Posted on Jun 30, 2000

George Moore, 1852-1933
by Adrian Frazier
(Yale University Press)

“I cannot think of the place I was born without a sensation akin to nausea,” the prolific novelist, critic, and playwright George Moore once wrote of Ireland. It was vintage Moore, sharp-tongued and troublemaking. During a 60-year career spent largely in England and France, he mingled with Europe's leading modern artists and writers. Yet many became enemies, thanks to his accounts in several literary memoirs and 16 novels. Moore's appetite for so many genres and alienation from the Irish literary scene ultimately crippled his reputation, says Mr. Frazier, a professor of English at Union College in New York, who spent 10 years on this biography.

Q. If you had to compare George Moore to a contemporary literary figure, who would it be?
A. That's a hard question. I think Edmund White is an often fascinating stylist who is scouting new conceptions of masculinity, and writes very fine literary criticism and autobiography and sometimes fiction. He doesn't have the same scope and energy as Moore. Moore aspired to be Turgenev or Zola, to surpass James. I'm not sure that Edmund White has the same aggression. And Edmund White has marked himself very definitely as a gay male writer. Moore wanted to stimulate fascination with the margins of sexuality. He wasn't arguing for the rights of any group of people.

Q. Moore self-consciously constructed a public identity as an author. Why is that important?
A. It wasn't an absolute innovation on his part. But it does reflect a sense of an artist's self as something that must be created, managed, and revised. If you're going to be a great author, you're not just putting out individual books and they do or don't do well, willy-nilly. You have to conceive of yourself as a great master. Oscar Wilde did this. So did James.

Q. Yet over time, Wilde and James succeeded where Moore did not.
A. Moore succeeded, certainly to his own satisfaction. From the 90's till his death, he was a dominant literary and intellectual personality. What he didn't succeed at was beyond his control. It's what happened after he died. It's astonishing to me that Confessions of a Young Man, which everyone recognizes was crucial in shaping the world of ideas and manners that anticipated the 1890's decadent sensibility — this is out of print.

Q. So what happened?
A. There was the rise of a socially concerned, politically committed novel. And the emergence of many memoirs in which revenge is taken on Moore. Yeats pretty much set in stone an image of Moore as a clown, as inferior, as someone who was sexually despicable. What also probably didn't do him any good is that the critical schools of the 1950's and 60's were genre-based. And they tended to focus on the modernist literary text, as opposed to the life and culture that went beyond the text.

Q. If Moore comes back into scholarly vogue, it will be through which door?
A. People are so interested now in varieties of masculinity and in criticizing the notions of normative sexuality. Those are things that Moore illustrates better than anybody. And his interest in religion, as a nonreligious person. The Brook Kerith, his book about Jesus, is written with enormous sincerity and knowledge.

Q. In reviewing your biography, Denis Donoghue describes Moore as merely “parasitic” of better novelists like Zola and Flaubert. Do you agree?
A. I like Denis Donoghue, and I like much of his writing. But his description of Moore as a man without talent is absurd. Denis Donoghue likes austere authors, High Catholic sensibilities, authors that display an esoteric intellectual superiority. Moore is not to his taste. That's a value judgment as good and also as empty as every other value judgment.

Q. Still, if Moore doesn't win a new readership, have you failed as his biographer?
A. I didn't take that as my task, to make the best case possible on novel after novel. The assessment of Moore's books, the value you place on them, will follow from knowledge. That will take a good deal of time. But the desire to mock and to condescend to a writer that Virginia Woolf calls a great writer, that Ford Madox Ford calls a great writer — that seems to me an expression of our taste, not of his value.

Posted on Jun 12, 2000

About 660 students received degrees with the Class of 2000 at Union College's Commencement exercises on June 11. The College awarded 555 bachelor's degrees, 105 master's and two doctorates.

Kevin Klose, president and CEO of National Public Radio, was honorary chancellor and delivered the main address. He received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree. A former editor, and national and foreign correspondent with The Washington Post, Klose is an award-winning author and international broadcasting executive.

Jonathan Chung of Glenview, Ill., was valedictorian. Henry Michtalik of Middletown, N.Y., was salutatorian. Michelle Tham of New City, N.Y., delivered the student address.

Posted on Jun 11, 2000

Address by Kevin Klose, president and CEO of National Public Radio

President Hull, Trustees, first of all, I'd like to thank you for this honor on behalf of National Public Radio, a service that now marks its 30th year since its formation in 1970 and now reaches about 15 million Americans a week and more than 150 stations abroad and can be heard in Sarajevo every night at 10 p.m. where they broadcast All Things Considered from a satellite.

I'm going to do this hatless if that's all right.

I'd like to say to you graduates, first of all, congratulations. The Class of 2000. What a name. Can I make a suggestion while we're all here still together? What's in a name? I have a suggestion. It's not like the class of '62 or '71 or any other number. It is a remarkable name at a remarkable time. You're at the millennium. You're at the centennial. I suggest you make it the 'Classof2000.com'

Seriously, you are in an extraordinary class not just for the way the numbers add up. Centennial. Millennium. Your program for life will be watched and noted in a very special way.

There is no other class that will enjoy this kind of scrutiny because if you go forth into this new world, this world of information, the world of changed connections with people because of the digital age, your lives will be increasingly different day by day, day in and day out and at a faster pace than the lives that Americans have lived through any time in our republic up until now. You stand at a threshold, the very opening moments of a convergence of technology and society that is revolutionary in its potentia.

In this new age similar to the beginning of the age of energy and the age of electricity, the possibility of transforming society is almost beyond people's comprehension. You will have a role in this whether you wish it or not. But what will that role be?

What is the value of a person's values in an age that will soon know the entire composition of the human genome? If society and technology obtains the knowledge to fully comprehend and play with human life at the level of genetic creation, what role can a single individual — far from the laboratory, far from a supercomputer — have in making decisions that will affect us all? What will guide you and where will you find the compass settings of what will become increasingly your engaged and busy lives faced with the piling up of personal details, personal duties and again the flood of responsibilities across your days.

Here on this very beautiful campus, we have an extraordinary, if brief, interval of years in which to look at the ideas shaping the society and sciences and carry those ideas forward. Now, that learning will go forth with you into a very brave new world.

I want to put to you today the proposition that we, all of us, have never in history in this country, this extraordinary revolutionary democracy, this republic of civil societies bound together by the rule of law. The world will be looking to you, looking at your values in the way you embody them and carry them forth in your laws to set the tone for how the world will deal with the information age. You cannot escape it. It will be with you, with the Class of 2000, right through this extraordinary century ahead.

The moral value of who you are and how you will shape this new world, it must be shaped, in my belief, by the morality of compassion, of connection and of democratic discussion, inclusion of others, a search for common ground, and an ability to listen to reason and to return over and over again to the vision of equality and justice that has guided us since the Declaration of Independence 224 years ago in it's mystical vision of the notion that we all have inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That declaration speaks to us with as much vitality and promise as it did when Thomas Jefferson, with some minor assistance from some others, wrote it.

Thomas Jefferson knew the essence of freedom. A bibliophile, he collected books with a passion that even he himself could not describe. It was his collection of books, several thousand of which still survive, that form today the basis of the Library of Congress. It became the collection around which the Library of Congress was formed after it was reestablished after the British burned Washington in the War of 1812.

Jefferson's collection, which he packed up from Monticello in Virginia barely 100 miles from Washington and which was carried by horse cart up to the Capitol, was radically different from the collection of the Library of Congress that the British had burned. And this is the key to what Jefferson knew and what is key to your lives. That earlier library had been distinctively a legislative library filled with the legal documents pertaining to the early congressional sessions and the legal matters pertaining to the making of laws in those early sessions. It was a narrow, deep but narrow, library.

With Jefferson's new core collection a new vision emerged of what a library for a democracy should be and what in essence every citizen of that democracy should be able to turn to and should aspire to as universal knowledge. For this man, an architect, a framer, a gardener, a violinist, a plant breeder, an essayist, a lawmaker and a thinker, Jefferson's passion for knowledge knew virtually no bounds. His books on art, literature, music, architecture, language, law and philosophy formed what is now the most extraordinary collection of knowledge – written, reported and made knowledge – in the history of democracies.

Jefferson, who spoke and read five languages, was comfortable with this and believed that the promise of knowledge would embody the promise of democracy. If we could find the knowledge and devote ourselves to it, we could alter our lives and alter the lives of the society.

What do we draw from this, as you face and soon enter the age of information, an age whose powers to reveal long-hidden truths of life itself may transform forever our fragile human institutions of government and nation.

What I draw from this is the majesty of the individual search for knowledge of information gained and then transformed through learning and through civil debate and discussion so that society taking abstract knowledge may act in a civilized and enlightened way.

Embodied in you is the same unquenchable thirst for knowledge and we here salute you today. And we also implore you: keep learning, keep listening, and keep thinking. Move this democracy to a new place in a new era, a place of justice, of civil dialogue and of common ground for all who live here and all who will live here in the future.

'A people,' said Jefferson, 'cannot be both ignorant and free.' In our everyday lives, your class and your role will be demanding of you a place in the information age. You will discover again and again through your lives, the bitter lesson that ignorance is divisive, ignorance is limiting, ignorance in the end is against the nature of humankind.

Ignorance breeds fear, fear brings violence. We need only look at the last decade to see the evils of ignorance etched in the human chronicle … Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Serbia.

If you stand against ignorance and you stand then for humankind, you will raise this democracy to an extraordinary new place. This democracy, which itself in its internal composition, is radically changing from all that it was before, in the next 50 years in the United States we will become increasingly diverse and divergent. Fifty years from now this society will be a culture of minorities. The question then is will it be all for all or all against all?

The binding force in that contract is contained in the power of your abilities to seek knowledge, to think of it, to bring it into your daily lives and to project it into the democracy day by day seeking common ground with your fellow man.

The world will be watching you. The emerging democracies of the former Soviet Union, the people struggling for justice and democracy and to create civil societies across war-torn Africa, the democracies of South America burdened with the historic past of inequity and an inability to find common ground, and the great peoples of Asia, especially the Peoples Republic of China, which will alter and alter and alter again in your lifetime, bringing forth a colossal new nation of the kind that we cannot even today imagine.

All these people and these nations, bound to you by the means of either mass communication or the Internet for their knowledge and their insistence to find out how a civil society works will be looking to you — the Class of 2000 — in ways that no class has been looked at in dozens and dozens of years. You stand at an historic moment.

The age of information will provide to you the means of leadership in ways we can only suggest. But it is leadership through the way you will interact through the Internet, the way you will reach to your fellow classmates after you all disperse and from there across your jobs and your lives to the rest of the world.

The Internet and the digital age will provide you all, in no way that any class has ever had before, the means to exercise your individualism, your presence and your democratic values across the world through the power of the Internet and the power that it conveys back into the mass media.

To you, we salute you. To you, we ask you to bear forward in the name of the democracy in the name of the civil society in which we have been born to carry America, the United States, your generation and generations to come behind you to new awareness, new levels of commitment to common ground of a civil society.

To you all, the Class of 2000 here at Union College, in this historic college on this extraordinary day, congratulations and thank you very much.

Posted on Jun 2, 2000

The Union College Jazz Ensemble, under the direction of
Prof. Tim Olsen, will give two performances in its Spring 2000 tour.

They will perform Wednesday, June 7, at 7 p.m. in the
Norwood Village Green Concert Series, Norwood, N.Y. (just north of
Potsdam), and Thursday, June 8, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. at the Discover
Jazz Festival, Church Street Marketplace, Burlington, Vt.

For details, call ext. 6563.

Posted on Jun 2, 2000

Faculty recently approved a number of changes to the
faculty manual. The changes:

— Add language that
requires the administration to inform the FEC of any changes that it makes
in the faculty manual;

— Limit appointments to
liaison committee for athletics, campus facilities and library to
staggered three-year terms;

— Permit the FRB may form
subcommittees as AAC does;

— Add a legislative
flowchart for FRB following the model of AAC's Flowchart;

— Grant faculty status to
the director of Schaffer Library;

— Require the Faculty
Appeals Committee to consult the chair of the Faculty Executive Committee
and the Vice President for Academic Affairs about questions of FAC
procedure;

— Clarify what happens in
the event of a faculty override of a presidential veto. (It requires a
two-thirds vote of faculty in residence; chair of the FEC is to forward
the amendment to the trustees.); and

— Increase staff
representation to two on the Planning and Priorities committee.