After I wrote last week about the Gettysburg Address, some of you wrote in to recall Robert F. Kennedy’s speech announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. |
Probably many of us have thought back on that speech in recent days. I suspect that if you take just five minutes to watch Kennedy here, you’ll be moved by his forthrightness, soulfulness and determination. |
I thought about the speech again while reading this piece about higher education from our columnist Frank Bruni. Frank warns of a coming wipeout of four-year colleges, one in which “dozens and potentially hundreds of small four-year colleges go under.” |
The humanities, already on the ropes, are in particular peril, even though, as Frank writes, the wisdom to deal with our accumulating crises “will sooner come from history, philosophy and literature than from drug companies, social media and outer space.” |
That’s what made me think again of Kennedy’s speech. Much the way King drew on his vast reading, Kennedy — without pretension, without condescension and without recourse to notes — reached back to the Greeks, as he stood that night in the bed of a pickup truck, in a struggling neighborhood of Indianapolis. |
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus,” he said, after referring to the killing of his own brother. “He wrote, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’” |
In his essay, Frank quotes Brian Rosenberg, who just completed 17 years as president of Macalester College, saying: “A society without a grounding in ethics, self-reflection, empathy and beauty is one that has lost its way.” |
Being Frank, Frank deftly leaves it to the reader to make the connection that I will now ham-handedly make explicit: We have a president schooled in none of those things. We have a president who may hoist a Bible like a trophy while cocooned by riot officers, but who, at a moment the nation longs for words to strengthen it, cannot be troubled to quote a single verse. |
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