UPDATED JUNE 20. 2022

“The mission of Brown University is to serve the community, the nation and the world by discovering, communicating and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry, and by educating and preparing students to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation....”


This page is our version of a newspaper's Op Ed page, offering thoughtful essays by and for classmates. If you wish to contribute to it or to post a comment about any of these essays on our Online Conversations page—our version of a Letters to the Editor page—write to brown58newsletter@gmail.com

— Jim Furlong and John Reistrup, Co-Editors

Publishing Poems In One’s Eighties

Write On

[From George Held '58]

I begin with a corny title, a phrase that a poetry editor, and poet, whom I know uses at the end of her emails, presumably to exhort her audience to continue doing what they often must do: write. I’ve been writing poems since 1989 when on a sabbatical leave, I switched from writing scholarly articles to composing verse. The main reason was to save energy, as scholarship had helped to make me ill with chronic fatigue syndrome; writing a lyric took less time and energy.

Turns out I am a pretty good poet and have now published more than twenty books and chapbooks of poems, edited an anthology, and a book of nine of my short stories is scheduled for publication in 2022. While rejection remains the rule for unsolicited submissions, occasionally a poem is accepted. Rarely, multiple acceptances occur in a short spell. It’s one of those occasions that I want to record here.

Yes, on 25 November 2021, amid disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic and the Big Lie, I received an email from the International Lawrence Durrell Society, of Toulouse, informing me that my poem “Legacy” had won an Honorable Mention in its annual White Mice poetry contest. The Durrell society also invited me to read my poem at its awards ceremony in Toulouse in June 2022. And there was “Legacy” published on the society’s Web site. “Legacy” is about the imaginary son of a poet like Sylvia Plath, who killed herself when her two children were small; the daughter grows up to be a poet, while the son, my narrator, becomes a rather conventional type. You can find the poem at https://lawrencedurrell.org/wp_durrell/white-mice-poems-2021/#Held

The good news from Toulouse was followed in short order by email acceptances from these little magazines: Neuro Logical (Ireland) on 26 November and Jerry Jazz Magazine on 30 November. “Crossed Hands,” the Neuro Logical poem, tells of a mother on her deathbed who asks her son to pawn her wedding band. The jazz poem, “Pandemic Jam,” recounts the playing of a peripatetic band of young jazz musicians led by a “jazz tuba” who perform, in fair weather, for Greenwich Village sidewalk restaurants.

At our age, one accepts good luck with increasing pleasure, knowing that it might end at any time.

Crossed Hands - George Held

How bare they looked, my mother’s hands,

Without her wedding ring, after she’d pulled

It off and placed it in a small envelope

And handed it to me, imploring,

“Please pawn it for whatever it will bring.

We’re broke and I no longer need this ring.”

Mom was pushing eighty and bedridden

With the virus that would bury her,

And Dad was long past the age when he could

Work, and, never more than sporadically

Employed, he had no savings to tide them

Over, and I was just a school teacher,

With no big bucks, so I didn’t make a fuss

But took the envelope from her withering

Hands and went to Emporium downtown

And got a couple hundred for the ring

And put the four Grants into the envelope

With four more of my own and returned

The gift to Mom, and she took it to her heart

And said, “You were always a good boy, Georgie,”

And before the year was out, she died,

And I made sure that in the coffin, hands

Crossed, Mom wore that same band upon her

Ring finger, a symbol of her dutiful life

ADMISSION POLICIES

In Defense of Legacies

From Pete Howard '58

I think Bob Sanchez’s defense of the Admission Department’s current emphasis on diversity is well stated and Jim Furlong’s summary of the risks right on. [See Online Conversations]

But there is another risk: the loss of fondness for the Brown Campus where some of us grew up. The places that recall memories. The courses. The stairways, sidewalks, statuary; even sounds and smells. Also a fondness for faculty and friends met in these locales. And this fondness is sometimes passed down from parents to children, sometimes even grandchildren.

Applicants who have grown up in this fondness for Brown are called legacies.

Brown now discounts the value of legacy, confusing it with elitism and racism. Jane [Loveless Howard '58] and I have witnessed the destructive effect this perception can have. One of our grandchildren, a talented and mature person, carried four generations of legacy. She mentioned this in her application five years ago. Her parents, both Brown graduates, one with an additional Brown PhD, received a letter from the Admission Office stating forcefully, even crudely, that our grandchild’s legacy would not be considered. She was rejected by Brown and accepted elsewhere. There she had an excellent and enjoyable education. But her parents refuse to even discuss Brown. And we are limiting our support. The four-generation legacy has been tarnished.

Brown is not a public school. Alumni support is important. It seems to me that legacy alumni are more likely to support Brown than alumni who had no cushion to help them through the trials of feeling an outsider because of race or class or nationality. Judging from the admission data quoted in Online Conversations, candidates from certain locations are considered favorably in order to develop a class with wide geographic distribution. Similarly a percentage of the admitted students should be legacy candidates, assuming of course they are otherwise qualified.

This policy should benefit Brown in two ways. As students the legacies are likely to take part in all the opportunities they have heard about at home. Later as alumni they are likely to benefit the University as they contribute both financial and social support.

[Webmaster's note:For one classmate's reaction to a legacy's rejection, see Online Conversations]

THE ENVIRONMENT

Lessons Not Learned

The following column is by the late Edward Flattau ’58, a nationally syndicated columnist whose commentary on the environment appeared twice a week from 1972 until 2021 and was the longest-running column in the field. It is reproduced by permission from his own website, https://www.edflattau.com/

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It is a venerable adage indicative of mankind’s failure to benefit from past environmental lessons.

In the aftermath of recurrent natural disasters, solutions to reduce the damage become obvious yet continue to be ignored by the public. The will to act is often sabotaged because of the perceived notion that crippling sacrifice is involved. Yet the “sacrifice” that is resisted is no more than living in harmony with Nature. That requires elevating public health over materialistic values, an arrangement in which wisdom should not be mistaken for deprivation.

Nature provides salvation for those who respect it. Keep in mind that Nature’s ruinous outbursts are ecological regenerative agents as well as destructive forces. Thus, hurricanes rejuvenate freshwater supplies, and their gale-force winds build up protective coastal sand dunes when not hindered by rows of beachfront houses.

Another way that Nature provides relief is through the natural buildup of coastal marshes to reduce the impact of storms. In an ideal world, permanent structures would not be built on unstable barrier islands during their gradual migration to the mainland.

Our frequent failure to live in harmony with Nature despite past lessons is illustrated by the sustained loss from ill-advised replacement of settlements in the paths of periodic volcanic eruptions, intense forest fires, inundation of flood plains, and coastal hurricane hotspots from rising sea levels and ocean temperatures. Nature’s solution for coastal residents is to retreat to higher ground. If, after being wiped out, homeowners decide to stay and rebuild in the exact same place at water’s edge, they should bear the full cost. It is an application of the “polluter pays” principle which serves as a disincentive to engage in an ultimately losing battle with the elements.

Bottom line: Nature is a first-rate teacher. It is the will of its human students that all too often falters, turning them into lemmings hurtling towards a future of unrelenting misery.

December 7, 2020

RACE RELATIONS

THE NOT TOTALLY SILENT GENERATION

A version of the following column signed by Class Co-Presidents Jim Moody and Sandy Taylor was published September 27, 2020, in The Brown Daily Herald as part of the discussion prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement.

One of the advantages of increased age is we can look back and see history — how things have changed over time. Those of us who came of age in the 1950s are sometimes called the Silent Generation. We came along too late to serve in World War II and too early for most of us to be swept up in either the social activism of the 1960s or the war in Vietnam. We could also be called the Luckiest Generation because the United States enjoyed an economic boom during most of our working lives.

On the whole, we cannot doubt that we have been privileged. This is not to say, however, that we all had it easy. For the people we discuss in this piece, any progress tended to be through individual — sometimes lonely — effort rather than collective activism.

In our day students could take no respite such as a “gap year” because Selective Service, a military requirement for young men not enrolled in college, was waiting for us. Many, if not most, of our male classmates served our country during the Cold War and possibly Vietnam before going out into the working world. Many of the women in our class — Pembrokers, back then — didn’t pursue their own careers, due to societal pressures and lack of opportunities, but moved immediately into married life and raising a family.

A few members of our Silent Generation nevertheless played quiet but effective roles in facing and addressing the problems of racial relations that have beset Americans since before we were a nation.

One member of our own class of 1958, Alfred Uhry, developed a love of the theatre with Brownbrokers, Brown’s oldest student-run theatre group, and remained true to that love even when it kicked him in the face. The books and lyrics for a string of commercially unsuccessful musicals bore his name. One of his collaborations with our contemporary Robert Waldman ’57 closed after a single performance on Broadway, for example, although that team later enjoyed success with “The Robber Bridegroom.”

Al Uhry’s big breakthrough didn’t come until three decades after graduation, when he applied the writing craft he had absorbed to memories of his grandmother and the black man who had chauffeured her around Atlanta. His play “Driving Miss Daisy” opened successfully off Broadway and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing, and he turned it into a movie script that won him an Academy Award. The play and movie still enjoy worldwide fame for their insights on race relations, with powerful moral points made through gentle suasion. The movie is available on Prime Video, and we encourage you to watch it.

Bracketing our own class were two others with members who made their own memorable contributions to improving race relations. Augustus White ’57 and Wallace Terry ’59 knew each other, and many in our own class of 1958 are proud to say we knew them. We nominate their books to be added to the list of authoritative resources on race relations.

The first book we nominate is “Seeing Patients: A Surgeon’s Story of Race and Medical Bias” by Augustus A. White III, MD, Ph.D. Gus White was among only 16 black students at Brown, by his count. But he was a football player, a wrestler and a decent student, so the fraternity brothers from Delta Upsilon — “a kind of academic jock house,” he has called it — came calling during rush week. He became its first black member. The Brown chapter later elected him its president, but the annual international convention was canceled that year because its organizers didn’t want a black man to lead a delegation. (Much later, the fraternity apologized and gave him an award.)

Gus went on from Brown to become the first African American to go to Stanford Medical School. As he writes in his book, Yale had told him it already had its Negro for that year, but he was welcome to try again next year. He got his opportunities at Yale later, becoming the first black surgical resident at Yale and later a professor of medicine at the university. Later he became the first African American department head at a Harvard teaching hospital. Along the way he served as a U.S. Army battlefield surgeon in Vietnam, earning the Bronze Star and caring for people who suffer from leprosy in his off hours. His book shares that life story and the lessons about race and medical bias he has drawn from living it.

The second book we nominate is “Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans” by Wallace Terry. The late Wallace Terry was the first black editor of The Brown Daily Herald, where he made front-page national news by welcoming segregationist Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus to Providence with a handshake. From Brown he went on to report on civil rights protests in the South and the war in Vietnam for The Washington Post and Time magazine. Turning a 1967 cover story for Time into a book became an obsession for him, until finally “Bloods” was published in 1984. It tells the first-person stories of black Americans who wore the uniform of this nation when it was under both the external stress of the war and the internal stress of civil disunity.

These pioneers we list deserve not only respect but attention to what they had to say. Respect and gratitude are due as well to those Brownbrokers who consciously or unconsciously encouraged Al Uhry to make the theatre his career, those Delta Upsilon fraternity brothers who consciously or unconsciously encouraged Gus White to keep on breaking down racial barriers instead of going to a historically Black medical college as his father had, and those Herald staffers who consciously or unconsciously encouraged Wally Terry to make journalism his life’s work. That kind of encouragement can be of assistance to the real heroes of this world, and we find quiet satisfaction in listing the works of these three contemporaries as resources on race relations.