cracks, how would the men respond? Would they attempt to dismantle the old institutional disadvantage women had faced? Would they try to reinforce it where it stood? Or would they simply stand back and watch and wait for whatever was to follow?

Perhaps, as members of a society with 21 other chapters, including many that were older and arguably more venerable than theirs, the Vermonters simply believed that the election and induction of women to PBK, whatever it would ultimately signify and precipitate, lay outside their jurisdiction and beyond their authority. Yet if they had come to campus in the summer of 1875 expecting to enjoy the luxury of abstaining from the question, they were bound to be disappointed, because Selim H. Peabody would not give it to them.

At nine a.m. on July 14, with the day’s commencement ceremonies set to begin in an hour, the members of the Alpha Chapter of Vermont reconvened in Institute Hall to take up once more the “interesting question” that Peabody’s motion had forced before them, and which they had so far been unable to resolve. Yet overnight something had shifted. Peabody seems to have continued his campaign for electing women through the previous evening, for in the morning he was named president pro tempore and installed as the society’s chair.

Perhaps Peabody was in a unique position to understand what life on campus had been like for Mason and Hamilton. Three decades earlier, during his own student days in Burlington, he had been an outsider too, poor and lonely. For his entire first semester, no other student entered his embarrassingly spartan room, furnished only with a plain bed, chair, and desk. Yet even while surviving on a barrel of hard crackers and foraged apples, Peabody thrilled to his studies and dreamed of being a professor. He graduated third in the class of 1852 and was elected to PBK. The same year, he married and began teaching.

In adulthood, Peabody found a way into university life that had been closed to him as a student: He became president of the UVM alumni association. In July 1875, Peabody had come back to campus in this role—to attend the annual meeting of PBK, to sit onstage during the commencement ceremonies, and to speak at the fundraising banquet to follow.

With Peabody now presiding over the Alpha of Vermont, his motion from the previous day was raised from the table: that eligible students be considered for election to PBK without regard to sex. This time, the proposal was brought to a quick vote, and it passed unanimously. Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton were put up for election, and they were voted in.

Though the action of the society was now decisive, the outcome had not been a foregone conclusion or a mere formality. Neither Mason nor Hamilton had been summoned to Institute Hall that morning for induction, as their male classmates had. As a result, with only minutes to spare before the commencement procession was to depart, Alfred Tagert and Frank Woodruff were inducted into PBK, while the women would again have to wait.

Once the academic procession made its way downhill from campus into town, where a standing-room-only crowd was waiting in the College Street church, President Buckham opened the day’s ceremonies from the pulpit. First were student presentations, with Mason and Hamilton slotted near the end, just before Woodruff and Tagert. Mason’s address was titled “True Excellence: Conformity to Principle”; Hamilton’s, “The Value of an Appeal to Common Sense.” “The essays of the first young lady graduates were good,” reported the Burlington Sentinel, with “Miss Hamilton deserving especial praise.” A correspondent for the New-York Tribune thought that the whole program attained “a standard higher than in former years; a standard which would task well some of the Phi Beta Kappa men of 20 and 30 years ago to reach.” Each speech was greeted with applause and flowers, and “the two ladies” in particular were “literally covered with floral offerings,” Mason with a basketful of flowers, and Hamilton with a bouquet two feet in diameter.

When public exercises concluded at two p.m., the president, trustees, and distinguished guests moved on to the American Hotel for the banquet. After dinner there were more speeches, the last of which was given by Peabody, in his capacity as president of the alumni association. “We find now the beginning of a new era,” he said. “For 70 years the old order has prevailed; on the 71st we have a new sort of graduates. There are women among them—and I use a term, the holiest, noblest and sweetest I can employ—whose scholarship is proved by their record.” For Peabody, scholarship mattered more than biography—almost. He went on:

I am happy to say that the Phi Beta Kappa, this morning, reconsidered their dilatory action of yesterday, and placed the names of the women, too, upon their roll. These graduates show themselves thinkers; they speak easily and bear themselves gracefully—they take their place among their brothers—and we welcome them to a place among the Alumni. Let the women have whatever we have of good and of culture; they are to mould and educate the children—and all his life long will the man talk the tongue he learned when little at his mother’s knee, his mother-tongue. I believe that the Institution is to be congratulated on a step forward, and that it will reap abundantly from the seed now sown.

After the banquet, at five p.m. in the parlor of the American Hotel, while the president’s annual graduation party was getting underway, the UVM chapter of PBK convened for the fourth time in that unusual year. Elected that morning, celebrated at commencement, and just recently mentioned in fundraising appeals, Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton were finally inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Being honored by a society, no matter how distinguished, is different from being honored by society.

As Peabody recognized, Mason and Hamilton had proven themselves to be as good as the best male students at the University of  Vermont—and yet they were not equal, especially off campus. The coeducational “experiment” had succeeded on precisely the terms it aimed for. It had not turned women into men. Instead, it prepared women to better do the things that women were then permitted to do. Just as Peabody had said, women graduates were meant “to mould and educate the children,” and they had little choice in the matter. There was one career path for women after college—teaching—and it ended either in marriage or in retirement, and often in both at once, for married women were generally not permitted to teach, lest their classroom duties impinge on their domestic ones. This was “the marriage bar.”

After graduation, as they began teaching, Mason and Hamilton kept up their friendship by mail. Across the first years of their new lives, their letters express frustration with their limited options through gentle disapproval of each other’s choices.

Mason taught for a year in Burlington and then married a dentist, S. D. Hodge, whom Hamilton didn’t much like, at least at first. Hodge bought the downtown parsonage where the women had spent so many afternoons studying together, and he and Lida made it their home. When Hamilton finally visited them there, she softened on Hodge and observed Lida in a new role: “busy little housewife,” as Hamilton put it in a letter. “All of her earnestness and talent is tuned now to keeping the home bright and pleasant.” Lida had been trying to keep up with her reading, working through Faust with a fellow Alpha Rho and UVM graduate, but then the latter went off to teach high school in Cleveland.

Hamilton took the other path, sticking to her teaching and, in 1878, becoming the first woman to earn a master’s degree at UVM. At the same time, she carried on a tentative courtship with their classmate and fellow PBK inductee Frank Woodruff, who had gone on to study at Union Theological Seminary. As it happened, Lida wasn’t wild about Hamilton’s choice, either, until Woodruff stopped to visit her at the parsonage on his way through Burlington. Then she saw how much he had matured in manner and appearance in the few years since they had graduated. “You must get domesticated my dear,” she wrote to Hamilton. “Not that I think you wild exactly but you have taught long enough.” Each woman viewed the other’s chosen path with skepticism.

Yet Woodruff was proving hard to pin down. Letters he wrote to Hamilton after graduation rebuffed even her modest intimacies, saying that she had mistaken their friendship for love. While Woodruff studied in New York and then Europe, calling himself a “Cosmopolite,” Hamilton stayed near her childhood home in Vermont and taught school. In letters, she confided to Woodruff how eager she was to “forget that [she] was a teacher,” and to “throw off all responsibility and assumed dignity which is exceedingly disagreeable to me,” and to be “my real self. Have I ever mentioned to you our Shakespearean readings?”

Over years of letters, Woodruff’s reluctance to commit softened into apologies for his coldness, and then into declarations of love and a marriage proposal. In spring 1882, nearly seven years after their graduation, Hamilton sailed to join him in Europe. While Woodruff completed his doctorate, she learned to paint plates. While he traveled to Athens, she stayed in wintry Berlin. Sick and lonely in January 1883, she joined him in Greece, and finally they were married at the home of the American ambassador in Athens.

When the two returned to the United States at the end of 1883, Woodruff was ordained as a minister and took a chair in sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary. The next year, they had their first child. “Ask Ellen what in the world she is ever going to do with a baby,” Lida wrote in congratulations to the new father. “Tell her that she must not tie it in the highchair before it is a week old.” Three years later, Woodruff accepted a professorship of Greek language and literature at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Woodruff would become the college’s longest-serving professor while also serving a term as the town’s superintendent of schools and, in 1920, winning election to the Maine state legislature. When he died of a heart attack two years later, the Bowdoin Orient published an obituary lauding his many and varied accomplishments but made only slight mention of the other third-ranked student in the UVM class of 1875: “He is survived by his wife.”

Being honored by a society is different from being honored by society—but isn’t that the very point of a society? To celebrate and advocate for the wider recognition of a special set of values so that they might in time reshape society at large? The election of Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton to PBK in the summer of 1875 did mark a historic transformation in American education and life, though not the sort of transformation that the advocates of coeducation—or its opponents, for that matter—had predicted.

By 1883, eight years after the induction of Mason and Hamilton, only 23 more women had been inducted into PBK chapters nationally. Ten of those had been at UVM, eight at Wesleyan, and five at Cornell. Yet as college attendance in the United States took off in the late 19th century among men and women both, the number of women PBK inductees increased at a rate that first seemed disproportionate, then ominous, and then perilous. By 1900, 532 women had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, including 179 who had been elected retroactively as alumnae of Vassar, which gained a chapter in 1899. In 1913, the numbers of new inductees were nearly equal—567 men and 563 women—but then the balance tipped, even before war took many men away from college. In 1914, at the 51 coeducational colleges with chapters, 770 women were elected, compared with 603 men. In 1918, women made up nearly two-thirds of new members in coed chapters.

For the leaders of Phi Beta Kappa, which had in 1883 formed a national governing body, this was nothing short of a “crisis” that jeopardized its standing as an elite honor society. They feared, as the author of a 1910 book on the Great American Universities put it, that in “coeducational institutions, if [PBK] is to be awarded strictly according to grades, it is apt to be monopolized by the more diligent sex and goes by the name of the ‘woman’s club.’ ” In this case, “diligent” was not a compliment. The implication was that women, unlike accomplished young men of active and diverse interests, had nothing better to do than homework. No one would want to join the “woman’s club.”

In 1916—the same year the first woman took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives—the Secretary and Treasurer of Phi Beta Kappa, Oscar Voorhees, suggested that the “preponderance of women” was due not to the academic superiority of women but to an uneven playing field: “A larger proportion of women than men … take the courses now accepted as leading to eligibility.” Long ineligible, women were not merely joining in but crowding men out. PBK’s existence, Voorhees concluded, was in peril.

However well women performed in classrooms, the world off campus was still mostly closed to them. Top collegiate honors were thus going to women students who were largely blocked from elite professions after college. This not only made for a strange, dissonant scene at graduation time, it also meant that the majority of PBK inductees would never earn large salaries that could fund annual donations or occupy public positions that would reflect prestige on the Society. Voorhees believed that PBK’s “reputation must come from its men [rather] than from its women members. The way must be kept open to the men …” To that end, he proposed that the standards of membership be altered to favor men: a shift away from classical academic rigor toward a broader social fluency of the kind valued, for example, in business and other male-dominated fields.

Today, nearly 250 years after the founding of PBK, male enrollment and graduation rates lag well behind those of women. Seventy percent of high school valedictorians in the U.S. are female. Almost 60 percent of college students are women. The contemporary “crisis” of men and boys, in higher education and beyond, has sparked new proposals to recalibrate the structure and focus of the American education system. But as the UVM chapter’s debate over its first female members shows, for at least as long as women have been permitted access to coeducation, men have struggled to come to terms with women’s achievements, fearing to find themselves falling behind. And so, as Voorhees suggested, men have tweaked the system to keep pace and stay ahead.

In 1919, PBK appointed a national committee to address the crisis it perceived in its membership. The committee found that many chapters had already adopted a workaround. In 1900, Brown University had set up a separate women’s PBK section for graduates of its sister college, Pembroke, so that “membership therein should in no wise diminish the number of men eligible for election.” In 1901, Columbia did the same for Barnard students. Many small colleges, including Middlebury, had also begun segregating elections by sex: inducting a fixed percentage of male students alongside an equal percentage of female. The national committee recommended this strategy be adopted widely, though final decisions would be left to the individual chapters.

Following the induction of Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton in 1875, the University of Vermont chapter never again formally sectioned off women and men. Yet for the rest of the 20th century, in chapters on many other campuses around the country—including Harvard, where the practice continued until 1995—Phi Beta Kappa honors would be separate but equal, because men and women were not.

The post The Two Ladies of Vermont appeared first on The American Scholar.