A love letter to the humanities program I used to teach in (riddled with inside jokes):
As the resident historian on the teaching team, I decided to dig into the SLE archives and share with you some institutional history that bears relation to our winter quarter syllabus.
You may know that in 1890 Friedrich Nietzsche fell into a paralytic insanity after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin. He spent the last ten years of his life in a state of near catatonia, likely the effects of tertiary syphilis, under the guardianship of his odious sister, Elizabeth Förster.
Elizabeth had come back from South America to take care of Nietzsche. A few years earlier, in the 1880s, she and her husband, Bernard Förster, a prominent German Nationalist and Anti-Semite, had moved to the remote jungle of Paraguay to found a utopian Aryan colony called Nueva Germania.
Now, back home in Germany, nursing her ailing brother, she tried all the remedies. Mercury baths. Massages. Visits from prominent German nationalists. But nothing seemed to work. Friedrich remained a drooling wreck.
Then one day she received a brochure in the mail from California, from a distant acquaintance, Dr. David Starr Jordan, the first president of Leland Stanford Jr., University. Like Elisabeth, Jordan was a believer in racial purity, an advocate of eugenics, and a lover of all things German. (Sadly, these bits are all true).
Elisabeth noticed that the seal of this new university, despite being in the far flung reaches of the Americas, was in fact in German:
“Die Luft der Freiheit weht.”
“Fancy that!” thought Elisabeth. Then she saw that the design of this German-inspired university, according to the brochure’s pictures, looked just like the Jesuit Spanish missions she had seen in the jungles of Paraguay. Suddenly memories of her beloved erstwhile colony, Nueva Germania, came rushing back to her. She felt a deep ache to leave Europe and return to the West, if only she didn’t have to take care of her brother….
And then it occurred to her: perhaps a change of locale would actually do Friedrich good. If the university motto was to be believed, the air in California was fresh and liberating. Who knows? Maybe it would blow the syphilis right out of him.
Elisabeth wrote to President Jordan, who was happy to offer the philosopher a temporary and poorly compensated adjunct lecturer position for the winter quarter in a fledgling humanities program: Imperial Domination Education. That’s what Jordan had originally called it, though the PR people soon softened it to the friendlier, though no less sonorous, Structured Liberal Education.
It was a long and arduous journey by steamship and locomotive, though the change in scenery seemed to reignite the ailing Nietzsche’s powers of speech. Though he spoke on only two occasions: the first, when the ship steward returned each morning to take his breakfast order, to which the philosopher thundered: “Begone, demon of the eternal hourglass!” And, the second, at Grand Central Station, while being loaded onto his Pullman car: “Dionysus does not ride on choo-choo trains!” Still, Elisabeth looked on these outbursts as promising signs.
Having finally arrived in Palo Alto, they caught a Marguerite wagon down Palm Drive to the Oval, where President Jordan received them. When he saw the beleaguered state of his new hiree -- the mustache matted with several days’ worth of drool, an unhinged gaze, and a handshake as limp as a wet sock, he knew he had found the right man for the job. “You’ll fit right in on our teaching team, Dr. Nietzsche. Welcome aboard!”
Friedrich chewed his mustache and grunted in response.
Elisabeth, fearing that Jordan might cotton on to her brother’s condition, said “I’ll have you know, Herr Jordan, that my brother adheres to the strictest pedagogical standards of German Wissenschaft, which puts the burden of learning on the student, not the teacher. As a result, he is a man of few words, and when he speaks they are often in aphoristic style, so as to require exegesis.”
“Oh, that’s just fine,” said the President. “The students in Imperial Domination-- I mean, Structured Liberal Education could talk the hind legs off a donkey. They never get sick of listening to themselves. Fact is, our lecturers can barely get a word in edgewise.”
President Jordan showed them to their quarters and so began the Nietzsches’ winter at Stanford.
At first, the California air seemed to be just the cure Elisabeth had hoped for. Her brother showed remarkable improvement those few initial weeks of the quarter. His eyes uncrossed themselves. Flickers of a functioning intellect began to appear on his face. His appetite even returned.
Friedrich became smitten with the SLE dining hall, where the Irish cook Florence Moore whipped up batches of delicious toasted morsels of grains and colorful fruits of the marshmallow plant, which she called her Lucky Charms. Nietzsche lived off bowl after bowl of these delicacies, and always kept a reserve supply of them hanging from his mustache.
But the most remarkable improvement to Friedrich’s health was that he suddenly regained the ability to write. He began sending letters back to his friend Franz Overbeck in Germany (It’s thanks to this correspondence that we have such a complete historical record of Nietzsche’s quarter in SLE).
His first letter records his impressions three weeks into the quarter:
Dear Franz,
I have entered a strange world. From the look of the grounds, it seems I am in some sort of Potemkin monastery, a shabby historicism meant to hide an absence of authentic character. Every corner I turn, I half expect to run headlong into a jolly friar or a licentiate from Salamanca. But instead, the students of Leland Stanford, Jr. University all go careening around on velocipeds. And they dress-- mein Gott!-- they dress like they are either going to heave barbells in the gymnasium or ply their trade in the brothel.
Even the faculty here in my little outpost assume the most bewildering appearance. Why, when I first arrived, I encountered a strapping fellow covered in tattoos and with a seasoned saltwater look about him. Assuming he was a longshoreman recently returned from a long spell in the Sandwich Islands, I bade him carry my valise to my lodging. But it turned out this man was in fact the Resident Director and Senior Lecturer, Gregor Wootkins.
All said, I am getting on well here, thriving like a strange plant in foreign soil. Of course, my students are all hopeless democrats, socialists, and beer guzzlers, and they foolishly worship science like it is a god capable of creating meaning. But they have the strength and vitality of youth. Their ressentiment is only nascent and has not yet blossomed into the hideous flower of the graduate students they will surely become. In fact, it is a comfort to be surrounded by so many people, who, like me, have a healthy penchant for self-overcoming and an admittedly more than healthy penchant for self-abuse [aka masturbation].
Oh, and guess what? The dining room phonograph plays early Wagner all day long, and they serve the most delectable dish called Lucky Charms.
[the rest of the letter then goes into a dithyramb about cereal.]
But by week six, these promising beginnings began to sour.
It started with the students’ Dante papers. They drove Nietzsche to distraction with their insistence that it was God’s love that created hell. “No-- Hate!” he shouted, in a rare utterance during section. “Dante got it wrong! Eternal hate created not only hell, but the entire Christian Paradise! Hate, do you understand?!”
Paper meetings were equally tense. Having observed that the Associate Director of SLE Jeremiah Saboolius instructed students on writing by drawing pictures of boxes, Friedrich adopted his own practice of drawing ever widening spirals on the board in total silence until the allotted thirty minutes were up.
By week eight, the quarter had unraveled, and it was clear all of Friedrich’s progress had been lost.
His letters from this period report that “the students are assaulting me with brain-softening chatter about a painter who valorizes the peasant and his herd existence over the soaring feats of the Greeks. It’s enough to make me gnash my teeth in despair!”
Even Friedrich’s beloved dining hall fare, which he had once described as tasting “magically delicious,” lost its charms. This occurred when he entered the dining hall one evening only to hear late Wagner-- like, sickeningly late Parsifal-era, Christian transcendence Wagner-- blasting from the Victrola. Friedrich ground every last marshmallow to dust and renounced sweetness itself as evil.
The next week, on his way down to the SLE office, Friedrich caught a fleeting glimpse of a skull in the Holbein painting and feared he was losing his mind again.
Whether it was a genuine premonition or a precipitating psychological disturbance, Nietzsche’s fear proved true, for directly following the appearance of the skull came what scholars have since referred to as “the Flaubert incident.”
The director of SLE, a scholar of English origins, was delivering a lecture on the novel Madame Bovary. He had just aired the thrust of his claim – about the novel as a form of cognitive training – when Friedrich, who was slumped in the corner looking quite unwell, sprang from his seat as if convulsed. The hairs on his mustache stood on end like an angry cat.
“Air! I need air! I am trapped in the befogged boglands of the English psychologists! That land of milksops and greengrocers! Sacrificing another victim on their altar of Utility, while smuggling in morals through the back door! Must literature be useful to be of value?! Must art be good for us!? Strong natures can take the poison and turn it into fuel. And I would gladly swallow all of Flaubert’s corrosive prose just to feel his intoxicating powers of transfiguration and style. A unity of style! That is what is necessary! Only that!”
Just then, out of the corner of his eye, which had once again gone strabrismal, Friedrich noticed a student outside the lecture hall.
He was abusing his velociped, shouting and kicking at a Touring bike which refused to let loose of its lock.
This sight triggered the traumatic memory of the Turin horse. And in a flash, before Jeremiah Saboolius could bang the gong to bring everyone to order, Friedrich Nietzsche lost his mind for the second time.
The spirochetes resumed feasting on his brain and nary a word was heard from the lips of the great philosopher again.
But his legacy in SLE remains because that was the first time anyone had banged the gong in SLE. And it’s original meaning was “Lookout, everyone, there’s a deranged German philosopher in our midst!”
Which means that, genealogically and etymologicallly speaking, that is the true meaning of banging the gong in SLE today.
And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
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