I’m listening to The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (“One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023”). The author was born in 1963, just as I was. Unlike me, he did not drop out of high school but, by contrast, was admitted to a highly selective Telluride Association Summer Seminar (not in Telluride, Colorado, but in Ithaca, NY and Baltimore, MD). The choices circa 1980:
Telluride was offering three seminars that summer, one on literature and revolution, one on the life of the American city, and the third on sociobiology,
I was curious to see if the program still existed. It does. The choices of topic for 2025: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies.
Maybe the author would have benefitted from one of these programs. Here’s the beginning of a story of how he ends up in the hospital:’
Early in the second week, as Michael and I were cutting across the sweeping [New Rochelle, NY] high school grounds on our way home, talking about classes and the usual bullshit, I noticed a group of Black guys up ahead on the bank of the lake to my left. They seemed about our age, or a few grades older, but did not look like they had spent the day in school. Several were lounging against the low, thick branch of a weeping willow; others were horsing around, tagging each other and darting out of range; and one or two were sitting on the ground.
(There was no motivation for the subsequent attack and facial disfigurement other than the victim being white.)
Based on the photo on their website, ~1/25 of the program participants is white. I wonder what the selection criteria are for achieving their goal of “… prepar[ing] and inspir[ing] promising young students to lead and serve through transformative educational experiences rooted in critical thinking and democratic community.
And how come the last posted annual report is from 2015-2016?
My 2005 post about what Radcliffe College should have been turned into… “Radcliffe Southwestern Pre-Professional College for Women of Color” https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2005/11/02/radcliffe-southwestern-pre-professional-college-for-women-of-color/
My idea was that they should have aggressively shucked off their reputation as a snobby northeastern school for rich girls, but kept their mission of educating women aged 18-22. The growth in U.S. population is happening mostly in the Southwest so the new Radcliffe would be there, perhaps in Phoenix, Santa Fe, or Los Angeles. To ensure that the graduates took up powerful places in society, the school would have only three majors: Pre-Med, Pre-Law, 5-year MBA. To make sure that the press and the public would recognize the new demographic, the school would accept only “women of color”. No white or Asian-American students would be permitted to apply.